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By Root 534 0

and Mr. J.J. feel that the theater owes them a debt of gratitude for thus destroying a monopoly, but since few of the younger men in the trade remember the Syndicate, they are likely to consider the Shuberts themselves rather tentacular. This makes for what the Shuberts consider misunderstandings. During the jihad, or holy war, between the Shuberts and Klaw & Erlanger, the moving pictures gradually destroyed the legitimate theater in the provinces. Then the depression put a terrific crimp in it in New York. The theater in recent years has become a minor form of enterprise localized on Manhattan. But even though their army has shrunk to a squad, the Shuberts comport themselves like field marshals of industry. They have never taken to moving pictures. Mr. Lee says that the cinema is “a kind of makebelieve.”

The Shubert preoccupation with the theater dates back to 1885, when Sam, the eldest brother, now dead, made the only recorded appearances of a Shubert on the American stage. He was eleven years old, and his part was a walkon in the first act of a Belasco production called May Blossoms, which at the time happened to be playing the Wieting Opera House at Syracuse. May Blossoms, a treacly thing, called for the engagement of four child actors in every town the company visited; this was much cheaper and less troublesome than taking children on the road. The company manager had picked Sam Shubert out of his classroom in the public school nearest the theater. The boy received a dollar a performance for a whole week, and the entire Shubert family, including tenyearold Lee and fiveyearold Jake, attended every night, on passes. The boys were entranced by this factitious world, so unlike the Seventh Ward, where the Shuberts and most other poor Jews in Syracuse lived. David Shubert, the boys' father, peddled notions, underwear, and sundries among upstate farmers, riding out to the country on a train from Syracuse and then trudging from door to door with his wares on his back. May Blossoms gave Sam, Lee, and Jake their first intimation that there might be a pleasanter way of making a living. It was such a milestone in the Shuberts' lives that they later devised two operetta titles from that of the Belasco show. The operettas were Maytime and Blossom Time, both illustrious moneymakers.

Sam was a precocious, imaginative boy. Since his death in 1905, the surviving brothers have agreed to consider him the family genius, and a portrait of him hangs in the lobby or lounge of every theater they operate. Soon after his dramatic debut, Sam became program boy at the Grand Opera House, the secondbest theater in Syracuse, at $1.50 a week. Immediately his younger brothers' ambitions switched from the artistic to the commercial side of the theater, where they have been ever since. Sam was still wearing short pants when the manager of the Grand promoted him to assistant treasurer, which meant relief ticket seller. He had to stand on a box to reach the ticket window. When Sam moved over to the more elegant Wieting Opera House, at a higher salary, Lee succeeded him at the Grand. Lee, in his early teens, already had been an apprentice cigar maker and shirt cutter, and a haberdasher's clerk. The haberdasher was named Jesse Oberdorfer, and he, too, had theatrical inclinations. He was destined to be the first in a line of Shubert bankroll men which since then has included George B. Cox, a Cincinnati millionaire; Andrew Freedman, Samuel Untermyer, and Jefferson Seligman. Syracuse had four legitimate theaters in the nineties. A job in a good provincial theater was the best possible introduction to the profession, for stars spent most of their time and earned most of their money on the road. Sam and Lee Shubert met actors like Richard Mansfield, Nat Goodwin, and Joe Jefferson in Syracuse. Before Sam and Lee were twenty, they rented road companies of A Texas Steer and A Black Sheep from Charles H. Hoyt, the authormanager, guaranteeing him a fixed return for the use of the productions which he had assembled and trained. The boys managed the companies, sent