A story by O. Alan Weltzien
The Taylor Triptych
When Great Uncle Beach laughed, which he did frequently, he tilted his bald pate back and raised his bulbous nose and the laugh erupted in steady waves. It relaxed and spread across the room, inviting you to join in and we did. A chubby kid, I couldn’t help myself. Uncle Beach found more risible matter than most of us do. I laughed more than usual every time we visited: he died at age 92 (1888-1980) when I was in my late-20s, in grad school. Closing my eyes, I hear his resonant baritone.
When I watched Mary Poppins and listened to Ed Wynn and Dick van Dyke sing “I Love to Laugh,” Uncle Beach hovered just off-camera. He belonged in their club.
When he said “Now Robert” to Dad, his voice softened. Without his own children despite four marriages, Beach doted on Dad, taking him fishing and supplying him with candy bars which didn’t help his soft teeth. Whether the fish were biting or not, Beach handed over Mars or Snickers bars. He came prepared.
I’ve no relative who displays the particular hues of “colorful” as did Uncle Beach.
Likely by accident, he found himself on the edges of showbiz, working as an advance man for shows, particularly circuses. He lived close to a particularly intense, likely anachronistic mode of Americana, one characterized by bigtops and bright colors and caged animals and sideshows and competing barkers and pink cumulous clouds of spun cotton candy, and spangled boxes of Cracker Jack. He brought showbiz into our home, usually in the form of free tickets—the coinage of an advance man.
Do you have a past relative similarly dialed into this strain of Americana?
How many people you know with a moniker like Beach Bassett Taylor? A monosyllabic thump, a common noun most love particularly in summer, followed by two heavy trochees, the first connoting, in common form, a familiar species of hound with droopy eyes, long ears, short legs, and hanging belly. In his case, a pair of family names from his paternal grandmother’s family: according to archival records, he was likely named after a great uncle.
My folks wanted to continue the Taylor name but not the other two. In my family we fondly referred to him as “Peach Basket.”
His family’s wayward fortunes launched him on the road early. He was a second son and middle child like me. Beach stopped grammar school well before 8th grade because of his improvident father, a “professional astrologer” who tried to make a go of it for decades.
I never really leave school and retire after a long career in academe. But his career outlasts mine.
Beach and his older brother, Guy, were born in Wymore, NE where their maternal grandfather, a 300-pound man, ran the Arbor Gazette. Within a few years, though, their father had uprooted the family to some villages near LaGrande, OR; by the time Beach turned 15, the family had landed in Seattle where they’d stay. He’d left school behind: apparently it mattered little to his mother that he and Guy received minimal education; for the younger sister, my grandmother Gladys, it was a different story.
I leaf through a late 19th-century autograph book, a Christmas gift from Beach’s mother. Brushed velvet with a tin sunflower affixed on its cover, the size of a large wallet. Beach has written, “My Album’s open! come and see! / What! won’t you waste a line on me? / Write but a thought, a word or two, / That memory may revert to you.” Below he’s carefully inscribed his name and below that, “Age nine years and ten months, Dec. 1897.” He collected lots of autographs, some with hackneyed rhyming to match his own, just as his affability enabled him to collect lots of friends in his long life.
The first pair of verses and signatures are his folks’. His mother—Dad’s Grandma Taylor, whom he loved deeply—wrote, “Dear boy Beach: Count that day lost / Whose low decending [sic] sun, / Views from thy hand no worthy action done.” Commonplace piety. Soon enough her second son interpreted her advice to mean becoming financial anchor for the family. He and Guy, first-born and older brother, hustled all kinds of jobs, often as stagehands at Seattle theaters, to help pay rent and buy food. By the time of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific (AYP) Exposition in 1909, Beach had found a steady gig.
Uncle Guy became an officer in World War I, then a drunk.
In a profile of Beach published late in his life, he worked backstage in Seattle’s Third Avenue Theatre and the Grand Opera House, occasionally making an appearance as an extra in mob scenes. Like most of us he craved that kind of excitement, of being close to stars. By the 1960s these Seattle hallmarks, among many old theaters, were only faded memories, a conspicuous bygone chapter of popular entertainment.
