The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [76]
Life began for John Sigvard Olsen and for Harold Ogden Johnson when they met in the professional department of a music publisher's office in Chicago in 1914. They had existed, after a fashion, as individuals, but neither had as yet found his groove. Olsen and Johnson had come to the publisher's office in search of music for their respective acts. Olsen was with the College Four, a quartet of musicmaking comedians who played beer halls and rathskellers. He had been graduated from Northwestern, at Evanston, Illinois, in 1912 and was the only member of the College Four who had even been near a college. Ole played the violin, sang with illustrated slides, and did a bit of ventriloquism as his contribution to the act. Johnson was primarily a ragtime piano player, but he had a funny face. He was doing a twoact in smalltime vaudeville with a girl named Ruby Wallace. Both the boys had had serious musical ambitions. Olsen's pattern, in his boyhood days in Peru (pronounced Peeru), Indiana, had been Jan Kubelik, the Czech violinist. Johnson had gone out into the world from Englewood, Illinois, to eclipse Paderewski. Olsen's parents were born in Norway, Johnson's in Sweden. Chic and Ole immediately saw each other as great men. “I knew as soon as I saw him that Ole was a genius,” Johnson, the less articulate, says today. “He wore high yellow bulldog shoes that buttoned up the sides, and he was the first man I ever heard imitate a busy signal on the telephone. I knew I had to have him as a partner.” Olsen experienced a similar recognition of destiny. “Chic had the most powerful right hand I ever heard on a piano,” he says reverently. They could not sever their old associations right away, but they played a few dates together at the North American Cafe on State Street—violin, piano, ventriloquism, and harmony. They played together the following season and got a booking on the Pantages time. History does not record what became of Ruby Wallace or of Ole's three associates of the College Four.
Pantages shows were booked intact, a combination of five acts traveling together all season. Two of the four acts that traveled with Olsen and Johnson in their first year together were Victor Moore and Emma Littlefield, and William Gaxton and Anna Laughlin. A vaudeville act in those days grew gradually, the way a folk play or a legend does; it was not a static thing, like a play that a man writes on a typewriter. After the manner of a human body, it discarded dead cells and built up new ones. The more it was apparently the same thing, the more it changed. An act started with half a dozen gags; at the end of the first season, a couple of them might be dropped in favor of some experimental material. Some acts, while retaining their basic characters, changed all their material in the course of a few years. In others, one particularly strong comic bit would stay in for twenty or thirty years and become a kind of trademark. Olsen and Johnson still do a ventriloquist bit that was in their first act in vaudeville—the interlude in which Johnson sits on Olsen's knee. They dropped it for about fifteen years, then picked it up when Charlie McCarthy brought ventriloquism back. In their first act on the Pantages time, the curtain rose with Johnson seated at the piano, on which there was a telephone. The telephone rang, and Johnson, answering it, said, “Mr. Olsen? Is there a Mr. Olsen in the house?” Olsen entered and picked up the telephone. When he picked it up, the cord dangled free, and the audience could see that it was not connected.