Biographical information in a 1965 newspaper interview:
Scion of a family of circus tight rope artists and variety show performers.
Newspaper interview of the family members in 1965:
Sunday, Aug. 22, 1965 ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Fontinelle Family Troupe Was A Hit With Rustic Audiences
By Jack Rice
WHEN THE Goldenrod Showboat reopened this summer and astonished the young with proof there really is such high theater as "Ten Nights in a Barroom," the simulated nostalgia of it all made one man truly wistful. A retired trouper felt forgotten. The trouper, Robert C. Fontinelle, said to his son Robert E., and any ghosts that were listening, "Why all the publicity on the Showboat, and nobody remembers us?" The younger man passed along the question, and I went to his father's house at 3639 Hartford to determine how much the 91-year-old Fontinelle and his 84-year-old wife, Henrietta, remember themselves.
Mrs. Harrietta Fontinelle said they rana clean show and were able to enforce Prohibition and the no-gambling rule. Refering to a photo in a scrapbook Mrs. Fontinelle said, "That's me in tights. You needn’t look." Her husband's hearing improved instantly. He said, "You were the first lady drum major in tights." "We aren’t talking about that," said his wife. "Turn another page." So I went on in the scrapbook, to a scene of disaster, a fallen tent, and she said, "That's after a blowdown. We're all sitting around on the collapsed tent, sewing it back together again, using baseball stitches. We had a lot more pictures but they burned up in the fire, in 1936."
She gave me a copy of Billboard for Aug. 22, 1936. The front cover was gay with Rockettes, dancing. Inside, there was no gaiety to report for the Fontinelles. A news story datelined Belle, Missouri, reported that the Fontinelles had been burned out. Billboard speculated that "a lighted cigarette, tossed carelessly by a local boy," started the fire. There was no doubt about the outcome, a $10,000 total loss in uninsured equipment.
We carried the show into Belle in eight trailers," said Mrs. Fontinelle, "and we packed it out in two suitcases. Oh, yes and we saved the popcorn trunk, too." The family outfitted itself again and returned to the road with the Toby Shows. In the winter, when their own show was idle, the Fontinelles joined the cast aboard the Goldenrod. Capt. Bill Menke, roaming the river with his showboat in search of lost audiences, had brought his melodramas to St. Louis for a one-week stand in 1937. The Showboat hasn't budged since. World War II took all the Toby Shows off the road.
Between the Fontinelle family members, they remember everything from 1892, when Fontinelle entered show business, until 1942, when the Fontinelle Theater Co., touring summer delight of some 300 rural towns in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas, folded its chairs, struck its tent and recognized the end of an era. ]
The Fontinelles were a family show that traveled under family names: Robert C. was Papa; Henrietta was Mama; Robert E. was Young Robert; daughter Nina was Baby Nina as long as nature would hold still for it, then she became Heading lady Nina; and a third child, Hal, was Toby, which for generations was a hallowed stage name in the outlands.
The "Toby Show" was a mixture of vaudeville and drama, leavened with hayseed. In appearance, the character of Toby was a buffoon, shaggy of hair, droopy of overalls, overrun in the boot heels, but as a do-gooder he was a genius. Toby always brought the young lovers together in the last act, saved the homestead, flattened the villain, and made this the best possible of worlds. The pedantic called it a tent repertory theater. Actors called it a "mother, home and heaven show." About 1000 such units were beating around the rural areas in the 1920s, the glory period of the Toby Shows.
Fontinelle started his troupe in 1909, and by the 1930s it was one of the largest of the Tobys, with a company of 32 people, three stages, 1000 folding chairs and eight equipment trailers. The Fontinelles had years of $100,000 gross ticket sales, which was $99,992 better than they did in their first year together, 1897. They were married that year in Mrs. Fontinelle's home town of Decorah, Iowa. Their marriage was the first thing I heard about from Mrs. Fontinelle after her husband had risen to shake hands, a courtliness in a 91-year-old that would have made me feel guilty if he had not come to his feet so easily. His son explained that motion comes easily to Fontinelle. The sons stayed on some years, but now count themselves as retired.