His sister kept a diary which reveals anxieties about money as well as pleasures in traveling shows. On 27 July 1910 she notes, about the upcoming weekend, “It is the best time because Sat. is payday. That is Beach gets his pay.” Not their father. That Christmas, he gifts his sister sheet music (including rags, possibly some Scott Joplin) for the piano; for her birthday two years later, he’s given her a beautiful watch. Guy married in 1910, so Beach became primary breadwinner. He didn’t always have money to throw around: Gladys notes records a family nadir (2/15/1911), “Beach lost his position, no one works now.” Four years and a month later, between jobs, he scrounges: “Beach says he can’t stay here much longer if he does not get work. It is mighty fine to have him home again.” (3/17/1915). For a period he worked out of San Francisco rather than Seattle.
He’d already found a niche working as a circus front man. According to a cousin’s family research, Beach, like other advertisers of the time, favored barn walls. He’d offer free passes to the farmers, and for those wanting no big promotional posters, he explained he used a special glue that would lose its grip just after a show’s run (the poster then slipping neatly off). Most bought his line.
That’s a crucial image in the history of advertising and circuses, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.
Through the whims of history my great uncle witnessed, up close, the final years of both Wild West extravaganzas and vaudeville.
In 1912 his sister recorded in her diary, “Beach sent us three tickets to his 101 Wild West Show.” (5/26/1912). These gigs were temporary. My cousin recalls Beach telling her that, in San Francisco in 1917, he’d no money left in his pocket except a nickel, which he used on the Oakland ferry to reach the local Wild West Show office, which was hiring. He got the job.
When Beach provided those three tickets, Joe Miller’s 101 Ranch Wild West Show was seven years old, and some years it included Geronimo (a prisoner), Buffalo Bill himself, Tom Mix, and Annie Oakley, among other celebrities. Taylor admitted, decades later in an interview, that Oakley pulled off her act by pointing her gun at a target as the target exploded. According to one website, the extravaganza included a “buffalo hunt and barbecue, Indian sports and dancing, riding and roping contests, bands and a giant parade.” This website slides over the commonly accepted view of carefully staged, artificial pageantry that sustains, each performance, white triumphalism in the face of tribal near-genocide.
Instead it bridges fact and fantasy, reminding spectators that many performers are also ranchhands: “Although exaggerated and stylized[,] their work and their performance were one and the same. Hollywood actors and other famous people from a number of disciplines were among the attractions.” Gullible audiences such as my grandmother and her folks watched some admixture of artifice and “the real thing,” likely inclining to the latter view, however unreal. The early 20th-century zeitgeist bemoaned, in some circles, the “vanishing noble race”: hard upon the frontier wars, some Indians made good entertainment, as Cody and other entrepreneurs quickly realized.
Beach worked for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show during its twilight (1912-13). As a teenager I couldn’t get over the fact that this relative had worked for old Buffalo Bill—creation of dime novelists like Ned Buntline and photographers. Before then he’d worked for a billboard firm by the name of Foster & Kleiser: according to a profile published much later, Taylor supervised crews that put up theatre advertising. After World War I, where he’d served as a buck private, he worked for the Orpheum vaudeville circuit (1919-31). He stayed in the biz long enough to become a player in Seattle popular entertainment history, even a living legend. He parlayed popular entertainment nostalgia and came himself to embody it as a direct link to forms eclipsed by the movies, radio, and later, television.
Beach, who spent generations promoting a range of acts, made good copy himself. A pair of profiles published in The Seattle Times during his old age—John J. Reddin’s “Days of Tent Shows Recalled by ‘Sniper’’ (1/10/1965) and John Haigh’s “70 years in show business” (7/15/1973)—bear out his rep as a local legend and highlight his very long career. Taylor was 77 when Reddin published his column; when Haigh published his, Uncle Beach was 85.
Reddin opens by defining Uncle Beach as a “sniper,” “one of the last of a colorful but fast-disappearing breed.” Eight years later, Haigh begins his column, “After nearly 70 years of advertising show-business attractions from vaudeville to boxing, Beach B. Taylor finds it hard to quit working.”
He didn’t always use proper grammar but he told stories like no other I’d heard.
In Reddin’s profile, part of his “Faces of the City” feature that ran for many years in The Times, the photo is captioned, “BEACH TAYLOR WITH TOOLS OF TRADE.’ Homburg and necktie matching his dark suit, cigar jutting out his mouth’s left corner, he clutches a few Ice Capades posters in his left arm as he places another in a store front. He bends slightly but his short figure isn’t stooped.
