First were those postcard-sized, machine-autographed pictures of movie and radio stars that one found in beachfront amusement park arcades. I still had cards of Abbott & Costello and Burns & Allen when Donald McNeilly and I sent our first batch of sixty-plus years of show business collections to the University of Arizona in 2008.

It was the comedians I liked best and collected most. After Stan & Ollie, my first ‘comedy crush,’ I found the Marx Brothers and Abbott & Costello. When I began reading everything I could lay my hands on at the library about my favorites (and buying copies of their biographies) for my incipient collection, I discovered that all had begun their careers in vaudeville.

The early 1950s were signal years for me and my mania. Television was my enabler. Until visual recording tape burst the bubble in 1954, early television was live so it needed performers who could memorize an entire script, perform live and ad lib if the set fell down. Few 1950s movie actors were trained to do that, sdo it provided a career revival for vaudevillians: Ed Wynn,  Buster Keaton, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, The Marx Brothers (but not all together), Blossom Seeley, Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Savo, Joe E. Brown, Olsen & Johnson, Sid Caesar & Imogene Coca, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor among others.

That revival did not pass unnoticed in Hollywood. Soon 1930s films were re-released starring vaudevillians Mae West, Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. Shorts with Laurel & Hardy, Leon Errol, Edgar Kennedy and The Three Stooges (all vaudevillians) were leased to television. Even old phonograph recordings were reissued on LP albums. One of the first LPs was the RCA’s 1951 Old Curiosity Shop, a 12-inch platter that included performances by Sophie Tucker, Helen Kane, Will Rogers, John Barrymore, Marlene Dietrich, Fanny Brice, DeWolf Hopper, Nora Bayes and others.

For years I collected every show-business book, magazine and photograph I could get my paws on and could afford. Performers generously responded to my mash notes with autographed photos and material about their careers. My enthusiasms spread far and wide in the performing arts. I grew devoted to modern dance (Ruth St Denis and Martha Graham first performed in vaudeville) and blues and jazz that flowered in black vaudeville, speakeasies and revue.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s a generation of New Vaudevillians had come of age: Bette Midler, Bill Irwin, Arturo Brachetti, Avner the Eccentic and Keith Nelson, Stephanie Monseu & Adam Kuchler of Bindlestiff. And I fell in love with them.

By 1982, when moving entailed crating as many books, recordings, artifacts, scrapbooks and programmes as did furniture, clothing and furnishings, Donald McNeilly and I established the nonprofit American Vaudeville Museum to give purpose and shape to our collections. In the space of a decade our website (www.vaudeville.org) and our print quarterly, Vaudeville Times attracted performers and fans on three continents, and Routledge Press contracted with us to write the large-format, two-volume Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (2006).

The result was many donations of everything from Burns & Allen’s vaudeville trunk to a White Rats union card, so it became necessary to find a larger and more permanent repository for the American Vaudeville Museum collections. Fortunately one of our members was a child vaudevillian, Howie Davis, who suggested and facilitated the relocation of the AVM to University of Arizona’s Special Collections in Tucson. That little singing tap dancer grew into the gentleman and scholar man we know as David Soren, Regent’s Professor of Classics.