"Hal is working for a trading stamp company in Joplin," Robert E. Fontinelle said. "I was the company's star Toby,” Hal Fontinelle recalled. “We had no tradesmen in the family. Just the same, my family didn’t approve of me in show business. They wanted me to starve some other way. They enrolled me in a little old wildcat medical school somewhere in Tennessee, but I managed to flunk out. I joined a circus at Nashville and took up the trapeze."
His wife brought out two scrapbooks. The books held photographs, possibly a thousand of them. One of the first pictured "The Three Fontinelles, Robert C., Baby Nina and Henrietta, Novelty Tight Wire Artists," shortly before their arrival in St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Nobody asked them to come, but then, nobody invited the larger part of the army of entertainers who showed up at that fair. But the army was there, competing for work.
The Fontinelle family played to luck, and found jobs. They put on a free act, free to the public but paid for by the promoter of a large show, "The Destruction of Pompeii," to advertise his production. They walked a high wire above the Pike, the fair's midway, to ballyhoo the smoke-pot disaster impending for Pompeii. Some days only two Fontinelles walked the wire above the Pike. Baby Nina was in hiding those days. When she wasn't in hiding the sight of her, up there on the wire, was a scandal to militant town ladies voluntarily patrolling the fair to stamp out resident evils, including child labor. "Every so often we'd have to hide Nina until the fuss blew and one person's lines lead smoothly into someone else's.”
My husband was doing double traps, that means trapeze, and walking on a tight rope between buildings in town," Mrs. Fontinelle continued. "I fell in love with his green tights. He had to hock the tights to buy our marriage license. It was $2, and that's all he got for the tights, but I had $5 saved up, and it was a good thing I did, too." She raised her voice and said, "I'm telling about you hocking your green tights, Papa." He smiled and said, "I was out with the Billy Ashe show when we were married. I was on seven shows that season and never got a payday."
The United States Air Force perpetrated a sonic boom while Fontinelle was speaking. Four people in the room were startled by the boom, but the elder Fontinelle looked pleased. A sound had come along that he heard and recognized, without strain. 'That's a quick shot, isn't it?" he said. He lit a cigar, inhaled, and said that he was one of those American originals, in a world unknown to sonic boomers, a boy who ran away to join the circus.
He didn't run far. He was dragged back home to Nashville and didn't make his escape into show business good, and permanent, until 1892, when he organized Fontinelle's Indoor Circus. "My father was a college professor and he ran a little peep-show on the side," Fontinelle said. "I think he was more interested in the show than he was in being a professor. Hal stayed with show business (longer than any of us. I still do some work along those lines for our church group, but it doesn't count as professional."
I asked them to figure out how many years do count as professional, among the five in the family, dating from Fontinelle's Indoor Circus of 1892. Papa Fontinelle reported his total was 54 years; Mrs. Fontinelle had 48 years; Nina and Hal each had 46, and young Robert, 22. Somebody added it up and announced a family total of 216 years. Mrs. Fontinelle looked at Her husband, then asked, rather softly, "Papa, was it worth hocking the green tights?" His hearing rose to the occasion. "Yes," he said. "Very much, lover," Fontinelle said.
Fontinelle decided in 1909 to get his family down from the wire and onto something solid, a stage. He organized a stock company, and by the time World War I ended, and the country people were prospering and ready to pay as much as 50 cents a head for live entertainment, the Fontinelles had the cast for a Toby show complete among themselves. They chose Missouri as their principal territory, and St. Louis as their home base during the winter off season. There was a Fontinelle for every part in a play, and for every occasion between acts. "Mama and Papa did the character roles and Papa played trumpet between acts," Nina Fontinelle said. "Brother Bob here was the juvenile lead and comic. Brother Hal was our Toby, and he also played drums. I was the leading lady and I sang, too."
"We were known as the "Sunday School Show,' no liquor, no cards." Mrs. Fontinelle said. "Papa wouldn't allow drinking and gambling, and the towners all knew we ran a clean show. In all the towns we played, he wouldn't allow the roustabouts to go chasing, another, more difficult, matter. "Papa was a circus performer," Mrs. Fontinelle said without preamble, setting the pattern for conversation. When a Fontinelle has something to say, it is said, yet no one ever is interrupted. They talk on cue.
