by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As Los Angeles burgeoned into a major American city during the early years of the 20th century, one of the many areas that saw tremendous growth during the era was the performing arts. While this was certainly true of professional performance in music and the theater, there was also a very active amateur scene in both realms, with a wide variety of bands, orchestras, theatrical troupes and others consisting of those who may have aspired to break into the professional ranks or simply enjoyed expressing themselves creatively or artistically while employed in other vocations.
The featured artifact from the Museum’s collection for this post is a dance card for the First Grand Social Dance of the Los Angeles Dramatic Club, held on 10 January 1911 at Carl Horn’s Dancing Academy, located at Main and 15th streets in the southern part of the downtown district. The “Programme” included a grand march called the “Excursion Party: and there were eighteen dances that followed, with an intermission halfway through, and these involved two steps and waltzes in alternating order to a variety of songs, including “Dixie Twilight,” “The Suburbanite,” “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” and “Toot Your Horn, Kid” performed by Horn’s Orchestra. Whoever owned the card participated in all the dances, save one, and crossed out each accordingly.
On the reverse were a list of the officers of the Club and committee members for the event, including President Armando Eloy Antunez, Vice-President and Musical Director Arthur W. Schulte, Manager and Treasurer Ira Bullard, Secretary Emma Gerz and Stage Manager William F. Rooney. Among the floor committee members was J. Harold (Howard) Lichtenstein, while Rooney and Bullard comprised the door committee. There was a message to not forget that “College Chums” would be performed by the Club later in the month, but no reference could be found to the show having been undertaken.
The Club sprung up in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1907 and then changed its name by fall 1908, when it performed “His Last Chance” at Conaty Hall in what was then still called East Los Angeles, but which became Lincoln Heights about a decade later. One of the early mainstays of the organization was Willis C. Baker, who directed productions when he was at Occidental College, then located in Highland Park but soon to move to Eagle Rock.
Early in 1909, a Baker-penned piece called “In Old Wyoming” was performed at the Gamut Club Auditorium, a venue for one of the most prominent amateur musical associations in the Angel City, suggesting that the LADC was moving up significantly in sophistication. While white actors (men and women) played Latino characters, Antunez, who had Mexican and French ancestry, appeared as “John Dyer.” In October 1910, when the Club put on a four-act Western drama called “Arizona,” one of the chief comedic characters was a Chinese man played by Jewish actor Lichtenstein.
The LADC also performed for benefits, including for a relief fund established to aid those affected by the domestic terror bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in October 1910, as well as for masonic organizations. But, by 1912, not long after this dance was held, perhaps to raise funds to keep the Club afloat, it dissolved. Several of those involved, however, including Antunez, Rooney, Schulte and Gerz kept their dramatic interests going for a few more years by performing under the auspices of the Conaty Council of the Young Men’s Institute, a Roman Catholic organization.
Antunez (1888-1960), a Los Angeles native, who grew up north of the Plaza in an ethnically diverse area and whose family appears to go back to the 1850s in the Angel City, worked as a cigar company packer when he was counted in the 1910 census and was a wine company clerk when he registered for the draft during the First World War. A couple of years later, he was a machinist when he married and moved to Glendale and then was a clothing salesman before he began a long stint as a carpenter, including building sets at Universal Studios.
Schulte (1890-1968) hailed from San Diego and was of German ancestry. When the 1910 census was taken he worked, along with his father, who was the manager at the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, famous for its billiard and pool tables. Married in 1911, Schulte spent his entire working career with the Brunswick firm, except for a stint as a carpenter for a steam railroad company, and lived in the Bay Area in his later years.
Lichtenstein (1892-1943) was a leading performer at the Malott School of Acting in Los Angeles as a teenager and was said to be “preparing for vaudeville” when his photo and a brief mention of him appeared in the 6 October 1908 edition of the Los Angeles Herald. Yet, he joined the LADC and demonstrated his wide range of talents by leading the organization’s orchestra. Later in the Teens, he was the publicity manager for the Century Theatre and manager of the aforementioned Gamut.
He joined the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I in a baker company and remained in Europe briefly after being discharged to work for the Jewish Welfare Board, assisting their needy brethren in the shattered countries of that continent. Returning to the U.S. in 1920, he worked at a Pittsburgh theatre and then one in Dayton, Ohio before returning to Los Angeles by late 1923, where he worked at Tally’s Theatre. Aside from his stint with a film production company in Washington State, little could be found about Lichtenstein after 1924.
Ira Bullard (1883-1965) was born in Chico in northern California and lived on a farm in Ojai in Ventura County before moving to Los Angeles, where he was a grocery salesman in the East Los Angeles/Lincoln Heights area. It is not clear if he remained involved in theatrical activities much beyond the early 1910s and he moved to Santa Paula, near Ventura, where he was a grocery salesperson and a gardener, including for the high school.
