Plays Worth Remembering - Volume 1: A Veritable Feast of George Ade's Greatest Hits

By Ade Royalties and Publishing

Plays Worth Remembering is a two-volume set of 14 plays and two silent film screenplays by celebrated turn-of-the-20th century American playwright George Ade. Many of these works have never been published before and some do not exist in complete form anywhere else. Ade’s plays offer a valuable and funny commentary on politics, com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ade Royalties and Publishing
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734713619

Book preview

Introduction

My great-uncle George Ade passed away in 1944, nine years before I was born, but I encountered his ghost frequently as I was growing up in the farm community of Brook, Indiana where he had lived. I never actually saw George’s ghost, but most every adult I talked to had something to say about him upon learning my last name. It seemed as if everyone had known him. They spoke of him fondly and offered their barbershop opinions of what the great writer George Ade would think about this or that. They told and retold endless stories of his humor, grace, philanthropy, generosity and service to the community. Indeed, George was an international celebrity whose books and plays had made him a wealthy, well-connected man, yet he never forgot—and in fact, celebrated with gusto—his small-town Midwestern roots.

The first time I recall seeing any of my uncle’s plays, they were locked behind glass doors inside my great-grandfather’s bookcase along with most of George’s other works and the rest of our family’s valuable books. We kids were not allowed to touch any of it. When I was old enough to figure out where to find the key, I unlocked the bookcase and rummaged through the treasures stashed within. However, old enough to unlock a bookcase was not nearly old enough to know how to read—at least, not for me. Upon finding that there were virtually no pictures in any of the books, I lost all interest. I returned to the ancient bookshelf sometime during my middle school years, but my vocabulary and comprehension were still not equal to Uncle George’s writings.

However, when I was attending college I came home for the holidays one winter and took another look. Plays such as Just Out of College, The Sultan of Sulu, The College Widow and The County Chairman beckoned to me. Being a history major helped, especially with The Sultan. After I gave up history for geology, my interest in Uncle George’s writings deepened. I became very fond of his works while living and working in Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. For me, they offered an immediate and comforting transport back home to middle America any time I wanted it.

Typical pose of George in his prime, when he had three plays simultaneously on Broadway. A record that still stands.

In 2010 I set out, for my own enjoyment, to collect all of my uncle’s plays. I started by contacting Samuel French, Inc. in New York City. As the original distributor of most of George’s plays, I imagined it would be simple to get copies from them. Unfortunately, it was not simple at all. The problem was that years ago the plays were thought to be quite valuable, so most were never published and made available to the general public. Instead, the company rented out the scripts to theater groups, requiring that upon the close of the play all copies be returned. When the copyright for each play expired, Samuel French destroyed all related scripts.¹ The only title they still had available was The College Widow, the copyright of which was set to expire January 1, 2019. I paid a fee and they shipped Widow to me.

One title down, a dozen more to go!

Ultimately, collecting all of George’s plays took eight years and multiple visits to Purdue University’s Special Collections; the George Ade Home in Brook, Indiana and the Newberry Library in Chicago; as well as reaching out to the New York Public Library and its Billy Rose Theater Division; the University of Wisconsin’s Mills Music Library; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; the University of Indiana; and all of my older family members who I thought might have a copy squirreled away somewhere. Some of the scripts in the above libraries were in such delicate condition that they required special handling by the archivists. A few were too fragile even for copying, so I had to pass them by and keep digging for another script that was in better shape.

Which brings me to the next challenge I encountered in my quest: the majority of George’s plays have multiple versions. Knowing virtually nothing about playwriting and how a piece evolves over time, I expected that it would be easy to find relatively pristine versions of plays that were just as famous on Broadway in the early 1900s as are Hamilton and The Lion King today. Again, I was wrong. In the course of my research I learned that George was notorious for sitting in theaters during rehearsals (and in some cases, during actual performances) and changing the scripts on the fly. My collection shows convincing evidence of that practice. Time and again I found faded typewritten scripts with George’s handwritten notes and edits scribbled over various sections . . . other sections crossed out by George with big bold lines and X’s . . . George’s hand-drawn set designs and choreography recommendations inserted in one version but not the others . . . making it impossible to know which was the definitive or final script. By now I’m pretty sure no such thing exists. Especially challenging in this regard were Peggy from Paris, The Old Town and The Sho-Gun.

