Family matters
It’s distressing when family members are at each others’ throats, or are so indifferent to one another they fall out of touch. It’s especially disheartening this time of year. The holidays, among other things, are about family.
All of this, plus a display at a local restaurant, got me to thinking about my great grandmother, a Connellsville businesswoman and showbiz maven by the name of May Robbins.
We don’t know what became of “Gee,” as my dad called his grandmother. I mean, we know about her life. She was semi-famous. We know when and where she died. But we don’t know where she is. Literally. We don’t know where’s she buried. Not exactly, anyway.
No flowers for Gee. Not on Christmas or any other time of the year. It may have been planned that way.
Sometime in the early- to mid-’60s, my aunt Dorothy Coughenour offered to hand over May’s trunk to me. I declined. (What can I say? I was a teenager.)
The trunk, I recall my aunt saying, was filled with show business treasures. There were costumes and sheet music, maybe even original notes for the song, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home,” composed by May’s son Hughie Cannon, my great-uncle.
I suspect it wouldn’t have been surprising to uncover show business paraphernalia from May’s years in Connellsville, when she and third husband Fred Robbins managed an assortment of local theaters.
One was the Soisson, on West Crawford Avenue. In later years, the theater, which began as a vaudeville house, was converted into a bank building. One day, decades ago now, I strolled inside to check the place out. Walking outside to the back of the building I discovered the outlines of the old theater, principally its curved roof and side (stage) doors.
I thought of my great grandmother exiting one of the doors on a turn-of-the-century night, after the last curtain had rung down, her long, full skirt brushing the ground.
May was an entertainer practically her entire life. For years, she portrayed a character known as Little Trixie. That was also the name of the road show she starred in. It played everywhere in the latter half of the 19th century — Down South, The Midwest, New England.
(There’s a studio photo of May taken in Wichita, Kansas, in which a cigarette can be seen dangling from her fingers. She is wearing britches. May was a woman ahead of her time.)
A newspaper story at the time of her death recounted her playing on the same bill as the renowned comedy duo of Weber and Fields. She probably knew Tony Pastor, the impresario of vaudeville in New York City. A John Cannon managed Pastor’s Broadway showplace. Mary’s first husband was named John Cannon.
May died on April 21, 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. Services were at Trinity Lutheran Church in Connellsville; burial was at Hill Grove Cemetery.
Her son Hughie and husband Fred are buried at Hill Grove. Between them is room for another vault. All things being equal, that’s where May is. But there is no marker, no headstone. Just a bare patch of earth.
Why? One can suppose it was the Depression. Money was short. Another more vengeful explanation was May’s disputed role in the family. It appears she and my grandmother Edna — her daughter-in-law — did not hit it off.
In all probability, Edna was way more straitlaced than May, who married three times. Maybe Edna objected to the lure of show business which May personified. My dad used to tell a story involving his brother Bob. It seems a magician playing one of May’s Connellsville theaters proposed that Bob hit the vaudeville circuit with him. Bob would be part of the act.
There was evidently quite a row in the family about whether Bob, who was just a kid, should go or stay in Connellsville with his mother and father and four siblings. He stayed.
Relatives said relations were so strained between May and Edna that my grandfather Louis had to sneak out of the house to see his mother.
It was a sad state of affairs, and it may have ended up costing May a last, earthly reminder of where she takes her eternal rest.
As for the restaurant display: That would be at the nonprofit Connellsville Canteen on West Crawford Avenue. In addition to hundreds of World War II photos on the walls, there’s a small display featuring Hughie Cannon.
The Canteen is near the old Soisson Theater building. I’m supposing May would have been proud of Hughie’s display. She loved dat man.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.