Actors Fund Field Day 1916
It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Regular village “cut-ups” are those actor chaps and actresses. They don’t keep still a minute when they get loose on the village green at the Polo Grounds. The band begins to play and the procession starts from Madison Square in “buzz wagons” and keeps moving until they get to the grounds where every actress, actor and actorman in town passes in review before the grandstand of political and social celebrities there assembled. Here they come now: Eddie Foy, Bert Williams, Marie Dressler, Lew Fields, Marshall P. Wilder. George M. Cohan, Victor Moore. Jim Corbett, Tim Sullivan, Joe Humphreys, Emma Carus, Louis Mann, Terry McGovern, Annie Oakley, Irene Franklin and, well, just watch them as they pass by and you can pick them all out. This show takes in every show in Manhattan and the suburbs. There goes the wild men of Borneo in a Salome war dance. The phonie band is a close second. You can’t hear them play any music because they don’t. Annie Oakley gives an exhibition of fancy shooting and she does it. Burt Williams and Billy Reeves in a sparring exhibition would make an owl laugh, and the “greased pig chase,” just before the pie-eating contest; one was as funny as the other, and then yon couldn’t stop laughing. The chorus girls played the actormen, and they played them good and plenty, and there were many high balls caught on the fly by the girls in bloomers. Well, to tell you the truth, there were so many things pulled off I couldn’t describe them all. Just get a look at this picture and you will get acquainted with the “profesh” and their doings.
