Read Online Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Patrick McGilligan
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decreased.
The highlight of that summer was the four-day Home Talent Spectacle, an elaborate benefit for the Kenosha YMCA that Beatrice Welles staged at the Rhode Opera House in the last week of June. The show involved hundreds of local singers, dancers, and musicians performing their specialties against a series of posed and pantomimed tableaux. Besides helping to organize and stage the extravaganza, Orson’s mother played pieces on the piano and even sang “You’re Just the Girl I’m Looking For,” the hit of the 1906 Shubert light opera The Social Whirl. While her personal tastes were more sophisticated, Beatrice showed a good-humored willingness to try anything to entertain people, laughing at herself if she stumbled. In the final patriotic offering, “Pageant of the Nations,” she even posed as the Goddess of Liberty.
July Fourth was always busy. In the morning the Welles family motored to Racine for the annual parade by veterans of the Spanish-American War. Part of the afternoon was spent at the races for trotters and pacers at the Bain racetrack. The family stopped by the Caledonian Society cricket matches, where the Yules figured prominently, and, like many Library Park families, they ended Independence Day with dinner and dancing at the Kenosha Country Club.
On Labor Day, Kenosha held a downtown parade with floats and a thousand marchers, the streets lined with cheering citizens. The city’s brass workers were always the highlight of the procession, garbed in white duck suits and carrying brass canes, with the female lacquerers wearing white dresses. The following weekend, Badger Brass sponsored a separate field day for its employees, one of the company’s gestures after the strike. Workers and their families rode by rail to Silver Lake for the all-day company picnic, with games, prizes, music, dinner, and moonlight dancing. By now Badger Brass employed six hundred workers, Solar lamp orders continued to rise, and Dick Welles helped tally the profits.
At the last important meeting of the summer, Beatrice Welles ascended to the office of vice president of the Woman’s Club. And, when its fall-winter schedule for 1910–1911 was unveiled, the new vice president dominated the programming, contributing not just her piano performances to the listed events but the first fully staged play the club had attempted.
Ambitiously slated for the Rhode Opera House, Seven-Twenty-Eight; or, Casting the Boomerang was Augustin Daly’s adaptation of a German sex farce, first successfully produced in New York in 1883. The original stage show had featured Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, a specialist in playing grandes dames, in the role of Mrs. Bargiss, who entertains grandiose ambitions for her husband, an unproductive poet. Now, showing a surprising taste for age makeup and ribald comedy, the much-younger Beatrice Welles undertook the Mrs. Gilbert role in the club’s ambitious production.
Although the play was nominally staged by a local schoolteacher, Seven-Twenty-Eight was entirely the brainchild of Beatrice Welles, and she was its driving force. And the show proved a triumph with audiences, although some clubwomen found it frivolous and risqué. Afterward Beatrice announced that Seven-Twenty-Eight was merely the first theatrical offering of a new Kenosha dramatics organization that would be permanently supported by the Woman’s Club.
That year, the Welles family had an early Christmas Eve dinner at home. Later, Dick and Beatrice went to Guild Hall for a high-society party with refreshments and musicians imported from Chicago. After midnight services at the Unitarian Church, the couple returned home to little Richard, each opening one Christmas present before bed. On New Year’s Day the family departed for a much-needed getaway, motoring first to the annual automobile show in New York City, then going south for a sightseeing trip that included a foray to the West Indies.
The Welleses had not yet returned to Kenosha by the
The highlight of that summer was the four-day Home Talent Spectacle, an elaborate benefit for the Kenosha YMCA that Beatrice Welles staged at the Rhode Opera House in the last week of June. The show involved hundreds of local singers, dancers, and musicians performing their specialties against a series of posed and pantomimed tableaux. Besides helping to organize and stage the extravaganza, Orson’s mother played pieces on the piano and even sang “You’re Just the Girl I’m Looking For,” the hit of the 1906 Shubert light opera The Social Whirl. While her personal tastes were more sophisticated, Beatrice showed a good-humored willingness to try anything to entertain people, laughing at herself if she stumbled. In the final patriotic offering, “Pageant of the Nations,” she even posed as the Goddess of Liberty.
July Fourth was always busy. In the morning the Welles family motored to Racine for the annual parade by veterans of the Spanish-American War. Part of the afternoon was spent at the races for trotters and pacers at the Bain racetrack. The family stopped by the Caledonian Society cricket matches, where the Yules figured prominently, and, like many Library Park families, they ended Independence Day with dinner and dancing at the Kenosha Country Club.
On Labor Day, Kenosha held a downtown parade with floats and a thousand marchers, the streets lined with cheering citizens. The city’s brass workers were always the highlight of the procession, garbed in white duck suits and carrying brass canes, with the female lacquerers wearing white dresses. The following weekend, Badger Brass sponsored a separate field day for its employees, one of the company’s gestures after the strike. Workers and their families rode by rail to Silver Lake for the all-day company picnic, with games, prizes, music, dinner, and moonlight dancing. By now Badger Brass employed six hundred workers, Solar lamp orders continued to rise, and Dick Welles helped tally the profits.
At the last important meeting of the summer, Beatrice Welles ascended to the office of vice president of the Woman’s Club. And, when its fall-winter schedule for 1910–1911 was unveiled, the new vice president dominated the programming, contributing not just her piano performances to the listed events but the first fully staged play the club had attempted.
Ambitiously slated for the Rhode Opera House, Seven-Twenty-Eight; or, Casting the Boomerang was Augustin Daly’s adaptation of a German sex farce, first successfully produced in New York in 1883. The original stage show had featured Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, a specialist in playing grandes dames, in the role of Mrs. Bargiss, who entertains grandiose ambitions for her husband, an unproductive poet. Now, showing a surprising taste for age makeup and ribald comedy, the much-younger Beatrice Welles undertook the Mrs. Gilbert role in the club’s ambitious production.
Although the play was nominally staged by a local schoolteacher, Seven-Twenty-Eight was entirely the brainchild of Beatrice Welles, and she was its driving force. And the show proved a triumph with audiences, although some clubwomen found it frivolous and risqué. Afterward Beatrice announced that Seven-Twenty-Eight was merely the first theatrical offering of a new Kenosha dramatics organization that would be permanently supported by the Woman’s Club.
That year, the Welles family had an early Christmas Eve dinner at home. Later, Dick and Beatrice went to Guild Hall for a high-society party with refreshments and musicians imported from Chicago. After midnight services at the Unitarian Church, the couple returned home to little Richard, each opening one Christmas present before bed. On New Year’s Day the family departed for a much-needed getaway, motoring first to the annual automobile show in New York City, then going south for a sightseeing trip that included a foray to the West Indies.
The Welleses had not yet returned to Kenosha by the
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