§ 114 Me Lady’s One Weak Point
Martin Green, one of the best-known newspaper men in New York, has remarkable memory for faces. Twenty odd years ago he was a reporter in St. Louis. At a summer park he became acquainted with a vaudeville team consisting of a brawny Irishman and the Irishman’s equally brawny Swedish wife. The team had an act which was simple, and yet thrilling. Their stage props consisted of a sledge-hammer and a collection of paving-stones. The pair would come forth from the wings, and the lady would station herself in the centre of the stage and upon her head the gentleman would balance a large, jagged lump of limestone. Then, stepping back, he would swing his sledge-hammer aloft and bring it down with all the force of his mighty arms upon the stone, dashing it into scores of fragments. The lady would blink slightly, take her bow and the couple would back from sight to reappear an hour or so later and repeat the performance.
Two decades passed. In 1920 Green was reporting the National Republican Convention at Chicago. One evening he boarded a trolley car. The car was crowded and Green found standing room on the rear platform. Something about the face of the conductor stirred a memory long buried in his brain. He studied the countenance of the other for a minute and then the answer came to him.
“Say, look here,” he asked. “Aren’t you Brennan of the old team of Brennan and Swenson that used to do a turn at the summer park in St. Louis way back about 1900?”
“That’s right,” said the conductor. Then with a sigh he added, “Sure, but thim was the happy days.”
“What made you quit the stage?” asked Green.
“It was on me wife’s account,” said the ex-Thespian. “She got so she couldn’t stand it no longer, me bustin’ thim cobblestones on her head.”
“Gave her headaches, I suppose,” said Green.
“No, not that,” said Brennan. “It bruk her arches down.”