The boys who write the blurbs about George M. Cohan for the newspapers have me all wrong. They have given the public the idea that I and all my family have always been "big towners," and that we had been born and bred and fed on Broadway. The most that Broadway can claim of one or of all the four Cohans are the feathers that "the road" stuck in our caps.

We were all four small-town folks, when you get right down to it. Boston was really a small town when it gave Jerry Cohan, my father, to the world. Providence, Rhode Island, was what the profession affectionately called a "tank town" when Helen Cohan, nee Costigan, was born there. It wasn't much more than that one morning—now 61 years ago—when the whole town was shooting off fireworks, not to celebrate the blessed event of my birth, but because it was the Fourth of July. And it was in the Boston Museum—and not on Broadway—that many years later, as The Four Cohans, we launched into "big time."

Finally, it was neither the Big City nor the Windy City that first gave us the big hand and the inspiration that led up to it. It was the small towns of America, from New England to the Pacific Coast. We spent most of our early professional days solely in their company. On the "road." And by the "road" I mean the whole of a show-hungry America, outside of four or five big towns.

But the "road," our "road," is gone. For one reason because today it costs as much to move the scenery and the "props" of a show from stage to sidewalk as it once did to make the whole trip from New York to Chicago. There is no question of audiences. They are still there, as hungry as ever. Psychologically they had not changed a whit a couple of years ago when I did 25 weeks of one-night stands with Ah, Wilderness! that I'm still tingling over.

What I'm really trying to say is that the small-town audience has been an important factor in the education of the player and in the growth of the American theater. There was no time for the education of the children of factors' families, and no law to compel it, in those days. It was mainly a school of hard knocks and what you could learn from the study of other men—of audiences, in our case.

In the profession they called us "the travelling Cohans" because we spent nearly all our time on the road. After all these years I don't suppose there's a single American city—"small town" they could be rightly called on looking back—that I haven't played at some time or other. I could draw you a diagram of Main Street and a working plan of the opera house in the majority of cases. I can do this so readily perhaps because the memories are so deep, and are of things and experiences that gave the build up of my career as player and playwright. That's why I shall always love the very smell of the road. In many cases the smell came from those old narrow gauges, like the one that took us to Carbondale, Pennsylvania. I'll never forget that one because it carried us to our first "electrified" theater, over which we were greatly excited and not a little awed. That was back in 1890.

Even in the days that followed, the Edison lights often used to go out in the middle of a show and we had to fall back on the old reliable gas or even coal oil lighting. "The show must go on!" has been the battle cry of the theater, and we never failed our audience.

We were driven by another slogan, too: "The family must go on!" I think I must have crept out on the stage one night from my cradle in the wings and got a laugh and after that I was written in the show! It was something like that. Anyway, the small-town audiences, we discovered, like the real thing, the human touch. Their response is immediate and straight from the individual heart. They don't wait till the dramatic critic in the morning paper tells them what they should think of the show, the way city audiences have got in the habit of doing. That is why I have always tried out gags and songs and plays on the people "in the country," because they represent the people of the country.

Here's an example of what I mean. One of the most popular of many hundred songs I wrote was "The Grand Old Flag." When I composed it, however, I called it "The Grand Old Rag." I'll tell you why. I went to a soldiers' home and talked with the veterans and they affectionately spoke of the flag as "the grand old rag" and in a way that brought tears to my eyes. But nobody but they could use the term without seeming disrespect for the national banner, as I learned by singing it to a couple of road audiences. They were right, and I changed the title.

Our road setup in those earliest days was both simple and homespun. But because we were all simple and homespun together, they enthusiastically accepted us. My father sold the tickets, and, if sales were slow, he would give a ballyhoo on the sidewalk that he had learned in minstrel and medicine-show days. My mother collected the tickets at the door. Josephine, my sister, was the usherette. I was usually sent up to the corner of Main Street with handbills. Tickets sold at 25 and 50 cents for adults, 15 cents for children. Father blarneyed all the mothers by pinching the cheeks of their children and calling them all "the little darlin's!"—although he would have liked to charge them $1 admission because they were always disturbing the show. We were ever looking for a "$200 house." It would have taken all the worry out of the rest of a season. Sometimes we actually did find it by catching up with a county fair or a rural convention. Stack that up alongside my recent show, I'd Rather Be Right, where the boys in the "front office" began to grouse about poor business and talk of closing if we didn't gross $28,000!

