From Dave Price

I just learned today of the recent death of Billy Choate, operator of Bisbee's Comedians, the next-to-the-last Rep Show (Jimmy Davis' Schaffner Players being the last). Rep shows used to bill too. Here's a snapshot I took in 1958 of the Bisbee advance truck. By then they just distributed handbills, tacked a few pole cards and made announcements form the sound truck, but in an earlier day they had posted the barns and lithographed the windows. I believe I posted the very last daubs for rep show in the country. In 1966 Billy booked the show for an all-summer stand at a resort in Kentucky called Park Mammoth Resort. He figured that between the tourists and the natives who remembered his show from the past, he would have enough business to sit on the one lot all year. Unfortunately the people just didn't come and the show closed in mid-summer, never to troupe again. This resort had large metal signboards all over that part of Kentucky and Billy squared them for posting. He had some nice three-sheets printed up and called me to come up and work for one weekend, driving all over southern Kentucky posting these three-sheets on these metal signs and on any barns, sheds or fences I could find. I believe there were also half-sheet flat dates that I put up where I could. Anyway, the show died that year and since the Schaffer show had also stopped posiing large paper, I'm pretty sure I posted the last. Jimmy held out for a few more years but the Rep Show soon became a memory. Billy later wrote a nice book about his life, having lived most of it in Rep. The last time I saw Jimmy Davis, he had the Schaffer Show set up at the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis in the early 1970's. Mary Jane and I were phoning a town for Bill English nearby, so we drove over on a Sunday and visited Jimmy. Part of his deal with the fair was that he would motor scooter around the grounds greeting people. He wore a big ovesized badge reading "Cheif of Goodwill". We were having a coke at a sit-down joint when a lady came up to him and said "I bet you know Sadie Myers!" When Jimmy replied in the negative, the lady continued, "Why she works at the big downtown Goodwill store in Milwaukee!". And they think we're funny! Dave