Abstract
The early morning hours of September 27, 1937, were peaceful and quiet as the residents of East Cleveland slept, unaware of the mischief about to unfold. In the first hours of that Friday morning, a large, dark sedan crept up East 86th Street toward the north side of the Play House. A fuse was lit. Someone hurled a small object over the theatre’s brick edifice, and the car sped away. The dynamite exploded at approximately 2:30 a.m., ripping a four-foot hole in the roof of the scene shop, shattering windows of nearby buildings and waking residents throughout the neighborhood, including some reports that the blast was heard over ten miles away in Shaker Heights.1 The Play House’s ten-year-old home was under attack.
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Notes
John Vacha, Showtime in Cleveland (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 157.
Chloe Warner Oldenburg, Leaps of Faith: History of the Play House, 1915–1980 (Cleveland, OH: Published by the author, 1985), 49.
William F. McDermott, “The Play House,” Theatre Guild Magazine, vol. 7, no. 12 (September 1930), 44.
C. M. Streator, “What Readers Think of the Play House and Critics,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), January 24, 1932, 40.
Mildred Chadsey, ed., The Cleveland Year Book 1921 (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Foundation, 1921), 279.
Andrew Dawson, “Strikes in the Motion Picture Industry,” The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, edited by Aaron Brener, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009), 654;
David Witwer, Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 60–1.
William Benjamin Clark Jr., A History of the Play House, 1936–1968 (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1968), 257; McDermott, “McDermott on Bombs.” The $14,800 total reflects McDermott’s assertion that the first three union men are paid $75 a week and the remaining two are paid $72.50 a week.
Richard Christiansen, A Theatre of Our Own (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 64; “Boston Athenaeum Theatre History,” Proprietors of the Boston Athenaeum, http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/node/224 (accessed April 1, 2012);
Gilmor Brown, “A Dream on a Dime,” Ten Talents in the American Theatre, edited by David H. Stevens (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 165;
Howard Taubman, The Making of the American Theatre (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), 150.
“Must Broadway Take a Back Seat?” Literary Digest, vol. 114, no. 7 (August 13, 1932), 14–15; Clarence Arthur Percy, The Work of the Little Theatres (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1933), 27–47.
Joseph Wesley Zeigler, Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 109; Christiansen, 147–8.
Kenneth Macgowan, Footlights across America: Toward a National Theater (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 103.
Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 259, 274.
Brian M. Harvard, “National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp.,” The Encyclopedia of the United States Constitution, edited by David Andrew Schultz (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 496–7.
Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36.
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Christopher R. Martin, “The News Media and Strikes,” The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, edited by Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009), 46.
George Seldes, Lords of the Press (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1941), p. 400.
“Labor Union’s Rights: High School Pupils Will Settle One Point Tonight,” Plain Dealer, January 20, 1905, 10; Delos Franklin Wilcox, Analysis of the Electric Railway Problem (New York: published by the author, 1921), 543–4.
Alexander C. Brown, “What the Chamber of Commerce Can Do in Promoting Better Industrial Relations in a Community,” Constructive Experiments in Industrial Cooperation between Employers and Employees (New York: Academy of Political Science in the City of New York), vol. 9, no. 4 (January 1922): 213–4, 216–7; “Blood Was Shed,” The Spokesman Review (Spokane, WA), August 2, 1896, 1;
Anthony T. Kronman, History of the Yale Law School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 114–5; “Back at Foundry Today,” Plain Dealer, May 7, 1935, 14; “Hanna, Leonard C. Jr.,” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, 486; “Advertisement—Annual Report of the M.A. Hanna Company,” Plain Dealer, February 19, 1933, 22.
Philip Dray, There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 8.
Play House Programs, “The Play House—October 1, 1937,” 15, CPH Archives (accessed June 18, 2012).
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© 2014 Jeffrey Ullom
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Ullom, J. (2014). Catch These Vandals!. In: America’s First Regional Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394354_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394354_5
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