William F. Rooney (1887-1968) was born in Los Angeles of Irish ancestry and lived in what is now an industrial area south of U.S. 101 and east of Alameda Street. When the 1910 census was taken, he was a harness maker in an industry that was rapidly diminishing with the rise of the automobile. Rooney was still doing leather work for a harness and collar company in the Angel City when the First World War broke out and he married Emma Gerz (1890-1976), a native of Utah with parents from Germany, in 1918. Although he became a freight car carpenter and remained in that occupation, while Emma was an optician for a period, both retained intensively involved in amateur theater.
This included, in 1920, their joining William H. Wright and his wife in the formation of a troupe that specialized in Biblical plays, something the Wright Players continued offering for at least a quarter century. Residing in the house her parents purchased in Lincoln Heights, just northwest of Lincoln High School, the Rooneys were also very active in that community, including entertainment for such organizations as the Wednesday Morning Club. Emma, in fact, was a talented pianist and wrote and directed plays under the auspices of that group and served as its president in the mid-1950s.
If someone has a spare $2,055.99 laying around, they can purchase a diary Emma Gerz kept in 1912. The dealer notes that she mentioned “a fellow she likes named Billy,” almost certainly her future husband, mentions her musical interests, but also that “her first love is the stage.” Moreover, it is recorded that she “went to see Mr. Earnest and he gave me the part of a Negro mammy,” and then turns to shorthand to express her deeper feelings—something she did throughout the diary—before adding, “mama is angry about it too.” It is not stated whether this was because of an abhorrence to playing a Black person, but we can assume the role would have required her to portray the character in blackface.
As for Carl Friedrich Horn, he, too, came from German ancestry and was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, north of Kansas City and along the Missouri River bordering Kansas. Horn’s father worked at a store and then for a newspaper publishing firm and had some real estate, including an area of that city owned by his father and known as Horn Heights. His mother, Johanna Labastian, migrated from Germany to Cincinnati when a child and became a Union Army nurse during the Civil War, purportedly “gaining the personal friendship of President Lincoln, General Grant and General Burnside,” with some source stating she treated all three. It was also said she worked for the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency after the war and ended up in Missouri and marrying.
In 1905, the widow Horn and her children, including Carl and Gustavus, came to Los Angeles and settled in an area now part of the University of Southern California campus. Apparently, the Horns had a long-standing interest in dancing and music and Gustavus went on to lead an orchestra and a military band in the Angel City while also serving as assistant manager of the local branch of another well-known national private detective agency, that of William J. Burns.
Carl, when in Missouri, studied at a business college and worked as a bookkeeper and cashier for a wood and coal firm before he enlisted with the Army, following his father’s footsteps as the elder Horn served during the Civil War. Carl, whose main instrument was the cornet, was a bugler with a Missouri infantry company during 1898 when the Spanish-American War was being fought. Returning home, he went back into the mercantile world, while also continuing his devotion to music and dance, including the formation of a dancing school in St. Joseph. During the World’s Fair at St. Louis in 1904, he was a musical director for two venues at the fairgrounds.
After the family relocated to the Angel City, Horn joined The Broadway department store, working there for a few years, while establishing Carl F. Horn’s Novelty Orchestra and opening a dancing school on Vermont Avenue, south of Exposition Park. Newspaper references in these early years mention Horn as a “one-man orchestra,” so the novelty was clearly his playing a number of instruments simultaneously, included percussion, as used to be common in days of yore.
By 1908, his school was doing well enough that he left The Broadway to devote himself full-time to the dancing academy, moved to Main and 15th and known as the Majestic, where the LADC’s First (and apparently last) Grand Social Dance was held. After eight years, Horn found a larger space at the northwest corner of Spring and 8th streets (across Spring from where Walter P. Temple and partners soon built the Great Republic Life Building) and bestowed the name of “Angelus Temple School for Dancing” on his enterprise—later the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson would use the name for her megachurch.
In June 1921, Carl F. Horn’s New School of Dancing was opened on Seventh and Francisco streets, just west of Figueroa and in early 1926 he established another location on Wilshire Boulevard and Norton Avenue, across from the Forum Theatre. Later, he had a ballroom and school in the Walnut Park neighborhood just south of Huntington Park, as well as a school in San Jose in northern California. Yet, as he invested heavily in expanding his enterprise, including briefly referring to his Spring Street venue as the “Temple of Jazz” in what looks like an attempt to stay up on trends, though he soon disavowed any connection to “jazz,” he had some significant personal and professional problems.
One was his three marriages, at least two of which were tumultuous and all failing to last all that long. He married his first wife, Lillie, in St. Louis and the pair had a son, Ivan (named after his Ivanhoe masonic lodge—this may be how he became connected to the LADC—but, in fall 1910, she sought a divorce. Lillie claimed that Horn “had driven her from home by his bad temper” and demanded she choose between him and her family.
