20 Odd Jobs Entertainment Killed Off Before TV Took Over

In the decades between the 1830s and the 1950s, ringmasters like William Heckler would be found in carnivals and dime museums with their noses bent over magnifying glasses. Heckler hitched human fleas to tiny cannons and chariots using a piece of gold wire finer than a hair. The fleas weren’t trained. Heckler simply let the insects’ kicking propel the performance, feeding his troupe off his arm. Flea circuses died off thanks to better hygiene, more effective insecticides, and the advent of television.

George Gershwin began working for the Tin Pan Alley publisher Jerome H. Remick & Co. at age 15, in 1914. He made $15 a week playing the piano, serving as one of many song pluggers whose job was to perform new tunes in music and department stores to get shoppers to buy sheet music, since home recordings were still hard to come by. Even Irving Berlin had once held such a position before he achieved great fame. But radio, vinyl, and television eventually conspired to render sheet music nearly valueless.

In Japanese cinemas from the late 1890s to the 1930s, silent films were anything but silent. A storyteller, or benshi, would stand beside the screen and narrate every character’s dialogue. The benshi would explain the storyline, fill in the gaps, and provide cultural context. Top benshi became more famous than the on-screen stars they narrated. In fact, the fame of the top benshi was the reason that sound films were not fully adopted by Japanese moviegoers until the mid-1930s. Sound films eventually made benshi obsolete, and television finished the job.

During the Golden Age of Radio (the late 1920s to the early 1950s), sound engineers worked directly with actors in front of the microphone and constructed entire soundscapes from scratch on the fly: They’d stamp on coconuts for the sound of galloping horses, shake sheets of tin for rolling thunder, twist up cellophane to simulate the popping of a fire, bang down tiny doors. Prior to that, in October 1921, a WJZ announcer named Thomas Cowan was the first person to be credited for an effect: He broke wooden matches to create the noise of a bat striking a ball. Television and sound effects libraries eventually killed the off-stage live effect trade.

From the 1880s to the 1930s, organ grinders could be seen daily on the streets of cities throughout North America and Europe, playing popular tunes by cranking hand-turned barrel organs, with a trained capuchin monkey in a vest collecting coins from passersby. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia abolished organ-grinder licenses in the city in 1935, effective beginning in 1936. With the advent of home radio and then television that offered free music, the organ grinder disappeared from the streets by midcentury.

From the 1910s through the 1950s, each burlesque theater’s featured comic was known as the Top Banana. He worked with a Second and Third Banana, performing quick slapstick sketches between the chorus numbers. Milton Berle and Phil Silvers both started out as burlesque Top Bananas before moving over to television. Local censorship, along with competition from television, eventually closed most of the burlesque houses during the 1940s and ’50s. The live theatrical job disappeared, but that particular brand of comedy lived on in early TV variety shows.

From the 1840s through the 1950s, American minstrel shows had two comic end men named Tambo and Bones. They sat alongside the Interlocutor, who was formally positioned at the center of the stage as master of ceremonies and set up the jokes for them. Unfortunately, those characters were based on the racist stage tradition of minstrelsy, in which Black people were heavily caricatured. With the advancement of civil rights, a growing public rejection of the stereotype, and television broadcasting standards of the mid-20th century, both characters went extinct by the 1950s.

The movie palace, during the classic Hollywood era from the 1920s to the 1940s, held thousands of people at a time. Floor managers used uniformed, flashlight-carrying usherettes and ushers, drilled like military troops, to herd crowds to their seats without any disturbance or delay. When the TV sets drew crowds away from the theaters during the 1950s, many of the grand theaters either closed or had only one person working on floor management. Thus, the usherettes and ushers disappeared.

From the 1900s to the 1960s, traveling tent show troupes like Bisbee’s Comedians went from town to town in the Midwest and the South. Their main attraction was consistently the same character, Toby, a red-wigged, freckled country bumpkin who always managed to best the city folk. And it wasn’t just one Toby. Many different performers played the role over the decades. When television introduced rural-themed comedy shows, like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show, the tent shows died.

From the 1870s until the 1940s, medicine shows rode into rural towns in horse-drawn wagons. They recruited banjo players, comedians, and magicians to give free shows. When the audience was gathered, the pitchman would take over and try to sell his wares. He would offer patent tonics and elixirs, which were untested concoctions of alcohol, herbs, and flavored water that were marketed as miracle medicines. By the 1950s, these shows had disappeared because of stricter food and drug laws and the popularity of television, which provided free comedy programs and paid commercials for medicines.