Scion of a family of circus tight rope artists and variety show performers.
Newspaper interview of the family members in 1965:
Sunday, Aug. 22, 1965 ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Fontinelle Family Troupe Was A Hit With Rustic Audiences
By Jack Rice
WHEN THE Goldenrod Showboat reopened this summer and astonished the young with proof there really is such high theater as "Ten Nights in a Barroom," the simulated nostalgia of it all made one man truly wistful. A retired trouper felt forgotten. The trouper, Robert C. Fontinelle, said to his son Robert E., and any ghosts that were listening, "Why all the publicity on the Showboat, and nobody remembers us?" The younger man passed along the question, and I went to his father's house at 3639 Hartford to determine how much the 91-year-old Fontinelle and his 84-year-old wife, Henrietta, remember themselves.
Mrs. Harrietta Fontinelle said they rana clean show and were able to enforce Prohibition and the no-gambling rule. Refering to a photo in a scrapbook Mrs. Fontinelle said, "That's me in tights. You needn’t look." Her husband's hearing improved instantly. He said, "You were the first lady drum major in tights." "We aren’t talking about that," said his wife. "Turn another page." So I went on in the scrapbook, to a scene of disaster, a fallen tent, and she said, "That's after a blowdown. We're all sitting around on the collapsed tent, sewing it back together again, using baseball stitches. We had a lot more pictures but they burned up in the fire, in 1936."
She gave me a copy of Billboard for Aug. 22, 1936. The front cover was gay with Rockettes, dancing. Inside, there was no gaiety to report for the Fontinelles. A news story datelined Belle, Missouri, reported that the Fontinelles had been burned out. Billboard speculated that "a lighted cigarette, tossed carelessly by a local boy," started the fire. There was no doubt about the outcome, a $10,000 total loss in uninsured equipment.
We carried the show into Belle in eight trailers," said Mrs. Fontinelle, "and we packed it out in two suitcases. Oh, yes and we saved the popcorn trunk, too." The family outfitted itself again and returned to the road with the Toby Shows. In the winter, when their own show was idle, the Fontinelles joined the cast aboard the Goldenrod. Capt. Bill Menke, roaming the river with his showboat in search of lost audiences, had brought his melodramas to St. Louis for a one-week stand in 1937. The Showboat hasn't budged since. World War II took all the Toby Shows off the road.
Between the Fontinelle family members, they remember everything from 1892, when Fontinelle entered show business, until 1942, when the Fontinelle Theater Co., touring summer delight of some 300 rural towns in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas, folded its chairs, struck its tent and recognized the end of an era. ]
The Fontinelles were a family show that traveled under family names: Robert C. was Papa; Henrietta was Mama; Robert E. was Young Robert; daughter Nina was Baby Nina as long as nature would hold still for it, then she became Heading lady Nina; and a third child, Hal, was Toby, which for generations was a hallowed stage name in the outlands.
The "Toby Show" was a mixture of vaudeville and drama, leavened with hayseed. In appearance, the character of Toby was a buffoon, shaggy of hair, droopy of overalls, overrun in the boot heels, but as a do-gooder he was a genius. Toby always brought the young lovers together in the last act, saved the homestead, flattened the villain, and made this the best possible of worlds. The pedantic called it a tent repertory theater. Actors called it a "mother, home and heaven show." About 1000 such units were beating around the rural areas in the 1920s, the glory period of the Toby Shows.
Fontinelle started his troupe in 1909, and by the 1930s it was one of the largest of the Tobys, with a company of 32 people, three stages, 1000 folding chairs and eight equipment trailers. The Fontinelles had years of $100,000 gross ticket sales, which was $99,992 better than they did in their first year together, 1897. They were married that year in Mrs. Fontinelle's home town of Decorah, Iowa. Their marriage was the first thing I heard about from Mrs. Fontinelle after her husband had risen to shake hands, a courtliness in a 91-year-old that would have made me feel guilty if he had not come to his feet so easily. His son explained that motion comes easily to Fontinelle. The sons stayed on some years, but now count themselves as retired.