We attended Ice Capades or Harlem Globetrotters shows for years, thanks to his free tickets. As Reddin, looking at the old on-the-job risks for a “sniper,” says, “A thick pad of passes was (and is) the sniper’s only weapon, his sole leverage to deal with property owners or to cool off small-town constables and rural deputy sheriffs.” Those passes usually appeased the irate with the glow of the upcoming show.
In fact Reddin’s piece happily riffs on this definition of “sniper,” who’s no sharpshooter trained in killing. Old-fashioned snipers are the fast-taking and intrepid bill posters who put the prize-fight and touring road-show placards in store and restaurant windows…the long-brush men who hung gaudy posters on vacant store buildings, fences and rural barns.
Snipers—advance men—worked the ground weeks before a show was scheduled to open, and “in their wake, the countryside suddenly blossomed with oversize posters of snarling Bengal tigers, clowns, fearless lion tamers or Buffalo Bill and a stagecoach under attack by Indians in ferocious war paint.” Beach was a cog in a machine that served up carefully manufactured pageantry. As many scholars have written, “Wild” West extravaganzas appropriated subdued tribal peoples just as many vaudeville acts appropriated and stereotyped African Americans (e.g. white faces in blackface) during some of the most vicious Jim Crow decades.
The description brims with cliched pastoral nostalgia as though snipers trafficked primarily in rural locales. Certainly Beach, for most of his long life, called Seattle home even as he plastered barn walls and utility poles and building fronts in rural towns. As mentioned, he’d fast-talk farmers worrying about tattered posters after the show’s run. Sometimes he found himself in a hot spot.
In the Reddin profile Beach tells the story of a close call in Ashland, OR:
“I had really tacked the town. . .when the law grabbed me. It seems there was a city ordinance. I suggested to the town clown [constable] that ‘we go over to the town hotel and talk this over.’ [PP] Luckily, we met the show’s manager and, while he fast-talked the law and quickly wrote out free ducats for the constable and all his relatives, I snuck out of town—caught the next stage for Medford.”
Such scrapes make good copy, and Uncle Beach never ran out of anecdotes. One of my favorites concerned his dentures. One day on Seattle’s Second Avenue, the dentures, somehow loosened, fell out onto the sidewalk. Beach, short, bald, slightly pudgy, reddened as he bent to retrieve them, but his foot kicked them ahead and they clicked like a set of Halloween mandibles. Beach’s feet worked against his hands more than once before he thrust the dentures in his pocket and scurried beyond onlookers.
When Beach re-told this story, he leaned back and opened his mouth and his laughter pulsed. He didn’t mind laughing at his own expense. Endless yarns from life on the road. Between jobs he’d puff his cigar, hold it in his right hand during a story, then rear back for an unhurried belly laugh which demanded his friends join him.
But he didn’t talk, in my presence at least, about his astrologer father or alcoholic older brother or long-dead younger sister. Or previous wives.
Archival research attests that Beach married one Seena Mercord, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants, in 1914. Seena brought a daughter, Dorothy, to the marriage; Beach would sire no children of his own, which explains in part his doting on my father and aunt. I’ve never learned when that marriage ended, nor are there any stories or archival records I’ve found about the second and third wives. Maybe Beach was gone too much to satisfy a wife. His fourth marriage, to Ella L. W. Wagner Hansen (10/5/1957), a Swedish laundress, lasted over twenty years until their deaths.
Beach kept meticulous scrapbooks that document his long career and I don’t know what became of them, as they constitute an archive of 20th-century Seattle entertainment history. He’d shown them to John Reddin, whose profile includes a daunting list of acts and names. Sells Floto. Gus Hill’s Mutt & Jeff Theater Show. Armstrong’s Baby Dolls. Polack Brothers. Carson and Barnes. Campbell Brothers. Tom Mix Circus and the Wild West Show. Russell Brothers. The Clyde Beatty Circus.
Excepting the Wild West Show and Tom Mix, unknown names to me. Reddin also lists “almost-forgotten names” that, fifty-five years after the profile, have been forgotten, excepting Harry Houdini: “the Wilkes Theater Players, Joe Chitwood’s Auto Daredevils, the Great Patterson Shows, Singer’s Midgets, Toto the Clown, Charles Winninger & Company, Houdini, and Blackstone the Magician.”
