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Theresa Jane Baldwin, age twenty-one, had been
performing in the chorus of The Billionaire in Chicago
until the unexpected death of the production's leading comedic
star,
Jerome Sykes. Rather than attending his funeral the
afternoon December 30, 1903, some of his fellow cast members,
including Theresa, went to the Iroquois
Theater to see a Mr. Bluebeard matinee. For Theresa
the performance would have been especially fun because her
sister, thirty-two-year-old Mary E. Baldwin Law, was in the cast.* |
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The real name of
Mr.
Bluebeard chorus girl Mona Baldwin was
Mary E. Baldwin Law
(1871-1944). In
1891 she had married Leonard L. Stephenson (1865-),
in 1893 Alfred N. Law, with whom she had five
children before his death in 1919. She then
married William Craven, a widow.
Four
of her children lived to old age.† She lived in
Methuen, Massachusetts. Alfred worked as a
section hand in a worsted mill such as
Arlington Mills. (In 1901 he'd completed a
two-year course in worsted spinning at the
Lowell Textile School in Lowell, Mass, a member
of the second class to graduate from the school.)
William Craven was a carpenter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jane Theresa
Baldwin (1882 - 1962),‡ married Rolland Rolla Lester Halsted (1877-1951) in 1914. He was an
optometrist. His first marriage to Nellie E.
Woodford in 1906 had failed. Sometimes Jane went by
Jane, other times by Theresa. In 1908 she was
performing as a comedienne in The Serenaders
in Cincinnati. Her stage career lasted until at least 1913 (see news story at
right).
Jane and Rolla spent
most of their lives in Pekin, Illinois. In
1920 her widowed mother lived there with them. Jane and Mary Baldwin were
two of nine children born to English immigrants,
grocer Thomas Baldwin (1836-1917) and Anna Johnson
Baldwin (1843-). Their siblings were Lottie,
Margaret, Herbert, Walter, Sarah, Ann and Joseph. |
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1913 story in New York Clipper
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Discrepancies and addendum
* She
may have been in a party with other Billionaire
cast members, two of whom were not as lucky and lost their
lives in the fire. They were
Clarence Scott (aka Harry Hudson) and Arthur Caville.
† It is not known why
The New York Clipper referenced Mary's prior married name,
Stephenson, rather than Law. Perhaps the person who supplied the information to
Clipper wasn't up to date on her marital status.
‡ Jane's
obituary identified her as a surviving
Bluebeard cast member rather than as a member
of the audience but the 1904 NY Clipper story
reverses that and puts Jane in the audience and Mary
in the Bluebeard cast. Despite one
error in the Clipper story (see above note about
Stephenson/Law), other statements in the story,
involving five individuals, have been verifiable
with other records. Given a story composed
within weeks of the fire versus a story fifty nine
years later, probably based on the understanding by
nursing home staff where ninety-one-year-old Jane
spent her last days (since Alfred had been gone for
eleven years by then and they had no children), I'm
inclined to believe the Clipper story from
immediately after the fire. |