A page from a script for The Old Town, 1909.

By the fall of 2018, I’d collected scripts, scores and prompt books from all of the plays and digitized them. At this point it seemed a shame not to share them with the world. After all, George was one of America’s most important playwrights and his plays offer a valuable commentary on life at the turn of the 20th Century. The Encyclopedia of American Humorists put it this way:

George was wildly popular in the early 20th Century. Note the poster advertising his play The Sultan of Sulu in the background.

The more successful plays are pageants of a vanished society and provided his audiences an alternative to dialect burlesque, pratfalls, and sexual innuendo. Current devotees, such as Jean Shepherd and Shel Silverstein, have been greatly influenced by his ironic style and inversion of clichés. Along with Eugene Field and Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade helped create and establish a distinctively midwestern genre of American humor.²

Today it is relatively easy to find George’s books. Most are still in print, readily available on Amazon or through Project Gutenberg. But as I’ve described above, getting ahold of his plays was anything but easy. That’s why I created this book. To my knowledge this is the only published collection of George’s best plays. How to know they are the best? George listed them in his exceedingly short autobiography, which you’ll find in the pages ahead. I subtitled these volumes A Veritable Feast of George Ade’s Greatest Hits because George loved abundance . . . especially in stiff drinks, friends, laughter and food. Therefore, I begin by Setting the Table with an introduction to George and a description of his life, not only as an artist but also as a world-class host and merrymaker extraordinaire. Then I organized the content into courses—Drinks Before Dinner, on George (some of George’s writings about himself and his craft), Appetizers (his best one-act plays), First Course (his favorite full-length plays), Second Course (his rollicking musical plays), Dessert (two screenplays for silent films that have been lost)—and I close by serving up some After-dinner Cigars and Brandy (bonus materials that didn’t fit anywhere else but were too good to pass up). I preface each play with a little background information and fun facts, some of which have been passed down through my family and others picked up in the course of my research. I include footnotes wherever there was confusion due to the aforementioned multiple versions, illegible copy and/or unresolved conflicts in the text.

So, Dear Reader, after much help from a heroic troupe of librarians and an investment of much personal time, effort, and love, George Ade’s Plays Worth Remembering is ready for your enjoyment. I invite you to belly up to the banquet table for what I hope will be a deliciously satisfying repast.

William C. Ade

Brook, Indiana, 2018

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1. George Ade Davis, George’s namesake nephew and the heir to George’s royalties, once told my father, I have spent more money defending the copyrights than they ever paid in royalties! In hindsight, he (and now, I) would have been better served had he simply published the plays.

2. Gale, Steven H., Encyclopedia of American Humorists, (Routledge, 2016), 7.

Setting the Table

‘Early to Bed and Early to Rise’ is a Bad Rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most Prominent and Influential People.

—George Ade

The Ade side of our family hails from England. The first to arrive on American soil were John and Esther Ade and their three boys, one of them being my great-great -grandfather , John Ade, Jr., who was 12-years old when the family sailed into New York City in 1835 with next to nothing. They worked their way west to the Cincinnati area, where John Jr. met his bride, Adaline Bush, while operating the gate on a toll road.

By the 1850s, John Jr. had made his way to Lafayette, Indiana, a frontier town that was the jumping off point for the miner-49ers headed to the California gold rush. Before heading west, the miners would load up on supplies at John Purdue’s store on the banks of the Wabash River. Purdue—who bequeathed the land for what is now Purdue University—was a major trader with the largest brick building west of New York at that time. The building still stands. John Ade Jr. went to work freighting supplies for Purdue, occasionally traveling as far as Chicago.

