Cal Stewart, Your Uncle Josh: America's King of Rural Comedy

By Randy McNutt

An American recording icon of the early 1900s, Cal Stewart created the popular Uncle Josh Weathersby character; Joshs town, Punkin Center; and the many colorful characters who inhabited his fictional town from Way Down East. Stewarts recordings were among the bestselling of the period, and through his satire he showed life in a fast-changing world. The actor, singer, songwriter, and author performed across the nation with his Cal Stewart & Co. group, consisting of his wife, the Indiana violinist Hazel Gypsy Rossini Waugh, and her younger brother and sister. For millions, Cal Stewart was the king of rural comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462043477

Randy McNutt

Randy McNutt is a cultural historian and the author of twenty nonfiction books on regional history, the Civil War, travel, politics, vintage music, and fading Americana. Cal Stewart, reissued here, was his first book. A record collector, he lives in Hamilton, Ohio, with his wife, the writer Cheryl Bauer. He first learned of Uncle Josh when an elderly uncle played “Uncle Josh and the Honey Bees.”

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Cal Stewart’s America

2

Talking Machine Stories

3

The Age of Innocence

4

Imitators and Competitors

5

The Emperor of Rural Comedians

6

The Old Homestead

7

On the Road Again

8

Punkin Center Days

9

Uncle Josh vs. Mr. Edison

10

Josh and Nancy Make a Record

11

Mysteries of Josh and Cal

12

Uncle Josh Falls in Love

13

The Hoosier Connection

14

All in the Family

15

When America Laughed

16

The Death of Josh

17

Return to Tipton

18

Josh’s Comedic Legacy

19

The Last Days of Punkin Center

The Life and Times of Cal Stewart

The Punkin Center Cyclopedium

The Punkin Center Anthology

Cal Stewart

Cal Stewart’s Monologues and Songs

The Cal Stewart Discography

Cal Stewart’s Cylinder Recordings

Cal Stewart’s Disc Records

Cal Stewart’s Last Recordings

Bibliography

About the Author

MUSIC INDUSTRY HISTORIES BY RANDY MCNUTT

Talking Machine Madness: The Story of America’s Early Phonograph Shows (with Cheryl Bauer)

We Wanna Boogie: An Illustrated History of the American Rockabilly Movement

Little Labels—Big Sound: Independent Record Companies and the Rise of American Music (with Rick Kennedy)

Too Hot to Handle: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Recording Studios of the Twentieth Century

Guitar Towns: A Journey to the Crossroads of Rock ‘n’ Roll

The Cincinnati Sound

King Records of Cincinnati

AS CONTRIBUTOR

Shreveport Sounds in Black and White

Rockabilly: The Twang Heard ’Round the World

To the memory of John A. Petty

It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life.

Grace Paley

We are interrelated in a small town, whether or not we’re related by blood. We know without thinking about it who owns what car; inhabitants of a town as small as a monastery learn to recognize each other’s footsteps in the hall. Story is a safety valve for people who live as intimately as that . . .

Kathleen Norris

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many people who helped with this book, especially the Reverend John A. Petty. Soon after discovering Cal Stewart’s recordings in the late 1970s, I called the gentle United Methodist minister and record collector in Candler, North Carolina, and asked questions about the actor. John generously took time to tell me more, and later supported my efforts to write a book. We became good friends.

Soon after the first and only edition of this book was published in 1981, he gave me a Stewart discography that he had compiled, and offered it for use in the next edition. I agreed to include it. Unfortunately, I took thirty years to revise the book.

When I first met him, John had been researching Stewart and his Uncle Josh character for many years. Mainly working alone, he helped rescue fading memories of Stewart’s career and attracted new and younger Josh enthusiasts by writing stories for antique phonograph publications. John also taped more than 100 rare Uncle Josh records and helped preserve the little information that still existed on the portly actor.

He also wrote letters to me and steered me to various catalogs of the Victor, Edison, and Columbia phonograph companies. He continued to update his early discography, first published in the New Amberola Graphic, and marvel at the works of old-time talking machine artists.

Thanks also go to my wife, the writer Cheryl Bauer, for editing the manuscript and encouraging me when things looked dark. In 1981, the year we married, we formed our own small press to publish our first Cal Stewart book, and in 1986 we reprinted Punkin Centre Stories, a collection of Josh’s rural monologues. Eighty-five years after Stewart wrote it, the book helped renew some interest in his career.

