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Page 4   The Show-Down 


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Muggin' in Cleveland's Green Pastures
With BUD DOUGLASS
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It seems funny that Green Pastures should be getting greener in the fall of the year when everything else is drying up and withering away. Not so up here in Harlem, Cleveland, Ohio. It's too bad that this is written before the American Legion Convention gets here as I think I will have quite a lot to tell after the boys are gone. Anyway by the time you see this they will have been and went.

Gracing the Cedar Gardens in the heart of Green Pastures we have none other than Baron Lee. The Baron dropped in on us last week coming into the spot after Jean Calloway and her boys pulled. The Baron is making plans for the future and he intends to again have a band behind him. He is going to pick four or five good orchestra boys while he is here and when he hits into a Big Apple in January he will have things pretty well lined up. His always welcome blackface skit went over well with the patrons here. 

The Show-Down has been getting plenty of favorable publicity in Cleveland through the column of the Cleveland Call and Post, local rag that yours truly has the job of scratching theatricals for. Ted Yates is our New York man and he is writing for us exclusively. I think that he is to have an article in this issue of the Show-Down so you just might look for it. Anyway Ted is a mighty nice boy.

A new Night Club has opened to grace my ever-Green Ps. It is the Coconut Grove undoubtedly named after the famous Coconut Grove. Run strictly by Sepia it is taking its place and it is hoped will cramp the style of some of the Ofay spots.

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GIRL ON THE COVER-ETHEL WATERS

Chance started America's greatest actress skyrocketing to stardom.

It was in the guise of first prize in an amateur singing contest in a cafe on Hallowe'en night, that was her sixteenth bithday, that got her started as a singer. Soon after her triumph in the amateur contest, young Ethel acquired a manager, who got her a job in a road show at twenty-five dollars a week.

"My first engagement was in the old Lincoln Theater, Baltimore, Maryland, and my knees were so shaky when it was my time to go on the stage, that I had to sit on a chair to do my song," tells Ethel.

The song was "St. Louis Blues" and the audience liked it and howled for more, but she didn't hear the ovation.

Soon after her birth in Chester, Pennsylvania, her father died and her mother married again, leaving the infant Ethel to be brought up by her maternal grandmother. At the famous Plantation Club, at Broadway and 50th Street, she got her first break in 1925. One of the chorus girls in the floor show was Josephine Baker, who went to Paris to become famous herself, and of whom Miss Waters did a hilarious impersonation in "As Thousands Cheer."

About this time she began making phonograph records and quickly gained an international following that has grown from year to year. After appearing in a number of musicals, including "Africana," "Blackbirds," "Rhapsody in Black," Miss Waters starred in a long series of radio programs. In 1933, after her triumph at the New York Cotton Club, where she introduced the song hit, "Stormy Weather," to the nation, she was featured in "As Thousands Cheer," playing in it for more than a year and a half in New York and on tour without missing a single performance. Last season she was the outstanding feature of "At Home Abroad." Miss Waters now contemplates her own show which she plans to take to the West Coast, where several motion picture offers await her.


Scored in Pennsy
[[image- black and white photo of orchestra]]

[[caption]] Freddie Webster, diminitive orchestra leader of Cleveland, and his band have just recently completed a tour throughout the western end of Pennsylvania under the direction of the Climax Service Bureau of Cleveland.

While this orchestra may not be nationally known, in all spot they played they outdrew the big time orchestras that have played them recently. [[/caption]]

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