Further south in Newton County was a gentleman named Alexander J. Kent, who’d bought a large number of marshy acres with the idea of draining the swamps and establishing a new town on the resulting terra firma. Kent had an innovation that he believed would allow him to do just that: a huge sod-busting plow pulled by as many as 20 oxen. His plan was to use this contraption to dig an enormous ditch that would drain the swamp into the Iroquois River three miles away, thus leaving dry land upon which to build his town.

Few people thought that A.J. Kent would succeed in this endeavor, but he was not to be deterred by naysayers. He was able to get one cut with this massive plow, turning over a single furrow of sod for a distance of three or four miles . . . and then the spring rains came. Without sod on top of the soil, the furrow eroded down eight or ten feet. The famous Kent Ditch was thus dug with one cut of a giant oxen plow. The project that had been called Kent’s Folly resulted in the establishment of the town christened Kentland.

Upon hearing of this, John Jr. moved his family south and became the second resident of Kentland, the future county seat of Newton County, the last county to be incorporated in Indiana. John Jr. thought Newton County would be a fine place to bring up a family. And bring up a family he did. He and Adaline had seven children—Anna, Alice, William, Joe, George, Ella and Emma—whom John Jr. supported by working all types of jobs. Although he only had a few weeks’ worth of formal education, he taught himself to read and cipher. For John Jr., ciphering meant running his finger down a column of five-digit numbers and adding them in his head as fast as he could draw his finger down the page. He became renowned for his math abilities and eventually worked as a cashier at Discount and Deposit Bank (which later became the Kentland Bank, still in existence). Ultimately he became a partner in the bank. John Jr. was so good with numbers that he was elected County Recorder at a time when the Newton County courthouse was an old wooden barn. Later he was elected County Auditor. I have in my house the old desk he used back then. It is very much a frontier-era piece of furniture featuring a deep groove down the middle where the binding of the old county books would sit so that they could open flat. The entries in those books were made with quill pens.

John Jr. and Adaline had an interesting marriage. Adaline was a member of the Methodist Church and John Jr. a member of the Christian Church. Religion was a serious matter on the frontier, and neither John Jr. nor Adaline would compromise as to which church they attended. Therefore they decided to work out a holy alliance: John Jr. would deliver Adaline to the Methodist Church early every Sunday morning and then cut across town to the Christian Church. There he would enjoy almost the entire service, leaving a few minutes early to pick up Adaline at the front door of the Methodist Church as everyone was coming out.

When John Jr. was asked why he didn’t just join the Methodist Church and save himself some steps every Sunday, he said, The Methodist sermons put me to sleep. The fire and brimstone over at the Christian Church keeps me awake.

As I noted, the couple had four daughters and three sons, the second youngest being the subject of this book, my great-uncle George. Their eldest son was my great-grandfather, William H. Ade. William was the serious, sober one. He was once considered a candidate for the Methodist ministry but didn’t pursue it. He did all that was expected of him and became a highly-regarded member of the community, taking up farming, dabbling in business and running for Congress on the Bull Moose ticket.

John Jr. and Adaline’s second oldest son, Joe, was never as industrious and respectable as his brother Will. He was widely considered to be a ne’er-do-well; a very funny man but not much more. Despite his reputation as a bona fide slacker, Joe wound up getting a job with the railroad. He was riding in the caboose one day when the train derailed. The cars flipped over onto their sides in a ravine, and the doors to the caboose could not be opened. There were kerosene lanterns and a pot-bellied stove in the caboose, which started a fire. In the ensuing conflagration, Joe was the only one able to get out. A skinny, scrawny fellow, he managed to squeeze through a small window on the roof. The other crew members who were in the caboose with him were all burned alive.

From that day forward, Adaline forbade Joe to go back to work for the railroad, which was the best job he’d ever had. Joe took that as permission to do nothing. He became the town gadabout, loafing around from place to place and doing as little as was humanly possible.