That's the difference. It's all a business proposition today. It has to be. That's taken the old time fun out of it, when there was always something personal between us players and the small town audiences, yet with a whole lot of respect for each other at that. I remember that my father had a way of winking over the footlights at the heads of families in the audience as though to say. "This is confidential now, all that I'm sayin' to yez—between your family, God bless 'em!, and mine!" And it went over big in every place he did it.

The show itself was always of the same general character in those earliest days. Dancing, minstrelsy, and a sketch. That's when my sister first did her "Skirt Dance," which afterward became a famous headliner. This was followed by an ensemble minstrel number with songs, dances, and wisecracks. Then came the sketch. The last act consisted of individual dance "specials," the finale bringing out all four Cohans in a buck-and-wing "hoe-down" for the curtain. Then I jumped down in the crowd and sold our photographs at 10 cents each.

From the time I was 5 the family had me scraping tunes on an old fiddle we had picked up in a second-hand shop in Peoria, Illinois, billing me as "Tricks and Tunes, by Master Georgie, the Youngest Virtuoso." It brought out a knack laboring to be born in me, of picking tunes out of the air. They seemed to get the audience, making them either laugh or cry. And that's the essence of the whole show business: make 'em laugh or cry—no matter how! That was one of the most valuable lessons the road taught me, away back in my short-pants' day, and I've never ceased to be grateful for it. It was one of the most trying parts I ever played, however, due to the fact that the folks had dug up out of the "property" trunk a velveteen Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with a lace collar. After nearly every show I had to teach several small boys of the audience that I wasn't the kind of a sissie at whom they had been sticking out their tongues.

We prospered, and our company went out enlarged to six and became known as "The Cohan Mirthmakers." We put on our version of The Exploits of Daniel Boone, in addition to a variety bill. We took on a regular "advance man," who went ahead, hired a hall, an opera house, a tent, or whatever he could get. He billed the town and plastered it with "paper" enough to keep us out of any trouble that might arise. We carried another "extra," at $6 a week and board, as "baggage smasher." He took care of the theatrical trunks in which we carried the whole show—costumes, scenery, and properties.

In those barnstorming days we had no scripts, not even cues. You had to be a "natural" to get across. My father would assemble the company for first rehearsal, step out before us, clear his throat, and become very Irish. "And what could you do for your country, sir?" he would ask one of the newcomers. "An Irish comedian? So you think that, do you? Now, here's the idea of the show, I'll have you know," he would continue. And it was just a free-forall. Give and take. A battle of wits. The lines were changed frequently, retaining only those that got a laugh or brought tears to the eyes of the audience.

But the Cohans soon learned that they had lost contact with the audience that had given them their inspiration. We thought at first that the audiences were slipping. But it was really our "augmented company" not making good. In that way, and it never fails, the smallest town is the biggest critic. Its judgment is as true as blue. Producers generally have come to recognize this fact and open productions somewhere "out of town." After 100 nights on Broadway I often wish I could take the show out on the roadjust to tone it up. You've simply got to be up on your toes during a one-night stand, for instance. Small-town audiences take a player for what he really is and what he is worth on that important occasion. Audiences may be more polite in the city, but they are not nearly so honest as their out-of-town cousin theater-goers.

A case in point was the group of small boys—especially the bad boys—who came to see our version of Peck's Bad Boy, all varnished up with vaudeville, with which vehicle we recaptured our intimate theater audiences again. Master Georgie, now at the advanced age of 18, stole the show with his impudent playing of the stellar rôle of the Bad Boy. Old folks roared, but small boys resented the portrayal, throwing things at me on the stage and wanting to fight me offstage. Our whole company got all steamed up when we played Madison, Wisconsin. For George W. Peck, Governor of the State and author of Peck's Bad Boy, was in the audience. We all expected to be decorated—or something. Instead the old boy went to sleep on us! He didn't even come backstage. It was the first, and only time I can remember that all or any part of any audience did not give us a square deal. I got my revenge in truly Peck's Bad Boy style, when later that evening my father and I recognized Governor Peck at the bar. I got a large pickle from the free-lunch counter and slipped it down his expensive full-dress shirt front under his vest, and hurried out to the train.

