I cannot think of Mr King without thinking of this gimmick he had for paying his winter expenses. He would run ads in certain magazines and sell these out of the same post office box in Macon that he used to sell Beatty-Cole season route sheets. They were nothing more than small pieces of sheet latex meant to cushion dental plates.
I used to have two of these boxes but when Tom Parkinson wrote such a terrific obit for the good doctor, I gave one of them to him and he seemed very pleased to get this souvenir of his old friend. Of course he recalled them at once.
Go back in the old Bandwagons and look for that piece. For one thing Tom told of Mr King's bringing back some of the old time features like a street parade and a balloon ascension and that he had sometimes mentioned in his Billboard ads that he could place a flageolet player long after there was no one out there to respond.
Also Tom pointed out that some of the old timers called Mr King "Phineas" in a thinly veiled display of admiration. I can remember Arnold Maley calling him that. Frank McClosky always just called him "Floyd." I never had the nerve to call him anything but Mr King. |
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SPOKE TO THE MAN ONE TIME IN MY LIFETIME. HE HAD MARSHALL GREEN CONTRACTING PRESS(ON THE KING BROS-COLE SHOW, IN THE SEVENTIES.
MARSHALL, WAS A VERY GOOD FRIEND OF MINE, AND MR. KING CALLED ME, ONE DAY, TRYING TO GET A HOLD OF MARSHALL.
DON'T ASK, HOW HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, AS I COULDN'T TELL YOU, IF MY LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.
REMEMBER, THIS WAS BEFORE THERE WERE ANY CELL PHONES, IN USE.
the more i hear about things like this, the more i realize what a great showman mr king was! he could always come up with a solution for any problem except how to keep his own show on the road as a money-making show -- possibly because he often gave the people more show than necessary.
like you, i never called him anything but mr king. and he never said anything like "call me floyd" almost everyone who worked with him or for him called him mr king unless it was phineas or something like that. he always referred to himself as "the old man" -- when i was doing press for beatty-cole in new orleans and he was at the same hotel, he would often call at 3 or 4 am and ask me to go across the street to get a coca-cola for "the old man." i don't know when he slept but i knew that anytime i brought his coke to him, i could count on learning some more tidbits from his vast storehouse of knowledge. i often tell people i got my masters degeree in circus press from the floyd king university
jim -- i'm not at all surprised at your story. mr king could always find anybody anytime he needed them. he could get unlisted or unpublished numbers or any other information he needed anytime he needed it. he always knew everything that was going on with every show in the country. the man was absolutely amazing.
if he were still around, he'd find a way to fix the current problems our business has. god only knows how he would handle peta but he would have had them begging for mercy
A flageolot, by the way, is a small wind instrument similar to a flute, but with a mouthpiece at one end. Flageolots figure in several of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas. In Act II of THE SORCERER, the village vicar Dr. Daly accompanies himself on one while singing his haunting song “Oh, my voice is sad and low.” (For the initial run of THE SORCERER, Rutland Barrington, who created the role of the vicar, actually learned how to play a flageolet.) In IOLANTHE, the shepherd Strephon and later the shepherdess Phyllis both are playing flageolots when they make their initial entrances.
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