"Hal is working for a trading stamp company in Joplin," Robert E. Fontinelle said. "I was the company's star Toby,” Hal Fontinelle recalled. “We had no tradesmen in the family. Just the same, my family didn’t approve of me in show business. They wanted me to starve some other way. They enrolled me in a little old wildcat medical school somewhere in Tennessee, but I managed to flunk out. I joined a circus at Nashville and took up the trapeze."
His wife brought out two scrapbooks. The books held photographs, possibly a thousand of them. One of the first pictured "The Three Fontinelles, Robert C., Baby Nina and Henrietta, Novelty Tight Wire Artists," shortly before their arrival in St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Nobody asked them to come, but then, nobody invited the larger part of the army of entertainers who showed up at that fair. But the army was there, competing for work.
The Fontinelle family played to luck, and found jobs. They put on a free act, free to the public but paid for by the promoter of a large show, "The Destruction of Pompeii," to advertise his production. They walked a high wire above the Pike, the fair's midway, to ballyhoo the smoke-pot disaster impending for Pompeii. Some days only two Fontinelles walked the wire above the Pike. Baby Nina was in hiding those days. When she wasn't in hiding the sight of her, up there on the wire, was a scandal to militant town ladies voluntarily patrolling the fair to stamp out resident evils, including child labor. "Every so often we'd have to hide Nina until the fuss blew and one person's lines lead smoothly into someone else's.”
My husband was doing double traps, that means trapeze, and walking on a tight rope between buildings in town," Mrs. Fontinelle continued. "I fell in love with his green tights. He had to hock the tights to buy our marriage license. It was $2, and that's all he got for the tights, but I had $5 saved up, and it was a good thing I did, too." She raised her voice and said, "I'm telling about you hocking your green tights, Papa." He smiled and said, "I was out with the Billy Ashe show when we were married. I was on seven shows that season and never got a payday."
The United States Air Force perpetrated a sonic boom while Fontinelle was speaking. Four people in the room were startled by the boom, but the elder Fontinelle looked pleased. A sound had come along that he heard and recognized, without strain. 'That's a quick shot, isn't it?" he said. He lit a cigar, inhaled, and said that he was one of those American originals, in a world unknown to sonic boomers, a boy who ran away to join the circus.
He didn't run far. He was dragged back home to Nashville and didn't make his escape into show business good, and permanent, until 1892, when he organized Fontinelle's Indoor Circus. "My father was a college professor and he ran a little peep-show on the side," Fontinelle said. "I think he was more interested in the show than he was in being a professor. Hal stayed with show business (longer than any of us. I still do some work along those lines for our church group, but it doesn't count as professional."
I asked them to figure out how many years do count as professional, among the five in the family, dating from Fontinelle's Indoor Circus of 1892. Papa Fontinelle reported his total was 54 years; Mrs. Fontinelle had 48 years; Nina and Hal each had 46, and young Robert, 22. Somebody added it up and announced a family total of 216 years. Mrs. Fontinelle looked at Her husband, then asked, rather softly, "Papa, was it worth hocking the green tights?" His hearing rose to the occasion. "Yes," he said. "Very much, lover," Fontinelle said.
Fontinelle decided in 1909 to get his family down from the wire and onto something solid, a stage. He organized a stock company, and by the time World War I ended, and the country people were prospering and ready to pay as much as 50 cents a head for live entertainment, the Fontinelles had the cast for a Toby show complete among themselves. They chose Missouri as their principal territory, and St. Louis as their home base during the winter off season. There was a Fontinelle for every part in a play, and for every occasion between acts. "Mama and Papa did the character roles and Papa played trumpet between acts," Nina Fontinelle said. "Brother Bob here was the juvenile lead and comic. Brother Hal was our Toby, and he also played drums. I was the leading lady and I sang, too."
"We were known as the "Sunday School Show,' no liquor, no cards." Mrs. Fontinelle said. "Papa wouldn't allow drinking and gambling, and the towners all knew we ran a clean show. In all the towns we played, he wouldn't allow the roustabouts to go chasing, another, more difficult, matter. "Papa was a circus performer," Mrs. Fontinelle said without preamble, setting the pattern for conversation. When a Fontinelle has something to say, it is said, yet no one ever is interrupted. They talk on cue.