And then there was John Jr. and Adaline’s youngest son, George. George was a problem child growing up, but not the same kind of problem as his lazy brother, Joe. George’s trouble was that he always had his nose buried deep in a book. He read to the exclusion of almost all other activities. One day on the way home from school, George decided to walk down the middle of the railroad tracks so that he could walk and read simultaneously without straying from his intended path. Walking home on the tracks became a habit for him. One afternoon, Adaline was struck by an urgent sense that she needed to check on George, who was due home from school any minute. She dropped whatever housework she was doing at the time and ran one block south to where the railroad tracks passed by. Sure enough, there was George, ambling down the tracks totally immersed in his book . . . and completely oblivious to the steaming locomotive barrelling down on him from behind. Adaline pulled her son off the tracks with seconds to spare. She had never done that before and would never feel compelled to do anything like it again. Later in George’s life, he would write a story about this incident and entitle it A Mother’s Intuition.

Like his brother Joe, George was recognized as lacking enthusiasm for manual labor (his words, not mine). He simply didn’t enjoy farm work. Thus, the family wondered what in the world to do with him. They ultimately decided that as bookish as he was, perhaps they should send him off to college. Before Adaline let him go, she made him do an extra year of high school to ensure that he was prepared to compete in a rigorous college setting. George did his additional time at the high school, and in the late 1880s the family sent him off to a brand new college in Lafayette on the banks of the Wabash River: Purdue University.

George decided not to major in agriculture or mechanics because that would only land him back on the farm. He would have loved to have majored in literature, but it wasn’t offered at Purdue back then. The course of study he chose for himself was science. As it turns out, Adaline needn’t have worried about her son’s ability to measure up to Purdue’s high academic standards. George did more than just measure up. By the end of the first semester, he was at the top of his class with straight A’s across the board.

And then he discovered the joys of banned things . . . things like fraternities, which were prohibited at Purdue in the 1880s. By the time the second semester rolled around, George had joined the recently-organized (and top secret) Sigma Chi fraternity. His grades began to slip toward the mediocre.

George also got involved with the theater during his years at Purdue. Lafayette is midway between Indianapolis and Chicago; in those days it was a one-day journey by train from either city. Consequently, touring shows often stopped in Lafayette for one-night-only performances on their way to or from Indy and Chicago. This is how George first saw the musical comedies of Gilbert and Sullivan, which would have a major impact on his life later on. He became entranced with H.M.S. Pinafore and similar works, and he began to toy with writing.

George graduated from Purdue with a degree in science, but of course there were no science jobs to be found. He apprenticed for a lawyer and quickly determined that he did not want to go into the legal profession, nor did he want to do anything that required further education. He went to work for an advertising firm in Lafayette where he was assigned to create slogans for many products, most notably a laxative for which he coined the now famous tagline, It Works Overnight.

George was puttering around Lafayette waiting for something more exciting to do when his Sigma Chi fraternity brother, John T. McCutcheon, sent him a letter from Chicago. McCutcheon, who after graduation had gotten a job with the Chicago Record, was writing to encourage his frat brother to head that way.

There are more opportunities here in Chicago than there are in that hick town Lafayette, McCutcheon wrote.

George couldn’t argue with that. He moved to Chicago where he was hired by the Record to write the weather report, a position that’s about as low as one can go at a newspaper. Neither he nor McCutcheon had any money to speak of, so they pooled their resources and rented the hall bedroom at a boarding house. The hall bedroom wasn’t really a room at all but merely one bed set up in the hallway. George and his friend McCutcheon shared that bed.

It didn’t take long for the newspaper editors to notice George’s inventive use of colloquial American language in the weather column. They liked what they saw and gave him higher profile assignments. He wrote a series of stories and character sketches of the people and places he was seeing in 1890s Chicago, entitled Stories of the Streets and of the Town. These pieces were published in the paper under George’s byline. They became so popular that they were syndicated and later published as a book.

