MOUNT VERNON — It is my understanding the stage of the Cooper Theatre still exists in the upstairs of a building on Public Square in Mount Vernon.
It has occasionally been used for play productions over the years, but over a century ago, it was a busy place.
The earliest I could find a reference to it was in a 1907 newspaper article from Coshocton, where the Coshocton Tribune stated that the noted actress Laura Buckley would be leaving an extended run in Coshocton to perform at the Cooper Theatre in Mount Vernon.
Though elements of the building have been altered, both the Cooper Theatre and the Tobacco Store next door are recognizable as surviving structures that can be seen today. (Image source: Google Maps.)
It gave little further information about her performances, but did express regret at seeing her go.
“All were glad that they were given an opportunity to hear Miss Buckley at the Sixth Street Theater when she was here, but regret that we could not see more of her than we did.”
I’m not entirely sure if that reporter was talking about her acting or Miss Buckley’s cleavage, the way he phrased that. Either way, she clearly had her fans.
Unfortunately, another actress today has that same name, so finding anything about a minor celebrity from 1907 is difficult.
Perhaps her height of fame was a one-word review in Variety magazine in 1908 of her performance in Reading, Ohio: “Fair.”
Other newspaper reports mention that civic meetings were also held in the Cooper Theatre, but as early as 1910, it was struggling.
An article from the March 15, 1910, issue of the Democratic Banner said that patronage needed to increase or else the theater would only show movies and discontinue vaudeville shows.
Just a month later, it was announced that the theater’s dressing rooms had been removed to the top floor of the building, so that the stage on the second floor could be expanded to allow for bigger touring shows to appear.
It also appears that a theater named the Blackburn closed in Fredericktown around this time, and their patrons started making the trek to Mount Vernon, boosting the Cooper’s crowds.
The theater’s next adventure took off with a bang. On Saturday, May 7, 1910, a show was performed which included a prop gun. During the performance, the prop gun broke, and was handed to Cooper employee Ralph Beach.
It isn’t clear if he was the stage manager or the prop master for the show — or both — but he took the gun home with him to repair. He successfully repaired the small gun, and brought it back in to the theater Monday morning.
When the theater manager, Sam Hantman, asked about the prop, Beach reached into his pocket and handed it to Hantman.
What Beach forgot, was that he also carried around a small handgun for his own protection. He had started doing this because just days before, he had been robbed of $12 at gunpoint late one night on Vine Street in Mount Vernon.
For protection, he started carrying a small handgun that week. Unfortunately, it was this real gun that he handed Hantman, while the prop gun remained in his other pocket.
Hantman grasped the gun and pulled the trigger to make sure the mechanism worked, and was startled when the gun went off, the bullet narrowly missing his employee and embedding itself in the wall.
Fortunately, the only injury was a slight powder burn to Hantman’s face.
Although I was unable to locate a photo, records shows that Hantman traveled halfway around the world to get to Mount Vernon.
Born Schmuel Hantman, he was a Russian Jew who moved to the United States with his parents in the 1890s, and settled in Pittsburgh. Somehow, he found out about the theater in Mount Vernon, Ohio, which needed a manager in 1908.
He managed the Cooper for several years, overseeing its transition from vaudeville to motion pictures.
The Ralph Beach involved in the gun incident may be the Ralph E. Beach from Brandon, south of Mount Vernon. If so, he was 19 years old at the time of the accident.
When the Great War arose (the conflict we now call World War I), Beach enlisted, and headed to Europe on the ship the USS Ajax. However, Ralph was one of many soldiers struck down by disease.
He was sent home in late 1918, and he died in the hospital in Mount Vernon. He is buried in Brandon.
Boxing and wrestling promoter Al Haft of Columbus fought under the name “Young Gotch” in the early years of the twentieth century, when he managed to knock boxer Al Ackerman completely out of the ring and into the Cooper Theatre’s orchestra pit, yet still was not awarded victory in the match. (Submitted image.)
A popular show the summer of 1910 was a boxing match between “Young Gotch” of Columbus and Al Ackerman of Lima. Both held national boxing championships, and the match was highly anticipated.
At one dramatic point, Gotch walloped Ackerman with an uppercut that knocked
him through the boxing ring ropes, causing Ackerman to fall into the theater’s orchestra pit, where he landed on the piano, which knocked the wind out of him.
After a 10-minute recuperation break, the match continued and was fought to a draw, much to Gotch’s dismay. The two later fought a rematch elsewhere.
Young Gotch was the stage name of Al Haft, who later became first a professional wrestler, then a boxing and wrestling promotor. He remained Columbus based and passed away in the 1970s.
Mention of live shows at the Cooper disappears after 1911, when it appears that it became exclusively a movie theater, the same gradual process of vaudeville being replaced by moving pictures that was happening all over the country as people became fascinated with the new technology.
Sam Hantman remained as manager for a number of years, and began dating Stella Hyman.
When it started to look like Sam and Stella might get married, Stella’s father, Max Hyman, offered Sam a job working as a salesman for his cigar company. One wonders if the cigar store next door to the Cooper Theatre was run by Max, a prominent businessman of Mount
Vernon in those years.
Sam and Stella were married for the rest of their lives, having a number of children. Sam passed away in the late 1930s, according to Lois K. Hanson’s excellent history of Jewish people in Mount Vernon, Our Worthy Townsmen. (That, incidentally, is a book I hope to
write more about in the near future. It is available at Paragraphs Bookstore.)
Thus, it appears that the Cooper Theatre had a short but lively run as a live theater venue, continuing on for a short while as a movie house. It is fascinating to remember the events of this now almost forgotten theater.