John Haigh’s later column lists the famous vaudevillians he plugged, and most of them haven’t faded from collective memory: “Ed Wynn, Fannie Brice, the ‘three Keatons,’ Marie Dressler, Houdini and Will Rogers.” And Sarah Bernhardt who “toured in a private railway car and insisted on being paid $1000 [$15,000 today] promptly after each performance.”
Apparently Uncle Beach rep’ed a broad range of entertainment, much of it ephemeral. As Reddin admits, often “the long-awaited show wasn’t nearly as exciting or interesting as the posters.” Anticipation exceeded performance.
Advance men like Beach offered distraction and tapped into deep-rooted longing, as their posters and handbills blazoned with colors provided a diversion from black-and-white weeks and seasons. In a sense he was a magician with flour paste, a long brush, handbills, and sometimes, passes. He and his sundry employers added hot spices to one’s usual dull diet.
The entertainments he promoted satisfied a different craving than the spiritual cravings addressed by his father (astrology) or sister (Christian Science). Uncle Beach, who’d worked backstages since childhood, focused upon the bright lights and greasepaint rather than the inner self. In the various acts he fronted, he appealed to the sudden gasp, the shriek of joy, the dance of awe and laughter, not any sustained attention on one’s spiritual disposition. If he landed in the twilight of the Wild West Shows, he long outlasted vaudeville.
I hold a letter addressed to Beach from “Your Old Pal, Bill” from Salem, OR, August 13 1936. Bill regrets missing his ol’ buddy when he passed through Seattle “billing for the world’s greatest [the Clyde Beatty Circus] which is coming August 20—21.” He’s attached “some gold bricks”—the common currency—for the upcoming show. Bill reminisces about their days on the Wild West Show twenty-four years earlier: “Well Old pal I surely would have loved to seen [sic] you and talked about those good old times we use [sic] to have on the old ranch show. Boy those were the days and we can never forget them.” That was half a lifetime ago for Beach, who realized he’d been around for the last act of a long-vanished entertainment. By 1936, he also knew vaudeville was over, replaced by motion pictures and radio shows.
Beach, then 48, is part of a thick nostalgia concerning the “good old days” of Indians as losers in mythic spectacles, or white vaudevillians donning blackface. Circuses, dependent on captive, trained wild animals, appeal to the child in us, or at least parts of that child. We want to lean back and gaze as acrobats swoop or tigers jump through flaming hoops; we want to laugh at clowns. The letterhead stationery defines this particular nostalgia, the upper third like a handbill. The block lettering—red, black, and blue, in various fonts—blazons “JESS ADKINS & ZACK TERRELL / AMUSEMENT ENTERPRISES / COLE BROS. CIRCUS / AND / CLYDE BEATTY’S / GIGANTIC TRAINED WILD ANIMAL EXHIBITION.” Two leopards leap towards one another and snarling lions and tigers frame the oval photos of Adkins and Terrell—propped up by a pair of elephants. Along the bottom of the stationary, a frieze of circus acts, white figures against a pale blue backdrop.
He’d come a long ways already from backstage hand or mob scene extra.
John Haigh’s later Seattle Times column about Uncle Beach includes a large photo by Roy Scully, famed local photographer. Seated in front of a table as his left hand cradles one of his open scrapbooks, Uncle Beach, 85, looks right at you, his smile easy. Both collar and patterned necktie are slightly loosened and a tie chain slightly curbs its width. Reading glasses peep out of his white shirt’s pocket and his suit coat’s pocket shows at least one ballpoint pen.
In his mid-eighties, Uncle Beach admits he still “help[s] out” at Seattle’s Fidelity Lane Ticket Office. He’s outlasted most of the old theaters which had booked the shows he promoted. In his vignettes and memorabilia, they return momentarily to life: Haigh lists the Third Avenue, the Grand Opera House, the Lois, the old Coliseum, the Seattle, the Metropolitan, the Orpheum—at two locations. These former features of downtown Seattle’s landscape, like comparable theaters mostly vanished all over the country, symbolize a brightly lit chapter in our history of popular entertainment, one mostly eclipsed by the motion pictures.