At the same time, his pal McCutcheon was starting to receive attention for his cartoons, which also achieved syndication. The two friends finally had enough money to move out of the hall bedroom, but they didn’t want to do that . . . at least, not yet. The woman who ran the boarding house was dying of tuberculosis and needed every dollar to keep her family going. To help her out, George and McCutcheon stayed in the hall bedroom long after they could have moved upmarket. It was here that they began collaborating on stories and cartoons. Their works grew to be wildly popular, setting both men on the road to fame. McCutcheon became a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, and as we’ll see in a moment, George collected his fair share of accolades as well. Even after McCutcheon got married and George went to live at the Chicago Athletic Club, the duo collaborated off and on for their entire lives.

In McCutcheon’s memoir, Drawn From Memory, (which was published by his wife posthumously), he told stories of his time at Purdue and his friendship with George. In particular, he mentioned an incident involving Sigma Chi, the secret fraternity to which he and George belonged. There was a tall bell tower on the Purdue campus (not the one that stands today, but an ancient precursor) and some mischievous frat brothers climbed that tower to hang from its rafters a huge Sigma Chi streamer. The president of Purdue issued an edict that he would find the students responsible for that prank and expel them. The Sigma Chi brothers took an oath that no one would ever tell who had done it. That oath was kept, and the president never discovered the identities of the perpetrators. In his memoir, McCutcheon—the last living member of the original Sigma Chi chapter at Purdue—confessed that he and George were the culprits of the bell tower caper. It’s ironic that the rambunctious fraternity brothers who were once at risk of being permanently expelled from Purdue ended up becoming two of the university’s most generous philanthropists.

Indeed, George’s writing made him rather famous and wealthy. Billed as one of America’s great humorists, he began rubbing shoulders with ever more well-to-do people. This was the Gay 90s, a time of joint-stock companies and trusts and all manner of businesses starting up. Unfortunately, a few unsavory promoters got to George such that by the turn of the 20th century, he was facing serious financial difficulty.

Back to the Farm

For most of us, home is the place to go and family members are the people to see when we’re in trouble. This is the way George felt, too. As his world was crashing down around him, he returned to Newton County for a visit.

Well, I am back home again and broke, he announced at the family doorstep.³ George explained to the Ades that despite the bestselling books and successful plays he’d written, his pockets were nearly empty. All the financial investments he’d made had turned out to be complete frauds.

The family assured George that they understood his predicament and loved him nonetheless. One by one they expressed their full faith that he’d be able to pull himself out of the hole he was in. And then his brother Will offered a practical proposal.

George, when you get your savings built back up—and I know you will—why don’t you wire some of it to me and I’ll use it to buy you a farm? Will said. It’ll be a much safer investment than any of those sharpie schemes they’re running up in Chicago. That way if something bad happens in the future, you’ll have a place to go. You’ll never again be ‘back home and broke’ because you’ll own a piece of land.

George thought Will’s idea made good sense. He went back to Chicago and dedicated himself to writing and saving his money. After having been burned on the investment scams, he became quite an astute businessman and trusted advisor to his friends. When his fraternity brother, Booth Tarkington, complained that he couldn’t find a publisher to pay him good money for his manuscripts, George gave him some unconventional but savvy advice: Give away your first novel in order to get it published, and after it becomes successful, you’ll make your money on your subsequent novels . . . the key is to get your foot in the door and get your material in front of the public.

Tarkington did just that, and his later novels (Penrod and Sam, The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, etc.) not only made him rich and famous, but also made him the winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.

George also began a series of astute business deals with his own literary career. As he wrote stories for the Chicago Record, he was paid a flat rate. He then syndicated the stories with other newspapers and got paid again. He collected these syndicated stories into books of short stories on a cash and royalty basis and got paid yet again. Once the book had its run, he rewrote the stories as screenplays for Hollywood silent movies, and again received cash and royalties. George would then turn these stories into Broadway and touring stage plays or musicals—many of which are included in this book—and get even more cash and royalties. When talking pictures came out, George rewrote his plays and other works as screenplays for Hollywood talkies. He also took upon himself a protégé in the young P. G. Wodehouse, whom George picked to make over his Broadway hit play The College Widow into the musical play and later the film success Leave It to Jane. More cash and royalties rolled in.⁴

Whenever George accumulated a sufficient amount of money, he sent it to his brother Will, who used it to buy a farm. George continued writing and sending money to Will. At one point Will telegraphed back, Your first farm is paid off, but I borrowed one hundred percent against it to buy another one. You are still in debt. Keep writing.

