Other popular 1910 films included the sentimental “Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency,” an early, 13-minute version of “The Wizard of Oz,” a 16-minute version of “Frankenstein,” the nine-minute documentary “A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner,” the four-minute “Aeroplane Flight and Wreck,” and one of the earliest stop-motion films, the four-minute “The Automatic Moving Company,” about furniture moving itself into a house. Bert charged 25 and 35 cents, with a Thanksgiving discount price of 10 cents. Reader is not saying much, but he walks with a perceptible limp.” The Vaudette customarily did not advertise in the Daily Press, but it made one exception around Thanksgiving of 1910, when it ran an ad for a screening of the blockbuster film “The Life of Moses.” Unlike the usual one-reel silent movies shown at nickelodeons, this film’s five reels took 90 minutes to play. “He kept right on going and those who saw the evolutions he made declare that he is perfectly competent to draw $1,000 a week at any summer resort. “The wheel stopped-the whistle stopped-everything stopped but Mr. In cutting across a vacant lot, Bert ran into a wire that someone had erected to keep passersby off the grass. The proprietor of the local moving theater, it is said, was gaily bowling along Forest Avenue mounted on his steel steed, ” said the article. One sub-headline read, “Residents Living in Vicinity of Forest Avenue and Hamilton Street Highly Edified by Spectacular Exhibition. An accident resulted in a front-page story in the Ypsilanti Daily Press. If Bert had the genial gregarious nature of a good barber, it carried over well into his new career of entertaining the public, as he was well-known and well-liked in town. When the grocer’s shop at 19 North Huron closed, Bert purchased it and became a theater manager. Elizabeth kept house and tended their toddler Russell. Bert worked as a barber at his brother William’s shop, the Opera House Shaving Parlors, at 222 Michigan Avenue. The couple settled in Ypsilanti on River Street, moving in a few years to a house at 728 Lowell on the north side of town near the present-day EMU campus. In July of 1896, Bert married Elizabeth Myers, the Michigan-born daughter of German immigrant parents, in Essex, Ontario. Bert, Thomas and Eliza’s last child, was born just a few days before Jhis parents gave him the middle name of Centennial. Around 1875 the family moved to Michigan, settling in Ypsilanti. The family immigrated to Canada around 1860, where Lizzie, Josie, William, and Edward were born. Their first, Comfort, was born in England. Bert’s English-born parents Thomas and Eliza had had their six children in three different countries. Pianist Elizabeth was accompanied by her husband, singer Bert Reader, a former local barber who’d founded the Vaudette. To the side of the screen sat an upright piano at which a woman played popular pieces of the day to accompany the images being changed by her son Russell at the stereopticon. A variety of illuminants were used including kerosene, acetylene gas, and an apparatus that burned a piece of the white alkaline material lime in an oxyhydrogen gas flame, giving rise to the technical and later metaphorical term “lime-light.” Visitors to the Vaudette who had paid their nickel could choose one of the forty or so plain wooden chairs arranged on the old grocery store’s wooden floor, facing the small makeshift screen in back. Resembling a lantern-camera hybrid, the stereopticon had a slot in which a glass plate with an image could be inserted. In its earliest days, The Vaudette didn’t show movies, but still images from a turn-of-the-century slide projector called a stereopticon. In 1907, a tiny nickelodeon opened in a former grocer’s shop on the west side of North Huron, just north of the present-day Dalat. Ypsilanti’s first movie theater wasn’t the Martha Washington at Washington and Pearl (now the Déjà Vu) or the Wuerth on Michigan Avenue (now a salon adjacent to the Wolverine Grill). This story previously appeared in the Ypsilanti Courier.
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