Mid-way through college, I knew about my great-uncle’s longevity but he hadn’t shared many details. Haigh’s profile along with John Reddin’s earlier one give the measure of his show-biz career. From Haigh I glimpse, through Beach’s reminiscences, the flurry of vaudeville in 1920s Seattle: “‘We’d be promoting a new show every week,’ Taylor said. ‘They would run a matinee and two night shows every day, and also show a movie. All the top vaudeville entertainers came through here.’” The 1920s roared in Seattle theaters, and big-town and city theaters everywhere.
And later, as Haigh narrates, Taylor rep’ed Lawrence Welk and boxers Pete Rademacher and Floyd Patterson (who fought in 1957 in Seattle).
I remember watching Lawrence Welk occasionally with old relatives (“una one, una two, una three. . .”) on TV. Why didn’t I find out about Welk or so many others from Beach himself? Why didn’t I ask him lots of questions?
Was my great uncle a minor celebrity in Seattle’s 20th-century show-biz history? If advance men were by nature anonymous, his adaptability and duration lessened his own and tilted him into a voice of living history. I wish I’d asked him for details, reviewed his meticulous scrapbooks with him page by page.
Both of the newspaper columns about my great uncle close with a genealogical nod as if Beach were pre-destined for show business. He never knew his paternal grandfather, Theodore F. Taylor, who worked as a “general agent” for P. T. Barnum during the years Barnum showcased both Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” in the process becoming the best-known showman in the U.S. If Beach believed he inherited his predilection for show biz, at least he chose and followed a more profitable career than his father. The masses paid more for circus tickets than horoscope readings.
Uncle Beach’s marital life certainly didn’t match his work life. When he married Aunt Ella he was 69 and absent far less than during his past decades. Daughter of North Dakota immigrants, she’d had as little schooling as Beach and had survived an earlier marriage and decades working in a steam laundry. Ella was born about two months before Beach, her second husband, and pre-deceased him by sixteen months. How well I remember the old furniture smells in their Capitol Hill (15th Ave. E.) apartment, one of a seven-unit building they managed until old age forced them out.
Ella accepted Beach’s nephew (my father) and family as her own.
A cute old couple, simpatico, Ella stood as tall or taller than Beach. One time she cooked potato pancakes for our family, a new taste for me since Mom didn’t grate raw potatoes. As Christmas approached, we awaited her fudge. Mom shuddered when she learned Ella blew the nut husks off, holding them close to her mouth before mixing the chopped nuts into her fudge. We thought her fudge even better than Mom’s. Ella held clear opinions and employed a distinct gesture of dismissal if she thought something stupid or nonsensical. She extended her arm then flipped her hand down, that snap eliminating, for her, any further reality or relevance to what she was now done with. She usually joined his laughter though I can’t remember her sound.
Growing up, Dad rarely said anything about his mother, who’d died in her mid-forties. As we never saw Guy Taylor, whom Dad regretted avoiding, Uncle Beach represented the Taylor side of my father’s life.
I have a pair of color snapshots from April 1966, from my folks’ living room. No doubt Beach and Ella were over for a meal. In one Dad, wearing a plaid long sleeve shirt, stands with his uncle before the brick fireplace. In his mid-forties, he still looks young and his left arm clasps Uncle Beach’s left shoulder. Beach stands several inches shorter than Dad, maybe 5’6”, and I don’t think he shrunk. Beach’s smile is genuine though he shows no teeth, and he loosely joins his hands in front of his suit coat.
In the other photo, the couple sit on a couch next to Mom to her right. Mom is dressed in a matching skirt and top, her red hair carefully waved off her forehead. I sit just left of Mom cradling our ginger-colored cat, and I try to match Beach’s smile. My jeans ride unevenly up my big calves above the tops of my nerdy white crew socks. My younger brother leans over from behind the couch, between Mom and Aunt Ella, a fixed grin. Beach and Ella smile easily and Beach—suit, narrow necktie and clasp—leans back, his left arm cradling Ella’s shoulders. His smile looks like it might widen into a belly laugh.
Beach and Ella were 78 in these pictures and he’d live another 14 years.
I’ve always loved to laugh and as I’ve aged, particularly like laughing at myself. I heard a good role model in my youth, and only wish my laugh matched, in exuberance and generosity, Uncle Beach’s. It was always an invitation and it was always futile to resist. He always gave it its own time and during that time, the room warmed.
This work was featured in issue #12