Apparently this was just the inspiration and incentive George needed. He experienced a flurry of writing success at this time, earning the distinction of having three plays on Broadway simultaneously in 1904: The College Widow, The County Chairman and The Sho-Gun. It is a record that has never been broken, only tied by the great Neil Simon. He was at the peak of his productivity when he received this telegram from Will:

George: two thousand acres paid off in full. Stop. No need to send more money. Stop. Now go and have a good time. Stop.

Hazelden on the Prairie

George took his brother’s advice and set about the serious task of enjoying life. He went around the world—literally—seven times, back in a day when such travel was by ship. He returned to Newton County and began to build a modest cottage to serve as a writing retreat from his room at the Chicago Athletic Club. When one of George’s Chicago pals saw the cottage’s architectural plans for the first time, he was miffed.

Hey, what gives? the friend asked. Where am I supposed to sleep when I come down for a visit?

At that George promptly added a guest room to his cottage, and the whole thing just snowballed from there. The little writing retreat ultimately wound up being a grand two-story Tudor-style house with several bedrooms to accommodate guests. More outbuildings and features soon cropped up around the grounds; a dance pavilion, a clay tennis court, a softball field, a water tower and a swimming pool among them. The front door to this lovely home, which he called Hazelden, was always open . . . to family, friends, and even strangers. George particularly enjoyed this aspect of life in rural Indiana. He could never have left his door unlocked like that in Chicago.

Indeed, George was the consummate host. He enjoyed partaking in multiple stiff drinks every day and was widely known to have the best liquor cabinet in Newton County. Not surprisingly, his fun-loving brother Joe dropped by the house from time to time, and he rarely came alone. Once there, Joe and his buddies had a tendency to stay a while. Pretty soon every drunk in the county was hanging out at George’s place. The purpose of building the house had been for George to escape the hustle and bustle of Chicago so he could write in peace, but there was not a lot of peace to be found at Hazelden.

George certainly did not have a reputation for being a party pooper, but a man has to sleep now and then. He decided to build a log cabin across the road from his Tudor home to serve solely as a party house. That way the festivities could go on ‘round the clock without interrupting any of the sleeping or working George might choose to do across the road at Hazelden. He christened his new cabin The Clubhouse and moved all of his liquor over there. This setup pleased George. Now he would never have to be the bad guy and shut down a party. He could simply stumble back across the road to the main house whenever he got tired, leaving his friends to carry on in The Clubhouse as long as they liked. It was a winning arrangement for everybody.

My father recalled that in George’s old age he would still amble across the road from his home to the log cabin and peer in the window every night to check on the party. If it was going at full tilt, George would silently turn around and go back home to bed. However, if things looked glum or people didn’t seem to be having a good time, he would go inside to liven up the festivities and get things rolling along. Then and only then would he quietly slip out the back door and go home.

Yes, George certainly knew how to energize a gathering and make his guests laugh. New visitors to Hazelden were subject to many subtle and humorous initiation rites. When a first-time guest approached the bar, George would announce that he was going to buy the first drink. This was a pre-arranged cue to the bartender to reach for one of his special glasses. If the drink was to be whiskey, the bartender would take up a plain but large shot glass with a very thick base. He would fill this glass and place it directly into the hand of the guest with much good-natured ceremony. Sooner or later the new guest would have to set the glass down and when he or she did, it would fall over onto its side, spilling the drink all over the table and possibly the guest as well. The room would erupt with laughter. The hapless guest would pick up the glass and notice that the base had been filed off at such an angle that there was no way it could stand upright without tipping over.

