Heir to the King

One More Round at Brick's Pavilion
John Willard
Quad-City TimesPublication
March 28, 2006
Page: B1
James A. "Brick" Munro was an entertainment king-pin whose son never lacked cash to pursue his own fun.
The fatherly side of the "King of Bucktown" is revealed by his grandson, Richard Munro, of Seal Rock, Ore.
Richard provides more information about his colorful grandfather, the subject of our Jan. 24 column. It includes a tape recording of an interview in which Richard's father, the late James Munro, talks about the family's legacy in Bucktown, the notorious entertainment district that flourished on the east side of downtown Davenport in the early 20th century.
Here Brick Munro's Pavilion and Summer Garden thrived at the southwest corner of 2nd and Rock Island Street (Pershing Avenue), now the site of Bucktown Center for the Arts.
In the taped interview, James Munro said, thanks to his father, he always had "a pocket full of money" so that he and his friends could play punch board games. He speaks of his father's enterprises that included seven theaters, a livery stable, pool hall and the city's first motorized taxi service.
He also mentions that a young singing bartender named Al Jolson entertained at Brick's Pavilion before achieving fame as one of the biggest musical stars of the 20th century.
Despite its location in a bawdy Bucktown, with its gambling dens and brothels, Brick Munro did not tolerate prostitutes in his saloon and dance hall, his son said in the interview.
Brick Munro died in poverty at age 78 in 1940. Newspaper obituaries noted that he rarely turned down anyone who asked for money.
His son became an overhead crane operator and a labor union activist. His work with the United Auto Workers prompted the taped interview. Born in 1905, he died in 1982.
Richard Munro, 68, son of James Munroe and grandson of Brick Munro, graduated from Davenport (Central) High School in 1956 and from St. Ambrose College (University) in 1961. He retired in 1997 as a vice president with Nationwide Insurance.
He said his father and grandfather shared similar traits in that both never knew the value of a dollar and would help strangers.
"I am proud of the contributions my grandfather and father made to the Davenport community," he writes.
John Willard can be contacted at (563) 383-2314 or jwillard@qctimes.com.

Mischief Makers

This is the place for random thoughts...right? Hm-m-m
This may not be so random as I have thought about it quite a bit.
Lights on...lights off. Doors locked...doors unlocked. Elevator on...elevator off. Radio off...radio on. Water running...I didn't touch it! Items found in remote places. Coins found dropped in certain areas. (They tell me that is an attention thing.) Now the baby cry mentioned before makes sense since we discovered that Brick lived here with his family for a while. I'm thinking...just maybe...what seems like mischief may be playing with things they didn't have in 'the day'... Well, not at our level anyway. More like toys. They were a happy bunch. That we know for sure. Any thoughts?

Columbia Theater
406 W Third StDavenport IA
Demolished: 1967
Also Known As: Esquire
Originally a vaudeville house, the Columbia was extensively remodeled into a movie house in 1940. The building was demolished in 1967 to make way for a parking lot for the Kahl Building across the street, which houses the Capitol Theatre.

Sophie Admires Bix

by Rolla Chalupa. Davenport.
While he was still in high school, Bix played in the orchestra at the Columbia Theater some nights and always on weekends. When Sophie Tucker ("last of the Red Hot Mamas") came to town she was always the star of the show - and what an elegant lady and good sport she was. Every time she's come out to take her bow, she'd point out Bix and introduce him as "the greatest trumpet player in the world" and he was just a high school kid. Whenever Sophie was on for the afternoon matinee, Bix would play hooky and always buy a box seat and sit there alone for the show. And as soon as she went off, Principal Marshall would march up to the box seat, take Bix by the ear and lead him back to school. It happened several times and always brought down the house. I'd heard about it and a couple of buddies and I played hooky to see it. Sure enough, Mr. Marshall took Bix by the ear. But he understood Bix and enjoyed the joke, and he was never punished.