From the 1830s to the 1940s, showboats, barges pushed by steamboats, brought live melodrama and musical revues to small, isolated towns along the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers. The performers lived right on the boats, announcing their arrival by playing steam calliopes before the show started. Paved highways, movie theaters, and television eventually put an end to the original touring showboats. The last of them, the Goldenrod, kept running regular shows into the 1940s.

In 1904, the booking agent Keith Vawter began sending touring circuit Chautauquas around small-town America. They brought a caravan of lecturers, classical musicians, and performers to millions of rural Americans under big canvas tents, giving them lectures and dramatic readings they wouldn’t have had otherwise. The Great Depression put a real strain on the business, and the whole touring circuit came apart in 1932. Radio in the 1930s and then TV gave people similar entertainment right in their homes for free. The circuit never made a comeback.

From the 1700s through the 1910s, lanternists toured theaters and halls with lanterns, which were optical devices that used oil flames or limelight as light sources. In phantasmagoria ghost shows, lanternists placed their lanterns on wheeled carriages behind smoke screens or gauze curtains and rolled the carriages toward audiences, causing painted skeletons and demons to seem to grow and fly toward viewers. Lantern shows didn’t use film. They used hand-painted glass slides. Cinema (in the 1890s) and later television killed off live lantern showmanship.

The predecessor of travel documentaries was the stereopticon lecture, which ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. It was Burton Holmes who really pioneered the travelogue. He traveled from town to town with his stereopticon (a two-lens projection lantern) that enabled him to cross-dissolve between hand-colored photographic glass slides as he related his experiences on stage. Newsreels, sound documentaries, and even home TV travel shows would put an end to live lecture entertainment.

Long before it became easy to record your own music for playback, you could hear any song at home through a pianola or player piano. These devices played musical notes from paper rolls with holes punched in them. Musicians would perform at a keyboard and then roll punchers would translate the performance into holes on paper rolls, manually encoding each note, tempo and dynamic. Some of the more famous pianists like George Gershwin performed over 140 piano rolls between 1916 and 1927, while editors like Frank Milne hand-punched the paper rolls. But once radio, then phonographs and eventually television gave easy recording/playback, roll-punching faded into obscurity.

In the Golden Age of Radio (late 1920s through early 1950s), daytime soap operas used the talents of live studio organists (like Jesse Crawford) to accompany performances, watching the actors at the mic and playing emotional stings and suspense chords, all while the drama was actually being performed. These musicians could score dozens of 15-minute serials each day. When many radio programs were transferred to TV or ended their runs in the 1950s, they no longer employed the live organist but instead used records from library music services.

Radio shows that did not go out live over network telephone lines during the 1930s and 1940s were recorded instead on transcription discs. These were large, 16-inch records, far larger than what was commercially available. Distributors produced, packaged, and shipped thousands of these delicate discs weekly to local stations across the country. The stations then used record players designed specifically for those records. When magnetic tape came along, followed by cable and satellite delivery systems for television, this courier business disappeared.

Early movies were only about 10-15 minutes long from reel to reel between 1894 and the late 1910s, so there were a few minutes when the projectionist would get the next reel set up. Nickelodeons hired illustrated song singers to keep the audiences entertained during those breaks. Accompanied by the piano player in the theater, they would sing popular songs while images of the lyrics, painted onto glass slides, were projected on the screen. When movies became longer and then sound films and television came along, they eliminated the reel-change break, and this occupation became obsolete.

In the days of silent movies, there was no soundtrack, so the dialogue was provided in written intertitles (cards) placed between the shots. From 1913 to 1928, studios around the world employed intertitle card artists and calligraphers to hand-letter every line, and sometimes add artistic borders or illustrative details to set a mood. A few title writers received screen credit. When sound film was introduced in 1927 with “The Jazz Singer,” it rendered intertitles virtually obsolete. And so this occupation became extinct well before the invention of TV.

In New York, Chicago, and Hollywood, many a radio stock actor got along on voice alone, reading from a script and playing multiple characters a day through changes in tone, dialect, and apparent age. As TV assumed the mantle of dramatic presentation, actors with neither photogenic faces nor previous acting credits found themselves without a job. Some, but certainly not all, struggled to make the transition to acting on camera. It was a chapter that ended, permanently, on September 30, 1962, when CBS transmitted its last episode of “Suspense” and “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.”

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