Most of all, I am grateful to my elderly uncle, Vernon Hornung of Hamilton, Ohio, for introducing me to Uncle Josh’s records. On many occasions he provided commentaries on the period, added perspective, and made me feel as though I had traveled back in time to interview an original Josh fan of 1919. Thank you, Uncle Vernon, for your love and thoughtfulness. Through your interest and personal observations, you educated me on America’s cultural history.

Other contributors to the original project included Marvin Pettit and Tim Johnson of Quality Publishing in Fairfield, Ohio. Both answered my many printing questions over the years, set type, and made halftones. I miss both friends for their knowledge and good humor.

I also thank the late Milford Fargo, a Rochester, New York, music professor who gave me the nice photograph of Stewart and Ada Jones at the recording horn and always took time to talk to me about pioneer recording artists; Patrick Feaster, a doctoral student at Indiana University in Bloomington, who provided some fascinating theories and sent leads to me in 2004; Al Michaud, a Tennessee genealogist who contributed several old newspaper stories about Uncle Josh and provided sound advice while I was rewriting this book; John Kiesewetter of The Cincinnati Enquirer; Larry G. Hudson, of Larry’s Audio Works and the Michigan Antique Phonograph Society; John B. Welch, of the Walter H. Baker Co. in Boston; Jennifer Lamoreaux, a managing editor of The Tipton Daily Tribune, for finding old stories; Tina McCarthy Vinces, CBS Records, New York, for sending me matrix numbers from the archives; Maxine Clouser, the Tipton County Circuit Court clerk; Leigh Darbee, the Indiana Historical Society; Leon Warner, the Tipton County Historical Society; and genealogist Marietta Henry, the former Tipton County extension agent who spent hours researching microfilms of newspapers and public records. When she—and many other Tipton people—willingly assisted me, I felt as though I had assembled a small army of Indiana contributors.

Unfortunately, John Petty, America’s foremost Cal Stewart authority, was killed while repairing his car on April 6, 1990. During thirty-four years of preaching, he had to move every six years to a new North Carolina congregation. Every time, he hauled his fragile 78-rpm record collection—all 20,000 copies—to the latest parsonage. He is missed.

We lost another Uncle Josh enthusiast on February 22, 2004, when Vernon Hornung died at age ninety-three. But my love for my favorite uncle can be felt within the pages of this book.

Finally, thanks to all the contributors left unmentioned, for they also helped me uncover the neglected story of Cal Stewart, America’s Uncle Josh.

Introduction

As a winter storm pummeled the city of Hamilton, Ohio, I was below ground, exploring the artifacts of my elderly uncle’s life. The unfinished basement in his 1920s bungalow was his personal museum, a dim place crammed with everything from antique fishing reels to corroded weathervanes. They were piled all over the room. All his life he had hoarded assorted junk and hand-me-downs, and they ended up there in the basement. As a child, the place fascinated me with its strange things and creaky sounds. My mind can still see them—an old orange soda pop thermometer, a set of yellowed cow’s teeth, a dozen black iron tobacco cutters, rusty horseshoes, a train-station clock, and a hornets’ nest—long since abandoned, thankfully.

Rummaging in a corner on that February night in 1977, I discovered an upright Brunswick crank phonograph, a fancily carved oak model that had been painted flat red. (In the 1920s, it must have been a flapper’s dream machine.) Next to it stood a pillar of dusty 78-rpm records. I glanced at one of the more oddly named selections; it was credited to someone named Cal Stewart, who performed as Uncle Josh. To a slightly bored twenty-something newspaper reporter, Vernon Hornung’s assorted collectibles looked like relics from another century—old, useless things, suitable for tomorrow’s trash. At first, I included the Uncle Josh records in this category. As I studied the paper label on one of the heavy records, however, I became intrigued by his stage name.

Who’s Uncle Josh? I asked.

My uncle smiled. He was a big name in his day. When I was young, my brother and I used to entertain ourselves for hours by listening to his records.

I pointed to the phonograph. Does that thing still work?

