NED WAYBURN—AN INSPIRATION
By Carleton B. Case
EVERY line of endeavor has its outstanding leaders. The men and women who do great things in a grand way ever command our admiration. We like to hear about their public careers and the intimate side of their exceptional lives is of decided interest to us. This I think is especially true where the noted ones are among our public entertainers, the player-folk, who bring so much joy and happiness into the world out of nothing—creators of innocent pleasure.
Long years before this was penned, and while yet my locks were innocent of the whiteness that now typifies my years, I was closely associated with the family of Wayburn. I was a man in Chicago when Ned Wayburn was a boy in the same city, starting on what was destined to become a truly remarkable career.
I know Ned Wayburn well. He is a king and a thoroughbred, as man or as manager, and to know him is to esteem him.
His fame is peculiar in that it is based so largely[28]on the success of other people—the actors and dancers whom he has discovered or directed and so helped to become stars of the first magnitude. To name them by hundreds is easy; to number all who are approaching stardom or who, now well placed on the professional stage, have materially profited by his aid and instruction, will go into the thousands. Surely such a record of achievement is ample cause for pride.
Ned Wayburn possesses an almost uncanny faculty of discerning latent talent in the line of his profession. You may not know one dance step from another, yet his discerning eye will detect a possibility for you in some branch of the dancing art that results will later prove as correct as they are surprising to yourself.
I have heard him tell of Evelyn Law, that when she first came to the studio she exhibited a tap and step dance as her specialty.