The Shimmy Queen

From February 27 through March 2, 1921, Bee Palmer and Company played at Davenport, Iowa’s Columbia Theater. According to Esten Spurrier, he and a young Bix Beiderbecke, both budding cornetists, attended every single one of these shows and listened to the great music. The New Orleans men were among the top young jazz musicians, and Pecora and Roppolo were to become legendary.On March 3, 1921, before Bee and her band left Davenport for Peoria, she secretly married her pianist Al Siegel in a midnight ceremony at a judge’s office in the local Masonic Temple. On the marriage license application, Al gave his age as 24 and Bee gave hers as 23. She was actually 27. The Davenport Democrat and Leader reported that Bee “evidenced all the confusion and embarrassment of the unsophisticated school-girl bride and seemed extremely happy when the ceremony had ended.” The bride sported a large purple hat instead of the typical veil.
Bee introduced and is sometimes credited as a writer of one of the most popular "leavin'" songs ever written: Please Don't Talk about Me When I'm Gone In any case the Shimmy was immensely popular in the 1920's and served as the inspiration for the popular song If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (A. J. Piron, 1922). Bee was sometimes referred to as "the Shimee-She-Wabble Girl".
On First Looking into Bee Palmer's Shoulders
by Franklin P. Adams. With bows to Keats andKeith's
["The World's Most Famous Shoulders"]
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent upon a peak in Darien."
MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of jazz,
And many goodly arms and shoulders seen
Quiver and Quake--if you know what I mean;
I've seen a lot, as everybody has.
Some plaudits got, while others got the razz.
But when I saw Bee Palmer, shimmy queen,
I shook--in sympathy--my troubled bean,
And said, "This is the utter razmatazz."
Then felt I like some patient with a pain
When a new surgeon swims into his ken,
Or like stout Brodie, when, with reeling brain,
He jumped into the river. There and then
I swayed and took the morning train
To Norwalk, Naugatuck, and Darien.

Brick's Place

Brick's Heritage

Data: Ancestry.com
James A. Munro: Genealogy
Born September 7, 1862
Died 1940
1908 Davenport City Directory
Res. 229 1/2 East 2nd Vice Pres. Family Theater Co. Saloon and Livery 305-311 East 3rd
Palace Hotel 111-115 Brady
Wife: Anna P - birth 1878
Children: George A - birth 1908
Ruth M - birth 1912
Evelyn - birth May 18, 1915

1880 Census
Parents: David - birth 1836 - Kate - birth 1840
Siblings: Margaret - birth 1865
Mary - birth 1869

More to come...we hope.

More Art Starts in Bucktown

The Victor Animatograph Company and the Genesis of Non-Theatrical Film
By David H. Shepherd 1975
Alexander F. Victor
Motion Picture Pioneer
Born in Bollnas, Sweden June 20, 1878 .... Died March 30, 1961
Formed the Victor Animatograph Company April 1910-May 1956
216 1/2-218 1/2 East 3rd
submiting 86 patents most of which were accepted.
Invented stereotrope, animatograph,
Stereoptican, viopticon (thin but strong glass slides 2 1/4 x 2 3/4 in a press board frame).
More about Alexander F. Victor , inventions and a complete list of his patents.

Jolson, Blind Billy and Brick

What tales the old brick streets of downtown Davenport could tell if the asphalt paving were stripped away.
One of the celebrated clubs of the early 1900s was Brick Munro's Pavilion at the south-west corner of Pershing Avenue and Second Street in Bucktown.
Munro, so the memories tell, ran a straight place_no girls, no gambling, just a saloon and good music.
The legend has been handed down so many times that there must be some truth in it.
Once Munro hired a young man by the name of Al Jolson as a singing waiter. In later, more prosperous years, Jolson returned to Davenport to star on the stage at the Burtis Opera House. At intermission, he called out to the audience:
"You paid three bucks to hear me tonight. A couple years ago, you could hear me for the price of a beer at Brick Munro's."
High-salaried performers from theaters around the Tri-Cities regularly would wind up the night singing or playing at Munro's. One of them was a piano player named Blind Billy, who appeared on many vaudeville stages across the nation and made much to-do about his claim that-though blind-that he could play any song called to him from the audience, without music of course.
Billy enjoyed the atmosphere of Munnro's and stayed for nearly a year.
The story goes that one day a bartender called to Munro:
"Hey, Brick, Billy wants to see you."
Munro yelled back: "He'll have a hard time seeing me, he's blind."
Customers in the place laughed , and that became a part of Blind Billy and Brick Munro's nightly routine.

