Great grandma was one of a kind
This is personal.
At my father’s funeral in 1991 a man introduced himself to me with a surprising revelation: “I knew your great grandmother.”
As a youngster, Bill Calhoun, my dad’s chum, delivered the Connellsville Courier. One of his stops was the Soisson Theater. The Crawford Street establishment was managed by my great grandmother – my dad’s paternal grandmother – May Robbins, a former vaudeville performer and the mother of songwriter Hughie Cannon, famous in his day for “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.”
Outside of my family, I had never met anyone who knew May. She died in 1932 or 1933. Either out of neglect, familiar discord, or simply because the family didn’t have the cash in those Great Depression years, her grave, in Connellsville’s Hill Grove Cemetery, is unmarked.
My great grandmother, Bill Calhoun told me, was a fashion plate, in an old-fashioned sort of way. Climbing the stairway (after passing the large mural of May in the theater lobby), Bill would encounter the matriarch of the Soisson in her second floor office, dressed to the nines in a long full skirt and starched blouse fastened at the neck by a polished stick pin. May exuded “celebrity” vibes, Bill Calhoun said.
For years, she traveled the vaudeville circuit – first as May Cannon, “Irish comedienne, song and dancing soubrette,” as one of her advertising cards proclaims, then as May Cannon Robbins, in the role for which she was most famous, “Little Trixie,” a theatrical vehicle she purchased with her third and final husband, Fred Robbins.
The fact that she was married three times suggests something of her character: independent, perhaps a bit heedless, headstrong, a romantic, ambitious, impatient, flirtatious.
For a time, she was under contract to Benjamin Franklin Keith. Keith owned vaudeville houses throughout the East, including in New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The Keith circuit was a powerhouse, helping to propel vaudeville into an American institution.
Tony Pastor was another influential and famous vaudeville impresario. May worked for him, too.
A now-fading studio photograph snapped in Wichita, Kansas, shows a young May with a cigarette dangling between her fingers. My great grandmother lived robustly, or so it seems.
Earlier, I mentioned familial discord. For reasons never fully explained to me, May and her daughter-in-law – my grandmother Edna Robbins – didn’t get along. I don’t know how long this was the case. My dad told me that his father, Louis Robbins, would have to sneak out of the house to visit his mother. Things were that bad.
The family schism may have stemmed from an episode involving my Uncle Bob. Bob, several years older than his brother Bill (my dad), evidently spent part of his youth hanging out among show business types.
One of these “types,” a magician, invited the youngster to join his act. In my dad’s telling, Edna put her foot down. She would not have her middle son running all over the country, from one stage to another, from one city to another, spending time in backstage corridors with fancy show girls, fast talking agents, and an unknown number of rummies, rogues, and rowdies.
I seem to remember my dad suggesting that Bob was not averse to misusing his youth in this fashion. But his mother said no. Instead, Bob grew into a steady, sober, church-going, adult grocery store owner. Robbins Market was a mainstay of Connellsville’s Morrell Avenue for years and years.
In addition to managing theaters in Connellsville, May also owned a billboard advertising company. My great grandmother’s most important role, however, may have been as the mother of ragtime’s Hughie Cannon.
In this role, she might be judged a failure. A whirlwind early in life, Hughie died broke and alone at a Toledo, Ohio, infirmary in 1912, his life dissipated by alcohol and drug addiction. He was not yet 40 years old.
“I started drinking when I was 16,” Hughie told a reporter. The result was “20 black, nasty, sick years.”
My dad told me that May was buried next to Hughie, whose headstone bears the legend, “Bill Bailey.” I will have to try to find it. I’ve seen it once or twice. It’s on a hillside. The cemetery has many hillsides. I’m not sure which one.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He is the author of “JFK Rising” and “Troubled Times.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.