The new guest, now wise to the trick of the wobbly whiskey glass, might then attempt to order another drink. One of those cut-glass tumblers safely sitting upright behind the bar (obviously with a stable base) would be their glass of choice. The bartender would, with a twinkle in his eye, pull out one of these elegant marvels. The new guest would look around the room and see several people holding just such glasses. Oh, but the new guest was getting yet another special glass with a design that went around the vessel four times, deeply cut. Where the cuts made an X, what appeared to be a deep crevice was actually drilled all the way through. These glasses could be safely set down upon the bar or the table, but as soon as the new guest attempted to take a sip, the drilled-through holes would dribble whatever was in the glass down the front of their dress or shirt.

Perhaps by this time the new guest would give up on the bar and decide to take refuge by the swimming pool, where there were plenty of people who were wet already. Around the pool were several large metal lounge chairs. It seemed that there was always one that was unoccupied. Filled with trepidation, the guest would approach the chair and give it a check to see if it was actually solid and not going to fall over or collapse. Indeed, the metal was quite solid and the chair structurally safe. But once the new guest was seated and relaxed, George would appear on the other side of the pool with a mischievous grin. He would reach under the poolside table where a rheostat was wired into an electrical system to give a jolt to whomever was sitting in that particular chair. The hapless initiate would leap to his feet, having been ever-so-slightly electrocuted. The rest of the guests would hoot with laughter as all had been subject to the various initiation rites themselves. Thereafter our new guest would walk the grounds of Hazelden on tenterhooks, wondering what wild deception might greet them next. George would always think of something new.

In addition to enjoying a good laugh and a good party, George also enjoyed a good game of golf. There were no golf courses nearby, but that didn’t deter George. He simply turned the pastures adjacent to his house into an improvised course all his own. He painted numbers on shingles and nailed them to trees scattered throughout the pasture, the goal being to hit each numbered tree with a ball in the least amount of strokes. George spent many happy hours driving, chipping and putting his way around this makeshift course, a herd of grazing cattle serving as his gallery of spectators.

By the 1920s, the golf course George created in his pasture had evolved into a 9-hole regulation course known as the Hazelden Country Club. Hazelden ultimately became a renowned golfing venue, hosting tournaments attended by many of the era’s greatest golf stars. The club is still in operation.

As for George’s original writing cottage, it is now The George Ade Home, a museum filled with his memorabilia and writings. Bequeathed to the county upon George’s passing, the home has come a long way since the first time I visited it with my father when I was eight-years old. Back then it was an embarrassment. The floors and ceilings showed extensive damage from a leaky roof, the wallpaper was peeling, and there were bees everywhere; so many bees on the floor that you had to sweep them out of the way to walk. I asked my father if we couldn’t somehow repair the place in honor of Uncle George. He shook his head and said no one in the family had the kind of money it would take to restore it to its former glory. But eventually the home was repaired through subscriptions throughout the community, and it has been maintained by the county ever since. Today the home, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, plays host to wedding receptions, miscellaneous parties, and meetings of all kinds.

And then there’s The Clubhouse. The little log cabin that once served as Party Central for turn-of-the-century revelers from Newton County and beyond still stands. The property passed through various hands for 50-years following George’s death until I purchased it in the 1990s. When I told my dad I’d bought Uncle George’s old cabin, he said, You’d better be careful of the faucets.

Why? I asked.

Because they don’t run water, Dad replied. They run hot and cold booze.

Today I live in George Ade’s log cabin. The previous owner had spent a fortune restoring the place and it was in good shape when I bought it, but 100-year-old log cabins are in constant need of repair. They are not investments made for capital appreciation but for character appreciation. To live in George’s cabin is to live in the rural past of Indiana, to be in a prominent historical place, and most of all, to have a real feeling of home. After all, it was here that George entertained President Taft, Vice President Dawes, General Douglas MacArthur, and his literary friends James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington. Another frequent visitor was Ort Wells, the millionaire Chicago stockbroker and great friend of my Uncle George, who introduced George to Richard and Beatrice Welles, the parents of George Orson Welles of Citizen Kane fame. It is a little-known fact that George Ade was George Orson Welles’ namesake.⁵

Family Fortunes and Reversals

In her old age, George’s mother Adaline got to see her son become a millionaire and one of the biggest celebrities in America. All of her sons and daughters who lived to adulthood, with the possible exception of Joe, led successful, honorable, middle-class or better lives. Her son Will was a respected gentleman farmer with 1,000 acres of land and town properties. Her daughter Ella’s husband, Warren T. McCray, was elected Governor of Indiana. The entire family achieved the American dream.