Biographical information in a 1965 newspaper interview:
Scion of a family of circus tight rope artists and variety show performers.
Newspaper interview of the family members in 1965:
Sunday, Aug. 22, 1965 ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Fontinelle Family Troupe Was A Hit With Rustic Audiences
By Jack Rice
WHEN THE Goldenrod Showboat reopened this summer and astonished the young with proof there really is such high theater as "Ten Nights in a Barroom," the simulated nostalgia of it all made one man truly wistful. A retired trouper felt forgotten. The trouper, Robert C. Fontinelle, said to his son Robert E., and any ghosts that were listening, "Why all the publicity on the Showboat, and nobody remembers us?" The younger man passed along the question, and I went to his father's house at 3639 Hartford to determine how much the 91-year-old Fontinelle and his 84-year-old wife, Henrietta, remember themselves.
Mrs. Harrietta Fontinelle said they rana clean show and were able to enforce Prohibition and the no-gambling rule. Refering to a photo in a scrapbook Mrs. Fontinelle said, "That's me in tights. You needn’t look." Her husband's hearing improved instantly. He said, "You were the first lady drum major in tights." "We aren’t talking about that," said his wife. "Turn another page." So I went on in the scrapbook, to a scene of disaster, a fallen tent, and she said, "That's after a blowdown. We're all sitting around on the collapsed tent, sewing it back together again, using baseball stitches. We had a lot more pictures but they burned up in the fire, in 1936."
She gave me a copy of Billboard for Aug. 22, 1936. The front cover was gay with Rockettes, dancing. Inside, there was no gaiety to report for the Fontinelles. A news story datelined Belle, Missouri, reported that the Fontinelles had been burned out. Billboard speculated that "a lighted cigarette, tossed carelessly by a local boy," started the fire. There was no doubt about the outcome, a $10,000 total loss in uninsured equipment.
We carried the show into Belle in eight trailers," said Mrs. Fontinelle, "and we packed it out in two suitcases. Oh, yes and we saved the popcorn trunk, too." The family outfitted itself again and returned to the road with the Toby Shows. In the winter, when their own show was idle, the Fontinelles joined the cast aboard the Goldenrod. Capt. Bill Menke, roaming the river with his showboat in search of lost audiences, had brought his melodramas to St. Louis for a one-week stand in 1937. The Showboat hasn't budged since. World War II took all the Toby Shows off the road.
Between the Fontinelle family members, they remember everything from 1892, when Fontinelle entered show business, until 1942, when the Fontinelle Theater Co., touring summer delight of some 300 rural towns in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas, folded its chairs, struck its tent and recognized the end of an era. ]
The Fontinelles were a family show that traveled under family names: Robert C. was Papa; Henrietta was Mama; Robert E. was Young Robert; daughter Nina was Baby Nina as long as nature would hold still for it, then she became Heading lady Nina; and a third child, Hal, was Toby, which for generations was a hallowed stage name in the outlands.
The "Toby Show" was a mixture of vaudeville and drama, leavened with hayseed. In appearance, the character of Toby was a buffoon, shaggy of hair, droopy of overalls, overrun in the boot heels, but as a do-gooder he was a genius. Toby always brought the young lovers together in the last act, saved the homestead, flattened the villain, and made this the best possible of worlds. The pedantic called it a tent repertory theater. Actors called it a "mother, home and heaven show." About 1000 such units were beating around the rural areas in the 1920s, the glory period of the Toby Shows.
Fontinelle started his troupe in 1909, and by the 1930s it was one of the largest of the Tobys, with a company of 32 people, three stages, 1000 folding chairs and eight equipment trailers. The Fontinelles had years of $100,000 gross ticket sales, which was $99,992 better than they did in their first year together, 1897. They were married that year in Mrs. Fontinelle's home town of Decorah, Iowa. Their marriage was the first thing I heard about from Mrs. Fontinelle after her husband had risen to shake hands, a courtliness in a 91-year-old that would have made me feel guilty if he had not come to his feet so easily. His son explained that motion comes easily to Fontinelle. The sons stayed on some years, but now count themselves as retired.
