Harriet Quimby knew Arnold Genthe, and, appreciating her rare beauty, Mr. Genthe said he would make her photos for window display for nothing. Oscar Mauer did the same for me, gratis. Rugs and furniture we borrowed, and the costumes by advertising in the program, we rented cheaply.
We understood only this much of politics: Jimmy Phelan, our Mayor (afterwards Senator James H. Phelan) was a very wealthy man, charitably disposed, and one day we summoned up sufficient courage to tell him our trouble. Most attentively and respectfully he heard us, and without a moment’s hesitation gave us the twenty.
So we gave the recital. We sold enough tickets to pay the Homer Henleys, but not enough to pay the debt to Mr. Phelan. He’s never been paid these many years though I’ve thought of doing it often, and will do it some day.
However, the critics came and they gave us good notices, but the recital didn’t seem to put much of a dent in our careers. Harriet Quimby soon achieved New York via The Sunset Magazine. In New York she “caught on,” and became dramatic critic on Leslie’s Weekly.
The honor of being the first woman in America to receive an aviator’s license became hers, as also that of being the first woman to pilot a monoplane across the English Channel. That was in the spring of 1912, a few months before her death while flying over Boston Harbor.
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Mission Street, near Third, was in that unique section called South-of-the-Slot. The character of the community was such, that to reside there, or even to admit of knowing residents there meant complete loss of social prestige. Mission Street, which was once the old road that led over blue and yellow lupin-covered hills out to the Mission Dolores of the Spanish Fathers, and was later the place where the elegantly costumed descendants of the forty-niners who had struck pay dirt (and kept it) strolled, held, at the time of which I speak, no reminder of its departed glory except the great romantic old Grand Opera House, which, amid second-hand stores, pawn-shops, cheap restaurants, and saloons, languished in lonely grandeur.
Once in my young life Richard Mansfield played there; Henry Irving and Ellen Terry gave a week of Shakespearean repertoire; Weber and Fields came from New York for the first time and gave their show, but failed. San Franciscans thought that Kolb and Dill, Barney Bernard, and Georgie O’Ramey, who held forth nightly at Fischer’s Music Hall, were just as good.
At the time of the earthquake a grand opera company headed by Caruso was singing there. Between traveling luminaries, lesser lights glimmered on the historic old stage. And for a long time, when the theatre was called Morosco’s Grand Opera House, ten, twenty, and thirty blood-and-thunder melodrama held the boards.
At this stage in its career, and hardly one year before the great disaster, a young actor who called himself Lawrence Griffith was heading toward the Coast in a show called “Miss Petticoats.” Katherine Osterman was the star. The company stranded in San Francisco.