Spooky, rainy, night for the final Haunted on Broad of 2020. Here a written version of the story I told...
Exiled From Light
Don’t you love our Town Green? Have you ever walked through here late at night or even real early before sunrise? Did you hear or see anything ...unusual?
Late on quiet nights, when traffic noise is gone or distant, especially those new moon nights when the artificial lighting spreads a dome of twilight above and casts eerie shadows around the riverbank, sometimes weeping is heard here, ... and sometimes, some say sarcastic laughs. They say furtive figures can be glimsped slipping along the riverbank as if hiding from the light.
Perhaps it is as Shakespeare discribed them:
... “Ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop(ing) home to churchyards. Damnèd spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone,
For fear lest day should look their shames upon.
They willfully themselves exiled from light,
And must forever consort with black-browed night.
- Robin, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2
Some say you might see Bertha Jones, or hear her grieving her loss, others declere she more likely will be celebrating her revenge and-- forever consorting with “black-browed night”.
Now y’all know the Rome Shakespeare Festival has been performing here on the Town Green the last few years. Rome folks are right proud of it. Sheila and I have really enjoyed seeing some of those open air plays right here in the heart of our little city including A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our daughter Lillian played the fiece little Hermia. Shakespeare uses spirits of the dead in his plays and the excerpt I read is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But live open air theater is not new to Rome and certainly not to this location. And Shakespeare’s ghosts are not the only ones that have made themselves visible and made themselves heard hereabouts.
Bertha Jones' daddy, John, was a man with an entreprenurial spirit. You’ll find his name in the city directories all the way back to the 1880s first as a clerk living and working on Broad Street. Later a traveling salesman, married to Lizzie raising kids over my way on Avenue A. Then on Rome’s classiest street, Fourth Avenue, and managing the Novelty Gum Co. on Broad.
But for our story let me take you back just 110 years to 1910 when John already runs the Elite Theater on Broad -- with the whole family pitching in --Lizzie, Little John Jr. and the teenagers Cecil and Bertha, and opens a grand new companion theater right here; The Airdome. And what a theater: 1200 seats, the largest in town. A raked -- slanted -- floor and at the low river end, raised four feet off the floor, a large stage. The building looks a lot like a camp meeting tabernacle with a high roof and a long center raised ridge with high windows to expel the heat. The sides of the building were open half way up to provode maximum ventilation. Canvas curtains along the sides could be raised or lowered against the elements.
Comedy and musical vaudeville shows came and went all that first late spring and summer like the locally popular Alley Comedy Club. There was special entertainment between acts and sometimes a couple of reels of silent movies. John’s beautiful and talented teenaged daughter Bertha played the piano for the movies, and sometimes for the vaudeville song and dance acts that performed there.
One of those troupes in late summer included Sam Newman, a dapper twenty-year-old who commanded the stage whenever he stepped on to it. He had a strong baritone singing voice and was a master of the scandalous new ragtime dances like the Texas Tommy and the Turkey Trot. Bertha from her seat on the piano bench, was stricken by his good looks and the attention he gave her as she played the piano for rehearsals. It wasn’t long before he had found time to teach the dances to his new young friend, and not much longer before he had stolen some kisses back stage, and they had taken a few walks right along here... where the steam donkey hoisted cargo from the riverboat wharf up the ramp cut into the steep bank of the river to the waiting railroad cars. Bertha was head over heels for Sam. Sam was head over heels , too --- for anyone in a skirt. That included several of the dancers in the troupe, like wild and wildly popular Eva Erwin.
Some folks say Bertha caught Sam and Eva in a passionate embrace back stage just before the final performance and claim that as a motive for what happened next. Later that September evening, when the stage had been struck and most of the vaudeville troupe had headed up Broad to the Choice House Hotel --- where the Forrest is now --- before leaving Rome for the next town on their tour. There was Bertha again, walking across the tracks with Sam and along the boardwalk above the steam donkey chute. Bertha later explained that Sam was demonstrating some dance steps when he tripped; others believed he might have been dancing but they doubted he tripped. Somehow he ended up with his head cracked open on a skid of the Steam Donkey 15 feet below that boardwalk.
Well, John Jones was no longer associated with the Airdome by the time the 1913 city directory came out. He had moved on to automobile sales. Bertha never married. And folks say she often walked this riverbank, even into old age, crying say some, other say she was laughing. And though she’s buried on Myrtle Hill now, walk this way after midnight or before dawn on a quiet night and maybe you’ll see a figure here, and maybe you’ll hear the weeping... or a maybe your hear the cruel laugh of a spirit exiled from light....
(Copyright 2020, Terrell Shaw)