"Hal is working for a trading stamp company in Joplin," Robert E. Fontinelle said. "I was the company's star Toby,” Hal Fontinelle recalled. “We had no tradesmen in the family. Just the same, my family didn’t approve of me in show business. They wanted me to starve some other way. They enrolled me in a little old wildcat medical school somewhere in Tennessee, but I managed to flunk out. I joined a circus at Nashville and took up the trapeze."
His wife brought out two scrapbooks. The books held photographs, possibly a thousand of them. One of the first pictured "The Three Fontinelles, Robert C., Baby Nina and Henrietta, Novelty Tight Wire Artists," shortly before their arrival in St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Nobody asked them to come, but then, nobody invited the larger part of the army of entertainers who showed up at that fair. But the army was there, competing for work.
The Fontinelle family played to luck, and found jobs. They put on a free act, free to the public but paid for by the promoter of a large show, "The Destruction of Pompeii," to advertise his production. They walked a high wire above the Pike, the fair's midway, to ballyhoo the smoke-pot disaster impending for Pompeii. Some days only two Fontinelles walked the wire above the Pike. Baby Nina was in hiding those days. When she wasn't in hiding the sight of her, up there on the wire, was a scandal to militant town ladies voluntarily patrolling the fair to stamp out resident evils, including child labor. "Every so often we'd have to hide Nina until the fuss blew and one person's lines lead smoothly into someone else's.”
My husband was doing double traps, that means trapeze, and walking on a tight rope between buildings in town," Mrs. Fontinelle continued. "I fell in love with his green tights. He had to hock the tights to buy our marriage license. It was $2, and that's all he got for the tights, but I had $5 saved up, and it was a good thing I did, too." She raised her voice and said, "I'm telling about you hocking your green tights, Papa." He smiled and said, "I was out with the Billy Ashe show when we were married. I was on seven shows that season and never got a payday."
The United States Air Force perpetrated a sonic boom while Fontinelle was speaking. Four people in the room were startled by the boom, but the elder Fontinelle looked pleased. A sound had come along that he heard and recognized, without strain. 'That's a quick shot, isn't it?" he said. He lit a cigar, inhaled, and said that he was one of those American originals, in a world unknown to sonic boomers, a boy who ran away to join the circus.
He didn't run far. He was dragged back home to Nashville and didn't make his escape into show business good, and permanent, until 1892, when he organized Fontinelle's Indoor Circus. "My father was a college professor and he ran a little peep-show on the side," Fontinelle said. "I think he was more interested in the show than he was in being a professor. Hal stayed with show business (longer than any of us. I still do some work along those lines for our church group, but it doesn't count as professional."
I asked them to figure out how many years do count as professional, among the five in the family, dating from Fontinelle's Indoor Circus of 1892. Papa Fontinelle reported his total was 54 years; Mrs. Fontinelle had 48 years; Nina and Hal each had 46, and young Robert, 22. Somebody added it up and announced a family total of 216 years. Mrs. Fontinelle looked at Her husband, then asked, rather softly, "Papa, was it worth hocking the green tights?" His hearing rose to the occasion. "Yes," he said. "Very much, lover," Fontinelle said.
Fontinelle decided in 1909 to get his family down from the wire and onto something solid, a stage. He organized a stock company, and by the time World War I ended, and the country people were prospering and ready to pay as much as 50 cents a head for live entertainment, the Fontinelles had the cast for a Toby show complete among themselves. They chose Missouri as their principal territory, and St. Louis as their home base during the winter off season. There was a Fontinelle for every part in a play, and for every occasion between acts. "Mama and Papa did the character roles and Papa played trumpet between acts," Nina Fontinelle said. "Brother Bob here was the juvenile lead and comic. Brother Hal was our Toby, and he also played drums. I was the leading lady and I sang, too."
"We were known as the "Sunday School Show,' no liquor, no cards." Mrs. Fontinelle said. "Papa wouldn't allow drinking and gambling, and the towners all knew we ran a clean show. In all the towns we played, he wouldn't allow the roustabouts to go chasing, another, more difficult, matter. "Papa was a circus performer," Mrs. Fontinelle said without preamble, setting the pattern for conversation. When a Fontinelle has something to say, it is said, yet no one ever is interrupted. They talk on cue.