Stroll Through Bucktown

Let's go on a reconstructed walking tour of Bucktown in 1907. The area took in about six square blocks: from Front Street to East Third, and from Perry to the Arsenal Bridge annd the main line of the Rock Island Lines. From the vantage point of a westbound train or by foot, the area consisted of low-lying buildings, warehouses, small shops, tenement houses and saloons. The visitor could see hillside mansions beyond his line of vision and below the elevated tracks, some females might be posing in the windows or perhaps waving as the train slowed down, stopping first at the Burtis House at Perry and Fourth. Alighting from the train, our walk starts in a southern direction.
At the heart of the district was Brick Munro's dance hall.
At the peak of it's popularity,more than 1,000 people a night would stop in and have a beer while listening to the singing waiters on a small stage. This platform was used "by the professional vaudeville performers who would frequently do their turns on their turns on these slight stages ....As a result, many people who normally would not have felt free to visit the district....could rationalize that they were just going to watch the shows." The result was that Brick Munro's weekly receipts topped $2,500.
In reality, Brick's was a dancing pavilion and saloon. Floyd Dell...Davenport poet and socialist, described it from first hand experience. Herewith is his report:
A wire fence divides a row of seats and tables roofed by a trellis of vines from the dancing floor, with it's whitewashed pillars, wall and ceiling and in one corner bar.
The liquor was only part of the operation.
Tables and chairs range the sides of the room at which sit well dressed young men and girls. Over in the shade stands a special policeman , whose duty it is to see that the lads and lassies who have had too much and are getting loud leave before they have a chance to start a rough house. In the saloon the barkeep is doing a rushing business.
One possible legacy of the departed Bucktown was the introduction of syncopated music such as ragtime and jazz down by the riverfront. Many of the saloons had mechanical pianos which played for a nickle, but Brick's, the Standard and perhaps a few other places, had musicians who played. In my opinion, this could very well be the inspiration for the future coronet virtuoso, Bix Beiderbeck, who would have been a teenager when the district was disappearing. From the beginning, syncopated music was condemned as immoral and quite logically associated with with it's surroundings in bordellos down in New Orleans. As the black musicians slowly moved to Chicago, they probably stopped off in places like Davenport where the young Bix was stimulated into musical experiments. A contemporary opinion was that "jazz music is the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. Like the improper anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to behind closed doors and drawn curtains, but like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings and there wass tolerated because of it's oddity." By 1917 the first black jazz musicians were playing in Chicago and Bix had decided that music would be his life.

Artfully Creative Chef

Scott Co, Iowa USGenWeb Project
Davenport Democrat,
July 20, 1924HOME EDITION

The Chef Extraordinary.
William Coulter was the man who made the old Burtis house famous all over the United States thru his cooking. In fact, so great was the improvement in the preparation of the food when he returned to the kitchen after an absence of a few months that The Democrat spoke glowingly on the following day, July 2, 1864. "The boarders at the Burtis house were highly gratified yesterday at the change of the order of affairs in the culinary department. There was such a sudden change in the style of cooking that an inquiry was at once instituted to ascertain the cause. The investigation resulted in bringing out the fact that the old time and popular Burtis cook-William Coulter-was back at his post again. Mr. Coulter is one of the best cooks in the country. He was with the Burtis house from its opening until last spring when he left for a while. He commands in the kitchen and the public will have the return of those splendid dinners such as he along knows how to place upon the table." Previous to coming to the Burtis, Mr. Coulter had made the LeClaire house noted for its cuisine. He had come to Davenport from Chicago in 1858 and previous to that time had been chef of the Collamore and Globe hotels of New York, the National at Washington and a number of leading Chicago hotels.