The Cyclist
AMERICA’S BEST COMEDY BICYCLE ACT is what an Atlantic City newspaper called James Curtis Booth’s troupe. The Booth Trio took their act, Cyclistic Craziness, to vaudeville in 1909 and, by 1913, had appeared in cities across the country — Pittsburgh to San Francisco, Chattanooga to Minneapolis, Tacoma to Birmingham, and beyond.
Most of the Trio’s early performances took place in Ohio, James’s birthplace. An Akron reviewer noted the tremendous applause the chief daredevil received after jumping his bicycle up 20 steps and, in one big leap, landing back on the stage. Daring and spectacular, the reviewer called the stunt. Swift-moving and thrilling, another wrote.
And the act was funny. Noted yet another critic:
The Booth Trio keep its audience in continuous laughter in their novel and snappy cycling performance, which is marked by…originality and tomfoolery…Even the hair-rising feats performed by the trio mix laughs with the thrills.
The youngest of five children, James Curtis Booth, Jr. was born November 17, 1883 in tiny Wellston, Ohio. His father, James Curtis Booth, Sr., was a stationary engineer; his mother, Josephine Bagley, a farmer’s daughter. By 1900, the family had relocated to Pennsylvania, where young James, 16, no longer in school, worked as a “screw boy” in a tin-plate mill.
James apparently didn’t take to industrial toil, opting to spend his energies on a bicycle…and onstage. In 1908, he married Jennie L. Galloway, a native New Yorker with a 10-year-old daughter, Doris. The 1910 census shows the couple worked as trick cyclists; young Doris was listed as an actress.
Home base for the troupe was the Franklin, Ohio home of James’s parents, where also resided his sister, her husband and son, as well as wife Jennie’s widowed mother, a boarder, whose given occupation was “maid” in the “theatrical” industry.
By 1913, the Booth family of three had shifted their home base to California, where James found steady work in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was the heyday of vaudeville, and The Booth Trio shared billing with popular dramas and the singing/dancing Emma Francis and her Arabian whirlwinds.
Clearly, Jennie wasn’t trick cycling in 1913; she gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Jewel Patricia, June 17 in Los Angeles. James went on the road — his stops included Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Billings — and, for the first time, the act was billed as the “J. C. Booth Trio.”
Also for the first time, press reports were specific about the make-up of the trio; it was said to include “two men and a pretty girl.” The girl was Gretta Mack, touted not for acrobatics, but for her lovely gowns and sweet soprano voice. The second man went unnamed.
The Booth trio didn’t survive the addition of little Jewel and the change she made in the family’s professional lives. Before Jewel turned two, James met Nina Epsey Halligan, 21, a musician and actress whose father had once been the proprietor of the Olympic Theatre and the California Concert Hall in Denver.
The couple married July 2, 1915 in Elkton, Maryland, and initially made their home in Brooklyn, New York. On February 7, 1917, James Curtis Booth III was born. Exactly 10 months later, on December 7, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
James registered for the World War I draft in September 1918. The registrant noted that James was “troubled with (a) fractured hip, when walking far.” Additionally, the 34-year-old performer reported that he was employed at the Friar’s Club in New York City; however, he gave as his permanent address Camp Upton in Yaphank, New York.
Camp Upton was created in 1917 to house troops waiting for deployment overseas. The Friar’s Club, then a sort of fraternal organization for comics and musicians, later became synonymous with celebrity roasts. That James was associated with both suggest he was straddling military duty and show biz.
As it happens, so was Irving Berlin, one of the country’s most famous composers. Drafted into the Army in 1917, he was assigned to Camp Upton with one duty: write songs. He complied by composing an all-soldier musical revue titled “Yip Yip Yaphank,” a patriotic tribute to the Army. The show later moved to Broadway.
Did Irving Berlin’s production — “the best of all the soldier shows” — include a part for a trick cyclist? Why, yes, it did:
Having waited out the war as a performer, James resumed life in peacetime by reuniting with his parents. His mother and father, still an engineer, were renting a house in Los Angeles, where James, wife Nina, and James Curtis Booth III, born in 1917, joined them.
In the 1920 census, James no longer identified himself as a cyclist, but as a stage actor. He was then 35 years old.
In August 1921, James found his press far less positive than he had enjoyed in his cycling past. The Los Angeles Times published three stories about his failure to provide support for his and Jennie’s 8-year-old daughter, Jewel, who was living in the city with her mother and step-father.
James paid a $500 bond prior to his first court appearance, then made a deal with the judge. If he was allowed to travel to Denver to “stage his act,” he would leave the refunded $500 cash bail to pay his $30/month child support. The judge agreed to those terms.
It’s not clear how many more years James was able to earn a living on the stage. In the 1920’s, vaudeville shows increasingly included a motion picture on the program; in time, the movies usurped vaudeville’s variety acts as America’s favorite form of entertainment. The end of that era coincided, of course, with the aging of an acrobat who likely did his body more damage than the one fracture reported on his draft registration.
By 1935, James and Nina were no longer in California; they had returned to New York, renting a house on Jerome Street in the Bronx. In 1940, at age 57, James was working as an inspector for an arts dealer, earning $1700 a year. A decade later, he and Nina had a place on 34th Avenue in Queens. Both were employed: James as a sales rep for a produce firm, and Nina as an interpreter in a department store. They earned about $8,000 that year.
The Booths’ son married in 1936; he went off to World War II in May 1943. As a private first class in the ordnance division of the Marine Corps, he earned sharp-shooting and good-conduct medals. James Curtis Booth III eventually made his way to Dallas where, in 1961, he served as a deputy sheriff. He and wife Vera had one son, Roger.
It was also that year that James, then in his late 70's, and Nina, 10 years younger than her husband, decided to forsake New York City and join their son in Dallas. The 1961 city directory shows the two resided at 906 Tarrant Place in Oak Cliff; their son and daughter-in-law were close by, at 934 Tarrant Place.
It’s likely Nina lived alone in that apartment. In the fall of 1961, James Curtis Booth entered Terrell State Hospital in Kaufman County. The public psychiatric hospital opened in 1885 as the North Texas Lunatic Asylum but has operated under its current name since 1925.
James remained in the facility 201 days; in his last four days, he struggled with bronchial pneumonia and, on May 24, 1962, died there. The daring trickster of vaudeville who parlayed his talents into a role in Irving Berlin’s World War I musical was 78 years old.
In a jarringly inadequate note on his death certificate, a clerk identified James’s “usual occupation” as PARTS SALESMAN.
James Curtis Booth Jr. was buried in Oakland Cemetery (section 44, tier 10, grave 40). Nina lived another 16 years without her “Jim.” She lies next to her husband in grave 39.
James Curtis Booth III, who pre-deceased his mother by six years, is buried in tier 9. According to a notation on his interment card, his wife Vera’s ashes were left on the north side of his headstone.