Scion of a family of circus tight rope artists and variety show performers.
Newspaper interview of the family members in 1965:
Sunday, Aug. 22, 1965 ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Fontinelle Family Troupe Was A Hit With Rustic Audiences
By Jack Rice
WHEN THE Goldenrod Showboat reopened this summer and astonished the young with proof there really is such high theater as "Ten Nights in a Barroom," the simulated nostalgia of it all made one man truly wistful. A retired trouper felt forgotten. The trouper, Robert C. Fontinelle, said to his son Robert E., and any ghosts that were listening, "Why all the publicity on the Showboat, and nobody remembers us?" The younger man passed along the question, and I went to his father's house at 3639 Hartford to determine how much the 91-year-old Fontinelle and his 84-year-old wife, Henrietta, remember themselves.
Mrs. Harrietta Fontinelle said they rana clean show and were able to enforce Prohibition and the no-gambling rule. Refering to a photo in a scrapbook Mrs. Fontinelle said, "That's me in tights. You needn’t look." Her husband's hearing improved instantly. He said, "You were the first lady drum major in tights." "We aren’t talking about that," said his wife. "Turn another page." So I went on in the scrapbook, to a scene of disaster, a fallen tent, and she said, "That's after a blowdown. We're all sitting around on the collapsed tent, sewing it back together again, using baseball stitches. We had a lot more pictures but they burned up in the fire, in 1936."
She gave me a copy of Billboard for Aug. 22, 1936. The front cover was gay with Rockettes, dancing. Inside, there was no gaiety to report for the Fontinelles. A news story datelined Belle, Missouri, reported that the Fontinelles had been burned out. Billboard speculated that "a lighted cigarette, tossed carelessly by a local boy," started the fire. There was no doubt about the outcome, a $10,000 total loss in uninsured equipment.
We carried the show into Belle in eight trailers," said Mrs. Fontinelle, "and we packed it out in two suitcases. Oh, yes and we saved the popcorn trunk, too." The family outfitted itself again and returned to the road with the Toby Shows. In the winter, when their own show was idle, the Fontinelles joined the cast aboard the Goldenrod. Capt. Bill Menke, roaming the river with his showboat in search of lost audiences, had brought his melodramas to St. Louis for a one-week stand in 1937. The Showboat hasn't budged since. World War II took all the Toby Shows off the road.
Between the Fontinelle family members, they remember everything from 1892, when Fontinelle entered show business, until 1942, when the Fontinelle Theater Co., touring summer delight of some 300 rural towns in Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas, folded its chairs, struck its tent and recognized the end of an era. ]
The Fontinelles were a family show that traveled under family names: Robert C. was Papa; Henrietta was Mama; Robert E. was Young Robert; daughter Nina was Baby Nina as long as nature would hold still for it, then she became Heading lady Nina; and a third child, Hal, was Toby, which for generations was a hallowed stage name in the outlands.
The "Toby Show" was a mixture of vaudeville and drama, leavened with hayseed. In appearance, the character of Toby was a buffoon, shaggy of hair, droopy of overalls, overrun in the boot heels, but as a do-gooder he was a genius. Toby always brought the young lovers together in the last act, saved the homestead, flattened the villain, and made this the best possible of worlds. The pedantic called it a tent repertory theater. Actors called it a "mother, home and heaven show." About 1000 such units were beating around the rural areas in the 1920s, the glory period of the Toby Shows.
Fontinelle started his troupe in 1909, and by the 1930s it was one of the largest of the Tobys, with a company of 32 people, three stages, 1000 folding chairs and eight equipment trailers. The Fontinelles had years of $100,000 gross ticket sales, which was $99,992 better than they did in their first year together, 1897. They were married that year in Mrs. Fontinelle's home town of Decorah, Iowa. Their marriage was the first thing I heard about from Mrs. Fontinelle after her husband had risen to shake hands, a courtliness in a 91-year-old that would have made me feel guilty if he had not come to his feet so easily. His son explained that motion comes easily to Fontinelle. The sons stayed on some years, but now count themselves as retired.