One of the first things George did when he came into a great deal of money was to buy his parents the best house in Kentland. This magnificent two-story house still stands. Were it to be fixed up, it would be considered upper-middle-class even by today’s standards. John Jr. and Adaline moved into the house, but it didn’t change their lifestyle.

Adaline’s children always got together on her birthday and at Christmastime, giving her gifts of clothes, coats and such personal items that she’d never had as a woman on the frontier. She unwrapped these presents with great delight and thanked her children for their generosity.

This is too good for every day, she’d say. I’m going to put it away for now and wear it on an occasion.

But the occasions never came. Adaline dressed the way she’d always dressed, as a frontier woman. For her and John Jr. and most pioneers, the American dream was for the betterment of the next generation, not the current one. The old pioneer John Jr., who worked every day of his life, passed away in 1914 at age 85 while attending a Republican convention. It is no coincidence that this marked the peak of George’s career as an author and playwright. Several of his plays and stories had fathers as their heroes.

When Adaline was on her deathbed, her only request was that George promise to take care of his older brother, Joe. George made good on his pledge to his mother by purchasing for his brother a 160-acre farm with a lovely house, barn and outbuildings. When George presented Joe with the deed, Joe looked it over carefully, signed it and handed George one dollar.

What’s this for? George asked.

It says right there in the deed that I’m getting this farm for one dollar and other valuable consideration, Joe replied. I don’t want to be obliged none to you.

Joe was 60-years old when George presented him with the deed to the farm. Now the proud recipient of a lovely house and land, Joe became something he had never been in his whole life—an eligible bachelor. He was soon married. His new wife wanted to move to town, so he approached George with the proposition that maybe George would like to buy the farm back . . . at market price, of course.

But George had become an astute businessman, and he knew his brother very well. He bought the farm but not with outright ownership; he left Joe with a life interest in the 160-acres. Thus, Joe was never able to sell the place. This, of course, provided a comfortable income for him and his wife for the rest of their lives. It was an asset that even Joe couldn’t squander.

Therefore, George kept his promise to their dying mother that Joe would always be protected . . . even from himself.

Little Buck the Trapper

My father often told me a story about Uncle George that perfectly sums up the kind of man he was. The story, called Little Buck the Trapper, was told to my father by his father, who’d probably heard it from his parents. Little Buck the Trapper has never been published before, to my knowledge. The story goes something like this . . .

As George became more rich and famous, he commuted back and forth via rail between Chicago and Kentland to visit his family. Kentland was illustrious for being the only town in Indiana with more saloons than churches, which resulted in Kentland getting more than its fair share of revival meetings. In one or another (or all) of these saloons could be found a fellow known as Little Buck the Trapper.

Little Buck made his living by talking about doing work. He also talked a lot about the old days when he claimed he was a frontiersman and trapper out in the Rocky Mountains. Now, it was true that Little Buck disappeared from Kentland for a time when he was younger, but nobody thought for a minute that it was because he was off working somewhere. People assumed it was because he was drunk in a nearby city, or hunting and trapping along the Kankakee River in the northern part of Newton County.

At the saloons, Little Buck told tales of trapping beavers and wolves and collecting all of the pelts out in the Great Rocky Mountains and then selling them at trading posts, which he declared had made him wealthy. He also claimed that one of the adventures he had out West was coming across Buffalo Bill getting ambushed by a bunch of Indians. To hear Little Buck tell it, he swooped in with his rifle just in the nick of time, and together he and Buffalo Bill fought