Celtic Engagement Rings

Irish Newsboy

Irish Newsboy

In the 1880s, no man about Albany was a more welcome and popular sight than Joseph Kline Emmet. Cordial, good-natured, generous, and often a trifle tipsy, the renowned actor was typically met with the heartiest of greetings from all segments of the city's society as he took his almost ritualistic promenades down Pearl Street. "Fritz," to use the stage name by which he was universally and affectionately known, responded in kind to the greetings, including, as records of the day attest, both newsboys and bank presidents in his local army of admirers and friends.

After all, in his day Fritz was a major star. Whenever and wherever he took to the stage, full houses clamored to see their favorite comedian and no performer, it was said, commanded a higher salary than the one-time Missouri mill worker. Well over a century ago, Fritz's average yearly earnings hovered around the $100,000 mark (the equivalent of more than two million dollars today).

But Fritz might never have become a star if not for serendipity and a generally guileless Albany audience. The son of poverty-ridden Irish immigrants, Joseph Kline Emmet first went to work at age ten, as the sole support of his mother and two sisters, in a St. Louis mill in exchange for $1.50 a week and all of the hominy the struggling family could eat. Emmet was left entirely on his own just a few years later by the death of his mother and the early marriages of his sisters.

Before long, he found his way unto the stage and into the minstrel circuit, where he introduced the persona of "Fritz," America's first German dialect comedy character (think Katzenjammer Kids). Understandably, at least one German scholar has chafed at that nineteenth century cultural reality in recent years, but in the easy, unself-conscious ethnic caricature of Fritz's day, the character was loosely based on one of Emmet's landlords from his time living in St. Louis rooming houses.

Although Emmet had already been portraying Fritz for several years in New York City variety theatres and minstrel companies, it was his first appearance in a full-length play that secured his--and Fritz's--fame. In a telling of the story that is melodramatic in itself, Fritz, Our Cousin German was written during a frantic all-night session only hours before its scheduled opening at a Buffalo theatre. That, at least, is the local version.

With a bottle of ink at one hand and a bottle of brandy at the other, Charles Gayler (some local histories have it, "Gaylord"), then one of the premier figures of the American theatre, furiously scribbled the play that was to make Emmet rich and famous. The work was completed at the last minute and the unrehearsed and unschooled actor took the stage.

The play was only moderately well-received during its initial one-week run in Buffalo, but it was there that fate intervened and gave Emmet a much-needed break. On the closing day of the engagement, the theatre manager received a telegram from the next-scheduled performers informing him that they would not be able to keep the booking. Emmet was asked to fill in. Improbably, the scene repeated itself the following week, and the play ended up with an impressive three-week run that seemed to belie the mediocre notices he had garnered.

By the time Emmet arrived in Albany--two weeks late--audiences were convinced that the extended engagement must surely signify a major hit. The enthusiastic, standing-room-only crowds that greeted Emmet here ensured his success and played no small part in making Fritz a theatrical phenomenon. That, at any rate, is the story Albany writers of the time recount. The perhaps more objective accounts that turn up in theatrical histories note that the play, the first of four scripts written for Emmet's character, Fritz Von Vonderblinkenstoffen, actually had opened in New York at Wallack's Theatre on July 11, 1870, for a two-month run that was followed by a year-long tour before the show returned to New York.

But what is clear is that Fritz was immediately and ever after a favorite of Albanians, and the feeling was fully reciprocated. A dozen years after his first, fortuitous visit to the city, Fritz came back to make Albany his home. The imposing, somewhat garish, mansion that he erected on Van Rensselaer Boulevard in 1882 was known as "Fritz Villa" during the decade he lived there, but following his untimely death at the age of 51 the estate passed into other hands and underwent a change of name.

Joseph Kline Emmet died on June 15, 1891, succumbing to pneumonia and a general state of dissipation that he himself attributed to "an insatiable craving at times for alcohol." At his funeral, the Reverend Dr. Farrar of Trinity Methodist Church eulogized Fritz as a man "who was whole-souled and benevolent, but his own worst enemy." Emmet was buried in Albany Rural Cemetery, like so many prominent Albanians through the centuries.

As for Emmet's Albany estate, his oversized home soon developed a significance apart from his legacy, becoming a pivotal place for generations of Albanians. In 1891, not long after Emmet's death, New York Governor David Hill purchased "Fritz Villa" and renamed it "Wolfert's Roost" taking the new name from a Washington Irving tale. It retained that name in later years when it was to become one of the region's most popular and prominent country clubs.

Excerpted from Albany Scrapbook, Vol. 1 by Kenneth Salzmann Copyright 2006 http://www.albanyscrapbook.blogspot.com http://www.literaryenterprises.com

Kenneth Salzmann is a freelance writer whose Albany history columns originally appeared in the magazine, Albany, New York, in the 1980s.

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