He examined the brittle platter, slapped it onto the red felt-covered turntable, and turned the metal crank. When the steel needle touched the record, a man’s tinny voice rose above the scratching to greet me with laughter. The title, Uncle Josh and the Honey Bees (identified only as a talking record), compelled me to continue listening—once, twice, three times.

This record was unlike any that I had ever heard. It was both American history and entertainment. It seemed that Stewart was talking to me personally about his fictional little town, Punkin Center, a place with stories, characters, issues, laughter, and sadness. While my own uncle regaled me with personal tales of listening to Uncle Josh records as a boy in an equally obscure small town named Dunlap, Ohio (fifteen miles west of Cincinnati), I sat down on the cold floor and paid close attention to the entertainment. I wanted more of this Uncle Josh.

Later, I searched local flea markets and found a few of his records. Then I graduated to collector auctions. Seeking more Cal Stewart over the next two decades, I visited libraries and Josh-related sites in Boston; Swanzey, New Hampshire; Indianapolis; Cincinnati; Tipton, Indiana; and even two rural Indiana communities named Punkin Center.

For a time, I actually felt that I was on Josh’s trail—cold as it had become by then. Some small-town business districts were left so unchanged that I imagined them ready to accommodate Stewart’s acting troupe from Indiana. I walked along old brick streets and saw some now-closed theaters—former stops on a loose network known as the Kerosene Circuit. The theaters provided paychecks for traveling actors and diversions for hard-working townspeople in the days before radio and television.

REGARDLESS OF WHERE I TRAVELED, I learned this simple truth: Finding fragments of Cal Stewart’s life and career and putting them together is like working on a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It will never be complete; questions will always confound us. Stewart preferred to discuss his fictional characters rather than himself. We practically know as much about them as we do their creator, who continues to live in dust-filled grooves of shellac records and wax cylinders. As I began to accumulate more information, I decided to write his story as an appreciation. If nothing more, I wanted to organize the facts that remain about the actor who entertained millions of people at the turn of the twentieth century. Slowly, my notes filled several file folders. I learned, for instance, that Stewart has been elected to the national Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York. Unfortunately, on the day I viewed his space on the group’s Web site, a large blank space existed under Stewart’s biography section. But that’s not surprising, for people tend to remember Stewart—if they bother to remember him at all—for some undetermined achievement. The truth is, he was a pioneer performer-songwriter, a forerunner of our modern ones.

His personal life—so colorful, he claimed—is filled with discrepancies. Did he really leave home at age twelve? Did he make up half the things he said about himself? Was he really an express messenger on a stagecoach out West? Did he operate a locomotive? Did he work with the famous actor Denman Thompson? Was he a friend of Mark Twain?

Even by using public documents and personal accounts, it is difficult to verify his claims. It is also difficult to uncover much personal information, including where Stewart lived at any one time. Too much time has elapsed, and Stewart hesitated to talk about himself except in the most superficial ways. He seemed to purposely hide clues from future researchers. Even his wife, close friends, and acting associates claimed they were not fully informed about his past. A business and music partner, Frederick Hager of Northport, New York, said of Stewart in a letter to writer Jim Walsh: Mark Twain was an old friend and, in later life, Will Rogers. That remark cost me a week’s work, and the results won’t even be included in the chapters on Stewart’s life. I can’t verify it, and I can’t ask Hager to elaborate. When I read The Autobiography of Mark Twain, written shortly before Samuel L. Clemens died in 1910, I found no mention of Cal Stewart. In addition, there is nothing about him in two Twain biographies, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain by Justin Kaplan, and Mark Twain: An American Prophet by Maxwell Geismar. Although it is possible that they were good friends, it is unlikely. Twain held a variety of jobs in the West, and Stewart was working there, too, during that period. Twain had already become a famous literary figure by the time Stewart went to work for the railroad companies. Who knows? Perhaps they met on the lyceum circuit in the early 1870s, or maybe they didn’t meet until Stewart became a nationally known recording star twenty years later.

Whatever the case, Stewart kept quiet about himself, which makes this book as much about the development of the Uncle Josh character in American life.

