Sure, Herbert— / Take a bite— / The crowd / milling on the bridge, the / night forms in / the air. So / much has gone /away. (Robert Creeley)
When John Coldiron said he was applying for the Showboat in the spring of 1956, I decided to apply too. Hiram offered a course in the summer entitled “Operating Theater” (six credits). If accepted for the course, you lived and performed for half of the summer on the Showboat Majestic, the last traveling showboat in the world, steaming up and down the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers putting on shows every night in towns and cities, large and small, along the way. John got accepted for the first half of the summer and me the second half. That was good because I needed the time to earn the money to pay for it and at least get a start on paying my fall tuition too.
Larry Sutton pitches candy. Hooty sits in the band pit by the drums.
I’ve written elsewhere about life on the Boat and don’t intend to go over it again. But the Boat changed my life –not only in college but after. After one summer on the Boat, I felt like I had a family on campus. I never felt alone. Attending classes, hanging out in the dorm, eating and working in the dining hall, working afternoons and evenings at Freddie’s, I felt connected. I lived and performed on the Boat for three summers (actually, two and a half). During that time, I acted, sang and hung out with probably sixty to eighty students out of a Hiram’s total student body of five hundred.
Secondly, the Boat gave me a venue for singing. I sang in quartet from my first night –with John, Kirby and Hootie. Our show every night was comprised of a melodrama, a candy sale and eight acts of vaudeville. The vaudeville lineup changed weekly but the quartet was always part of it. From the second week on, I had a solo act as well. Until I left the Showboat two and a half summers later, I always had an act of my own. Mostly I sang solo, accompanied on piano by Bev Johnson, Bob Shattuck, (maybe?) Bill Lineweaver. One week the third summer, Linda Price (Jardini) and I sang duets together–“Two Sleepy People” and the Kern-Hammerstein ballad, “(It’s) Only Make Believe.”
Another time, Kirby and I did a duet, him on trombone and me voice. (Kirby doesn’t remember this but I do, emphatically.) We did two tunes: “No Moon at All” and “Lullaby of Birdland,” both jazzy. We started “Lullaby” with a riff from a George Shearing record of the song. We went through the song once, me singing and Kirby playing second line on trombone. The second time through, Kirby took a half-chorus. Then he and I closed together in a wash of sound, ending with two-bar shout-and-echo exchanges.
Imagine what it was like to sing whenever you wanted, whatever you wanted to sing, however you wanted to sing it, every night, week after week! Having one, two, three pianists around waiting to practice with you! It was heaven.
The finale was always the entire company on stage (minus the pit band), our arms locked around each other as we belted out “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I had a brief solo line in the song: “We’d gladly bid our dreary lives goodbye.” For fun, I’d sometimes switch words and sing “We’d gladly bid our dreary wives goodbye” instead. Oh, wasn’t I the daring rogue?
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Fifty years later, in 2008, the quartet reconvened for a reunion in Oglebay, West Virginia. None of us had had contact with Hootie since college and John hadn’t sung a note since then. We cobbled together three or four songs and sang them that night for our college buddies. When we were done, everyone joined in and we sang the old Hiram songs together. Like I wrote earlier, Hiram people sang.
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Here’s an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It’s from 1957. I was a crew member then, which meant that I got free room and board and if we made a profit, a salary (though not much of a one). My job was concessions manager. Thus the picture below, in which Gary Barnard and I fill up the soda cooler, getting ready for the evening’s show.
One more reminiscence! We not only performed on the Boat, we slept on it. My bunk was upstairs at the back of the Majestic (basically a large barge with a 400-seat auditorium on the first level, a small stage and some work spaces, two small offices (one mine), men’s and women’s bathrooms, and upstairs around the rim of the deck, bedrooms for the crew and students). Behind the Majestic was the Attaboy, the paddle wheel tug that pushed the boat from town to town. And on the top deck of the Attaboy, a hundred feet from my bunk bed and level with it, was the steam calliope.
Whenever we hit a new town, the calliope started playing a couple of miles before we got there and played until we docked. We tried to hit a new town around eight in the morning so we could parade through town, with everyone in costume, around ten when everyone was up and moving around. The calliope playing, and the parade, were publicity for the show, especially effective in towns that had never seen a Showboat show before.
Most of us were students and young. We’d party at night after the show. When I got to bed late and didn’t have mess duty in the morning, I would skip breakfast to sleep in. But all bets were off when we hit a new town. The calliope could be heard five miles away. My bed was a hundred feet away. When the calliope started playing, all hope of sleeping disappeared. God forbid I was hung-over!
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Ethel Merman, “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954)
MUSIC & ME 