The time came when I added song writing to my career. Those were great days in Tin Pan Alley. Nobody ever had to worry about $1,000 royalty checks then,. If you wrote a smash hit, the publisher would clap you on the back and maybe press a $10 bill in your hand. This was just about 25 years before the day that a certain Tin Pan Alley song publisher handed me a check—made out to the Doughboys' Welfare, I think it was, for they had been responsible for it—for $25,000 for a song called "Over There!" I had jotted it down on the back of an envelope on hearing a bugle call and the sound of thousands of marching feet on their way "over there" on my way down to the theater one morning.

What I am leading up to is that all this song and music writing gave me an idea that changed our lives—mine at least. I would rewrite the Cohan shows with music in the up-to-date vaudeville style that I had picked up in Tin Pan Alley. Even though we were still small-timers, yet nonBroadway audiences were growing up rapidly with the rest of the country, and we had to grow up with them. We went out on the bills as "The Four Cohans," and got out first break in big time "variety" in 1897. That year we got all the way across the United States to California for the first time, although I made it at least ten times during the next dozen years. It was still a long, long way to Tony Pastor's Theater, and Broadway was the shining goal. I'm not trying to be condescending to the road when I say that we made the grade in time, largely due to hard work and the human psychology lessons that small-town audiences had taught us. Perhaps the greatest difference between the road and the world audience of Broadway lay in that on the road there was an intensely personal affection for the actor and an honest feeling of awe for him that was a thing apart from the mere admiration of talent.

I used to remark, in those bright young days of 23 Summers, that the 20th Century was properly and officially opened with my first attempt at a play called The Governor's Son at the Savoy Theater on Broadway! "Look out for success, my son," I used to say before I knew what it really was. "There's always a gag in it!" It seemed to come true, because a year later the four Cohans broke up for the first time since I was born, and I went out on the road alone, with my second self-made show, Little Johnny Jones. It was hard. I was always glancing in the wings for the "old man," or my mother, or Josie to come out and join me in my song and dance. There was that certain intimacy and friendliness, however, in the long-familiar audiences that both kept me up and pepped me up. Sentimental? I hope so. My gags and my lines were all back-yard stuff, because I had learned to figure out that everybody's got a back yard where he lives with his heart and sentiment. I saw to it that Little Johnny Jones was no stranger here. I had long since learned, too, that the whole country had a yen for the great American Baghdad and its Main Street, which I brought to the surface of every audience when I sang "Give My Regards to Broadway!" I don't think the so called sophisticated city ever quite got out of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy," which I sang waving the flag, what its country cousins did. Some years later Abe Erlanger, who understood the Broadway audience better than that of the broad highway, said that I couldn't write a play without a flag in it. I took up his challenge and wrote three flagless plays in a row—The Tavern, The Miracle Man, and The Seven Keys to Baldpate.

The Four Cohans were reunited just once more, in The Yankee Prince, which I wrote with my heart in it because I knew it was our last appearance as a one family show. Every theater on the road seemed to turn out with houses crowded with old friends, as though they were saying "Hello!" and "Good-by!" to the Jerry Cohans and their kids. All the way from coast to coast we played with our eyes filled with Irish tears.

My shirt-sleeve, corned-beef-and-cabbage days in the theater were over. Fifteen years of from soup to nuts as a Broadway producer and partner of Sam Harris followed. Oh, no, I didn't stop trouping. If anything, I think I trouped farther and harder than ever before. We would play Broadway and then go out on the long road. They tell me that I've written and played in a couple of score of plays, a few of them collaborations. I've played in a couple that other people wrote. Funny thing about Ah, Wilderness/ and the role I played in it. I seemed to know the part by heart. I had seen and met that country editor and father a hundred times over the footlights. I had always wanted to play him! Looking back, I've had nothing but fun out of it all. I guess that is because I put so much hard work into it. That's another thing I learned on the road: that you'll get a long way in the theater with plenty of hard work and a little honest hokum.

Finally, let me say that although I've always been "onto" Broadway, I never got into Broadway life myself. I've been to just one night club—years ago. I travel a pretty straight line between the theater and home. A homebody? Perhaps. I've always been that way, when I could be long enough in one place to have a home. Lonely? Not so long as I have a few cronies of many years' standing. They all show up perhaps once a week. Maybe we talk. Maybe we don't. That's friendship. True, I live in an apartment, but it's opposite the broad green acres of the Park. Once every day I walk round the Reservoir with a piece of grass between my teeth, and play with the squirrels.

In a small town everybody would know me and that I was 61 years old on the Fourth of July. But here in the "big town" nobody knows—or cares.