A Lucky Find

I'm back at the family history project and found this little gem of a book on the internet.  (You've just gotta love the internet!)  Little isn't the right word, though.  The thing is 500 pages long and contains way more information than I want or need.  However, thumbing through it revealed some really interesting tidbits, so I'm grateful to have found it.

McKee Rankin was my great-grandfather.  He was born in 1844 in Sandwich, Canada, the son of another actor, Arthur Rankin.  He married an actress, Kitty Blanchard, and together they had three daughters, one of whom, Phyllis, was my grandmother.  He was considered "a matinee idol and a superb character actor.  He wrote successful Western dramas, in which he and his wife created unforgettable characters."  He built a theater in New York City and one in San Francisco where, in the 1880s, he created a nationally famous repertory theater. 

In a preface to the book, Author Robert C. Toll explains:

"The period roughly between 1850 and 1920 was the heyday of popular theater in America.  Before 1850, drama had a principally urban, heavily elitist audience; after 1920, movies and radio supplied the popular drama, and the theater returned to its elitist base.  But for the seventy years in between, live drama was everywhere in the nation. This period is usually ignored or at best skimmed over in theater histories because it produced few plays that critics judge to be important.  But in that period more than any other, drama belonged to the people, the common people.  It reflected their desires, needs and tastes.  While trying to plot successful careers for themselves, actors and promoters playing to the average American unconsciously discovered basic formulas that continually re-emerged in American popular culture"