“A brief rest at home and then I got a job with the Reed and West Minstrels as one of the boys in a quartet. Even under the burnt cork the eye of my father found me again, and again I was fired for being no good. Then I woke up and, to get away from the parental influence, joined out with the medicine show with a boy chum. The towns the “Vigor of Life’ visited were too small to have theatres, so we played in hotel dining rooms, lodge halls and vacant lots. When I was not edifying the audience with my boyish baritone, I was down through the crowd selling ‘Bitters.’ We got a rake-off for every bottle we sold, but trade was none too good for in some distant mountain town the ‘Bitters’ lost their bite and the ‘Vigor of Life’ fluttered and went over the Great Divide, and I had to write home for money enough to get back to San Francisco.” — George Beban Sr.
Source: Kenneth McGaffey (1918)
“You do not have to have hairbreadth escapes or sensational stories to make a hit in pictures. You can take a simple little story and if it is human – if it has the personal feeling in it – the average photoplay theatre patron will like it just has well as some big, thundering drama with a lot of battle scenes and such like. Give your audiences something they can feel and it will do just as well as some, and a great deal better than many of the pictures now shown.” — George Beban Sr.
Source: Kenneth McGaffey (1918)