STILL SEARCHING FOR UNCLE JOSH, I drove along rural Indiana’s back roads that reminded me of Hoosier highways of the early 1900s. In the southern hills, I imagined Stewart’s acting company chugging along on a train to some small-town theater before arriving at the prized destination—the Empire Theater in Indianapolis. Surprisingly, I still found evidence of his career—publicity photographs, concert handbills, books, and records tucked away in Indiana’s antiquarian bookstores, antiques shops, and libraries. Except for his earliest and most rare recordings (one recently sold for eighty-five dollars), however, most Uncle Josh recordings aren’t worth more than ten dollars because the record companies pressed them in large numbers. But they are culturally valuable, and interest in them continues to grow.

Driving farther on back roads, I stopped in Tipton, the hometown of Stewart’s wife, Rossini, and her family. The Stewarts also lived there, although they weren’t at home too often. At the Sisters of St. Joseph on the outskirts of Tipton, retired Mother Superior Gerard Maher told me in 1980 that she remembered when Hazel Rossini Stewart returned to Tipton after Cal’s death in 1919. Mrs. Stewart accepted a job teaching music at the Catholic academy. The transition from performing to teaching music to girls in her hometown must have been jarring, but no doubt Mrs. Stewart needed to stay in one place and reflect on her life and future for a time.

One thing is sure: Indiana influenced Stewart’s writing. Early in his career, Stewart fashioned the Uncle Josh character into strictly a New England farmer, and promoted the act that way. As the years passed, however, and he met and married an Indiana woman and brought her into his company of performers, Uncle Josh became more generic—small-town Midwesterner meets New England farmer. Punkin Center turned into an odd amalgam of both regions, but most of all it represented rural America.

When I met Mother Gerard she was in her nineties, but her memory was still clear. She was one of the few people in Tipton who knew Stewart and his troupe. To her, a half of century had passed in the blink of an eye until the whole town seemed a sepia picture. Before the academy was demolished in 1977, Mother Gerard’s friends had mistakenly thrown away her Uncle Josh wax cylinder recordings. The younger women had no idea what the cylinders were, what they represented, and what they meant to the elderly nun. By the time I found her, she kept all that remained of her early days in a small wooden box: Stewart’s hardbound book Punkin Centre Stories, a collection of poems and monologues from 1903; a brittle newspaper clipping telling of his funeral in Tipton; and a playbill.

She presented the book to me as a gift, and I reprinted it to share Uncle Josh’s writings with the world.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, I returned to Tipton. At the Tipton County Public Library, a modern looking building near the courthouse downtown, a young man escorted me to the local history room and pulled out the only file he had on Stewart. It contained ten newspaper and magazine stories from recent years. As I sifted through them, I found an unexpected prize: an original publicity photograph of Stewart in character. My heart raced. The picture was about five by eight inches, sepia-toned, and cut unevenly on all sides. Dressed as Uncle Josh, Stewart stood on a set in front of a wooden railing, wearing his straw hat (with a chunk bitten out in front), white shirt, and speckled vest. He pushed up his wire-rim glasses on his wide and furrowed forehead. I believe the picture was taken later in his life, between 1915 and 1919. As I studied the heavy wrinkles under his eyes, I saw how much Stewart had aged in the last ten years of his life. I wondered if Cal himself had ever held this same picture, and what he might have thought of it. Then I turned it over and I saw these handwritten words, Cal Stewart—Donated to the library by the Sisters of St. Joseph. At that moment I understood that the photograph probably had belonged to Stewart’s wife, a good friend of the sisters. Holding his photograph on that gray day reinvigorated my search for Uncle Josh.

A hour later, as I stood at the broken cross that marks his grave in Tipton’s Fairview Cemetery, I asked myself: Why is Stewart nearly forgotten? Moments later, the wind blew a brown leaf across the frozen grass, pressing it firmly against the base of his tombstone. Then I realized that change is reality. Popularity is fleeting.

Although each generation has its own faded stars, Cal Stewart is one worth remembering for all time.

—Randy McNutt

Hamilton, Ohio

August, 2011

1

Cal Stewart’s America

In the halcyon years before World War I, actor Cal Stewart entertained the nation with the foibles of Uncle Josh Weathersby, an old farmer from Way Down East. A member of America’s first generation of recording artists, Stewart promoted his stage act with disc and cylinder recordings that he made for Edison, Columbia, and Victor, and for many of the smaller labels. From the early 1900s until his death in 1919, he reigned as one of the most popular talking machine stars of the acoustic—or non-electric—recording period.

To the public, his character would always be a befuddled New England farmer. He fostered this persona