Dan Mason: From Vaudeville to Broadway to the Silent Screen

by Joseph P. Eckhardt

In a career that spanned 57 years, Dan Mason (1853-1929) went from performing German dialect routines in variety halls to appearing in Broadway musicals to playing character roles in silent films. Along the way he also wrote, produced, directed and starred in his own plays. Best remembered for his role as the irascible "Skipper" in the Toonerville Trolley silent comedies, Mason created dozens of unique and colorful characters on stage and screen. This first-ever biography of the American comedian explores the roots of his craft and the challenges he faced navigating the rapidly changing world of popular entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Joseph P. Eckhardt, Emeritus Professor of History at Montgomery County Community College, in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, taught history and art history from 1968 until his retirement in 2007. His first book, The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer, Siegmund Lubin, was published in 1997. He has also published several articles on the early film industry both in the U.S. and Europe. Eckhardt’s film research led to the foundation of the Betzwood Film Archive at MCCC. He also lectured on the Philadelphia area’s silent film industry, occasionally staging recreations of early Nickelodeon shows with movies, songs, lantern slides, narration, and sound effects.

Following his retirement from teaching, Eckhardt began work on an in-depth study of American history painter, William T. Trego. His biography of this nearly forgotten artist, So Bravely and So Well: The Life and Art of William T. Trego, accompanied by an online catalogue raisonné, was published in 2011 in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition of Trego’s work that Eckhardt curated at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Eckhardt’s interest in Wilna Hervey began as a consequence of seeing her performances as “The Powerful Katrinka” in the Toonerville Trolley comedies he acquired for the Betzwood Film Archive. As further research into her life and subsequent career revealed the details of her extraordinary story, he decided that she and her life companion, Nan Mason, deserved to be better known. The result was Living Large: Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason.

Eckhardt's most recent work is a spin off from and prequel to Living Large--Dan Mason: From Vaudeville to Broadway to the Silent Screen.

Reviews

[Gary Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

SHOW BUSINESS MUST-READ

Dan Mason, the hero of historian Joseph Eckhardt’s new biography, was a kid who started doing penny theatricals in a barn in Syracuse in the 1860’s and couldn’t quit putting on shows until he had delighted audiences on vaudeville, Broadway, and the silver screen.

Mason’s acting life is a silver screen story itself, beginning with his running at age 19 to catch the train to join the traveling show that came through town and liked his song and dance stuff enough to welcome him aboard – if his mother approved. From that day in 1872 Mason spent years as a literal “trouper,” traveling the nation to play low-price hurly-burlies and serious drama as well, so in-demand that he rarely had a week without work singing, dancing, and making people laugh, often in shows he wrote and produced as well.

Eckhardt’s Mason was a character actor and a real character, one of the troupers who make theater and movies work for stars and audiences alike. He was a player of real people – a trolley conductor, a worried uncle, a sidekick who gets the big guy into and out of trouble, someone the audience can get close to. He began as a German dialect comic, and one of his last roles was as a janitor providing comic relief in a heavy “part talkie” film about murder and deceit. It was 1928 and the crash was coming, and it seems so right for Mason’s career – after working almost to the day of his old-age death – to end as an Everyman who makes people smile in a difficult world.

Joseph Eckhardt is a historian and in his Dan Mason book he gives us what all good histories give: insight in how we got where we are. The path to Panavision, multiplex, television, and streamed entertainment is the path Dan Mason helped to shape when he ran to catch that train from Syracuse to join Washburn’s Last Sensation and entertain America. From there the show went on and on for Dan Mason, and this elegantly-written saga will take you back to relive the early days of American show business, up close with one of the real troupers who made it work and thrive, as we all must, through changing times. This book was a pleasure to read, and I always looked forward to getting back to its hero, its world, and its story.

And if you read this book and don’t want the stories of the early movie business to stop, a wonderful complement is available in author Eckhardt’s Living Large: Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason.

[Marjorie DeAngelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eckhardt's work on Dan Mason, a giant of early vaudeville and theatre, at first outside and even by gas lamp and early movies, is meticulously researched! He has detailed Mason's astounding body of work, stretching from the early 1870's to the late 1920's. Mason seems at times almost like a magician, turning himself from a vaudeville performer to a movie star at will, sometimes juggling both - whatever it took to support himself and his family. He was a master of everything - not only a performer, but finding his own costumes, doing make-up, advertising, whatever! Nothing was considered below him. The financial struggles of these early performers is perfectly illustrated in Mason's life. His trials were many, both professional and personal - he endured the death of two young sons and a wife within a very short time, all the while continuing to work. He led an often grueling life shifting from the east to the west coast often by train as if it was nothing. He lived through WWI as if it was just another obstacle among the long line he lived through, ever busy trying to make a living for himself and his family, a responsibility he never laid down until death took it from him.

According to Eckhardt, this incredible work horse was ever reinventing and improving himself and his craft, his work in Hollywood reaching its peak when he was 72 years old! Wow! The photos in the book are priceless treasures, making the story come alive in yet another way. And the appendix called "Dan Mason, Raconteur" is not to be missed for the rich short stories and quotations. And, of course, Eckhardt's book "Living Large" about Dan's daughter Nan and her partner is a logical next read if you haven't already allowed yourself the pleasure!