"Hal is working for a trading stamp company in Joplin," Robert E. Fontinelle said. "I was the company's star Toby,” Hal Fontinelle recalled. “We had no tradesmen in the family. Just the same, my family didn’t approve of me in show business. They wanted me to starve some other way. They enrolled me in a little old wildcat medical school somewhere in Tennessee, but I managed to flunk out. I joined a circus at Nashville and took up the trapeze."
His wife brought out two scrapbooks. The books held photographs, possibly a thousand of them. One of the first pictured "The Three Fontinelles, Robert C., Baby Nina and Henrietta, Novelty Tight Wire Artists," shortly before their arrival in St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Nobody asked them to come, but then, nobody invited the larger part of the army of entertainers who showed up at that fair. But the army was there, competing for work.
The Fontinelle family played to luck, and found jobs. They put on a free act, free to the public but paid for by the promoter of a large show, "The Destruction of Pompeii," to advertise his production. They walked a high wire above the Pike, the fair's midway, to ballyhoo the smoke-pot disaster impending for Pompeii. Some days only two Fontinelles walked the wire above the Pike. Baby Nina was in hiding those days. When she wasn't in hiding the sight of her, up there on the wire, was a scandal to militant town ladies voluntarily patrolling the fair to stamp out resident evils, including child labor. "Every so often we'd have to hide Nina until the fuss blew and one person's lines lead smoothly into someone else's.”
My husband was doing double traps, that means trapeze, and walking on a tight rope between buildings in town," Mrs. Fontinelle continued. "I fell in love with his green tights. He had to hock the tights to buy our marriage license. It was $2, and that's all he got for the tights, but I had $5 saved up, and it was a good thing I did, too." She raised her voice and said, "I'm telling about you hocking your green tights, Papa." He smiled and said, "I was out with the Billy Ashe show when we were married. I was on seven shows that season and never got a payday."
The United States Air Force perpetrated a sonic boom while Fontinelle was speaking. Four people in the room were startled by the boom, but the elder Fontinelle looked pleased. A sound had come along that he heard and recognized, without strain. 'That's a quick shot, isn't it?" he said. He lit a cigar, inhaled, and said that he was one of those American originals, in a world unknown to sonic boomers, a boy who ran away to join the circus.
He didn't run far. He was dragged back home to Nashville and didn't make his escape into show business good, and permanent, until 1892, when he organized Fontinelle's Indoor Circus. "My father was a college professor and he ran a little peep-show on the side," Fontinelle said. "I think he was more interested in the show than he was in being a professor. Hal stayed with show business (longer than any of us. I still do some work along those lines for our church group, but it doesn't count as professional."
I asked them to figure out how many years do count as professional, among the five in the family, dating from Fontinelle's Indoor Circus of 1892. Papa Fontinelle reported his total was 54 years; Mrs. Fontinelle had 48 years; Nina and Hal each had 46, and young Robert, 22. Somebody added it up and announced a family total of 216 years. Mrs. Fontinelle looked at Her husband, then asked, rather softly, "Papa, was it worth hocking the green tights?" His hearing rose to the occasion. "Yes," he said. "Very much, lover," Fontinelle said.
Fontinelle decided in 1909 to get his family down from the wire and onto something solid, a stage. He organized a stock company, and by the time World War I ended, and the country people were prospering and ready to pay as much as 50 cents a head for live entertainment, the Fontinelles had the cast for a Toby show complete among themselves. They chose Missouri as their principal territory, and St. Louis as their home base during the winter off season. There was a Fontinelle for every part in a play, and for every occasion between acts. "Mama and Papa did the character roles and Papa played trumpet between acts," Nina Fontinelle said. "Brother Bob here was the juvenile lead and comic. Brother Hal was our Toby, and he also played drums. I was the leading lady and I sang, too."
"We were known as the "Sunday School Show,' no liquor, no cards." Mrs. Fontinelle said. "Papa wouldn't allow drinking and gambling, and the towners all knew we ran a clean show. In all the towns we played, he wouldn't allow the roustabouts to go chasing, another, more difficult, matter. "Papa was a circus performer," Mrs. Fontinelle said without preamble, setting the pattern for conversation. When a Fontinelle has something to say, it is said, yet no one ever is interrupted. They talk on cue.
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