Then, there was the situation with Johanna Horn, as Carl insisted that Lillie kiss her whenever leaving the house or returning to it, while purportedly telling her, “he could get a new wife anytime but could never get another mother.” While there was a reconciliation, another filing was made in 1912 and, while this was denied by a judge, Lillie was successful two years later in getting $15 a week in maintenance while they lived separately and it was added that she was forced to live with the widow Horn, who “called her a lazy wretch.”
Yet, the marriage continued until the summer of 1916 when another suit was filed and, as part of Lillie’s cause, she offered a witness who was a patron of the Horn dance studio. The woman told the court that Horn offered her diamonds and other inducements to take up with him, but that her husband, from whom she was then separated, went to the studio and pummeled its proprietor. This led the witness to declare “I thought that any man who would run from as little a man as my husband is was a coward” and, even though Horn asked her to join him on an Eastern business trip, she replied, “I had found who was the best man.” Lillie also told the court that Horn was spending an inordinate amount of time and attention on an employee, but he insisted they were merely staying after hours to paint the studio (red, perhaps?)
With Lillie finally granted a divorce on the third try, after such evidence as that, Horn was free to marry a much younger woman, Marguerite, in September 1917, apparently after having met her at his dance studio shortly after she moved to Los Angeles from Toronto. Early in 1921, however, he filed for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty, alleging that she “threatened to brain him and his employees with a telephone,” as well as committed assaults like scratching and biting his face until it bled.
He also told the court that she sat on a doctor’s lap in his presence causing “great mental anguish and suffering” and demanded that, if Horn didn’t buy her a car, she would find someone who would. For her part, Marguerite told the press that she’d returned from a two-week hospital stay for an operation and was surprised to be hit with the suit. In 1922, Horn married a third time, but that, too, ended in divorce after about a decade.
On the professional side, Horn was ordered to appear in March 1917 before the Police Commission on an allegation that he was “permitting minor girls to patronize his place and other misconduct.” This was a few years after he and the seven other licensed dancehall owners opposed an ordinance that, they argued, had loopholes that “would open the door for disreputable dancehalls of the very worst description” and that they stood for “the good repute of dancing as a form of amusement on a high plane.”
Horn’s Spring Street studio was raided in August 1918 when authorities went looking for draft dodgers. To help the officials, 100 sailors then left their partners, formed a ring around the dance floor and forced all of the other men through a small opening into the waiting arms of the investigators. When police officers were ready to take 71 suspects to the pokey, the sailors formed a double line and marched their prey to the jail at Broadway and First.
At the end of 1924, Horn was part of a Los Angeles Ballroom Proprietors’ and Managers’ Association, which asserted that it was comprised of “Sponsors of Higher Ideals in Public Dancing Institutions” as it offered season’s greetings to the public. The organization included a dozen establishments, including the Club Latino on Main Street next to the Plaza, the Strangers’ Social Club on Broadway south of 2nd Street, the National College of Dancing on Grand Avenue south of 7th Street, and Fred Solomon’s well-known “Ninth Wonder of the World” on Grand and 9th Street.
Yet, when Horn tried to get a permit for his Wilshire Boulevard place, which he dubbed the “Dutch Ballroom,” he again ran afoul of the Police Commission, specifically one member, Isador W. Birnbaum, who in arguing for rejection, stated that “there were 500,000 people in Los Angeles who thought the commission was granting too many dance hall permits” as the Roaring Twenties was in full swing. The Los Angeles Express of 2 March 1926 reported that, as the meeting unfolded at the City Hall on Broadway (the current one opened two years later),
Horn shouted out that the matter was a personal one for Birnbaum, and then the crowd [of 200 Horn supporters—he obviously knew beforehand of the commissioner’s opposition] took up the fight. Thy stormed into the small commission room and threatened physical violence to members, until Chief of Police R. Lee Heath, a member of the commission, arose and threatened to send in a riot call and have them all taken to the city jail in patrol wagons unless they departed immediately.
The assemblage, yelling at the Commission, grumbled after Heath’s threat and then headed to the office of Mayor George C. Cryer to demand Birnbaum’s removal. There is some evidence that Horn used the Wilshire Boulevard facility for some events after that and the building still stands and was, for many years, the well-known Jewel’s Catch One disco, a center of Black queer entertainment from 1973 to 2015 and now operated under different management as Catch One.
The move to Walnut Park, however, followed, but, as the Great Depression hit, Horn’s dance hall/studio enterprise crumbled. In late 1930, he and his third wife opened the Fireside Tea Room on Western Avenue, southwest of Exposition Park, but it appears to have closed shortly afterward and that marriage dissolved. In spring 1935, Horn tried to get a permit to open a dance hall on Wilshire west of La Brea, but that either was denied or he did not follow through with the project. He lived another seventeen years, dying in September 1952, a colorful, but forgotten, character among many in early 20th century Los Angeles.