Who Am I? August 2019

My friend and business partner were born in approximately the same year in N.Y.C. and we formed our partnership in ’98 (that’s 1898!). We didn’t exactly “meet cute” but our personal and professional relationship was to endure for 70 years.

Though we are not well-remembered today we had successful careers in vaudeville, on stage, in films, nightclubs and later on radio and TV.

Our first gigs were playing in Bowery saloons and the Palace Garden on 13th Street. Our specialty was low comedy and carefully executed skits as dialect comedians, a venue very popular at the time. In our early days we worked at a particular restaurant to help pay the bills. A big break came when we were booked with Will Lester’s Imperial and Vaudeville Comedy Company in ’01.

As our careers progressed we were among the first all American variety groups to tour Europe. We rode that vaudeville train as long as that venue was viable but once radio came out we had to devise new material and learn to work in different media. We got offers from Hollywood and made some two-reelers, short films, “soundies,” and a few full length motion pictures with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers and Columbia studios.

If you think of Bud Abbott's and Lou Costello’s physical appearances you can conjure up approximately what we looked like. One of us was tall, had a mustache, and delivered the punch lines. The other one of us was shorter and fat and was the straight man.

Our common connection to north Jersey, besides our vaudeville appearances, was that we both spent our last years at the Lillian Booth Actors Fund Home in Englewood. The taller of us survived 10 years after his partner’s death and he continued to perform for the Home’s residents and also lectured in high schools, and scripted “Dial-a-Jokes”. That’s us in the photo below.

(1a)What were our given and stage names? (1b)What was the name of our act? (2)How and where did we first meet? (3a)How did we arrive at a name for our act? (3b)Where did we work as waiters to help pay our bills when we started out? (4)Where did we celebrate the 50th and 70th anniversary of our act? (5a)Neil Simon wrote a play and film that was partially based on our lives. His work was kind of a parody because in real life the two of us got on splendidly. (5b) Aside from the names and dates, what else is written on our common headstone at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx?