History can be fun.

I've always liked history though I have a terrible mind for dates. However, I have a theory that memory is directly related to interest. Since I took up the idea to do a kind of tribute to Eddie Foy and his family in our show for the simple reason that he had 7 kids (really 8...11 if you count infantile death...and a soul is a soul) and I have 7. he and his kids toured and performed together. Seeing the Bob Hope movie about them got me interested in a unique angle or hook for next year. So I decided I should learn about the man and his family and so I paid handsome sums to get a hold of a biography and auto-biography of Eddie Foy. That and Internet research were the start. Turns out the movie was nothing like the real Foys. And so I wanted to know more.




I found an old Vitaphone (original talkies) of six of the seven younger Foys performing their vaudeville show "Chips of the old Block" ...that gave us an insite into what the little Foys grew into and I was able to see the kernel of their characters on stage.




I got a hold of 100 year old sheet music performed by the Foys...that gave me an insight into them as well.




In Foy's autobiography I discovered while performing in SF with his first wife (later to die in childbirth with the child) and a partner and his wife they decided to try their first and last try to be producer. Turns out he flopped at it. But that effort brought him to the gold town of Oroville, CA...my current home. It was 1882. That got me thinking. The State Theater here in town was built in 1928, I believe. So there had to be a theater preceding it. Turns out there were many. The American (the first theater in town), the Metropolitan, the Atkins, the Orpheum, and of course every honky tonk and dance hall had a kind of theater. So the research has to go deeper.




By process of elimination ((by date)) the Atkins and the theater in the Union Hotel were the only ones that (as of now) that could've been the theater Foy used. Here are photos of them now and then.

the Atkins then

Vacant lot today

Orpheum then

Parking lot today. (Notice the then Exposition Center is now a shadow of what it was....it was retrofitted and mad earthquake safe....the second level was removed, the facade was removed ...the sloping path was cut into two levels)