Dramatis Personae « The Strange Case of the Sunday Stagebill

Dramatis Personae

WALTER J. PUDDINGBOTTOM (1894-1952)

The original “Jovial Impresario” of the Eckington Theater in Washington, DC. After taking ownership of a small, community theater in 1929, Puddingbottom had dreams of hosting large scale Broadway productions. The theater’s location in the rough-and-tumble northeast section of Washington was not the sort of destination the city’s upper crust had in mind, however. Walter believed that if he could host a radio program from the theater, then the stars — and the customers — would soon follow.

For years in the early 30′s Walter consistently hounded the executives of the NBC Radio Network (the one his mother preferred) and begged them to do a live broadcast from his stage. Tired of the wheedling, whining Walter, NBC executives fooled him into believing they had created a new network — the NBC Orange Network — to accompany the Red and Blue network, thereby giving them a space on their air schedule. They gave Walter a cheap recording device, told him it was a transmitter, and for nearly 20 years thereafter Walter hosted his own little program.

He called it “The Sunday Stagebill” and recorded each program on wax discs, believing that to be the method of broadcasting at the time. With his sidekick (and some say he was more than that), Eldon McCarricker, Walter ruled the airwaves of his mind until an NBC executive spilled the beans in 1952 when Walter began asking for his own television show.

Walter was found dead in a Montreal hotel room on January 5, 1952. Apparently fell (or was pushed, some say) down the steps and, before he died, wrote the word “Huzzah” in his own blood on a nearby wall. McCarricker told reporters that he felt it was Walter’s way of trying to capture Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” mystique. At any rate, it failed. He was buried, broke and forgotten in an unknown, unmarked grave in DC.

ELDON McCARRICKER (1904 — ??)

Walter met young Eldon McCarricker when he purchased the Eckington Theater in 1929. Eldon was in charge of mopping up spit and other liquids from the stage floor. Being Walter’s assistant meant a small increase in pay for Eldon, but it was just the beginning of his suffering.

Eldon was Walter’s foil, his companion, his lackey, his stooge and his object of torment. For his part, Eldon loved Walter as a surrogate father and in ways that we can’t really understand not having been there at the time.

When XM Satellite Radio sold the remnants of the Eckington Theater in 2002, its contemporary host, Broadway Bill Schmalfeldt, searched for Eldon and found him in a Missouri nursing home. He took Eldon with him to New York City and made him his house boy at his Park Avenue estate. Eldon caused problems, however, by constantly inviting dirty homeless people to come and soak in the hot tub, and Broadway Bill had to let him go.

His whereabouts are unknown, but a search of obituaries hasn’t turned up a death notice, so we will assume he is still alive and bothering someone.

WILHELMINA McKECKNIE PUDDINGBOTTOM (1857-1954)

A horrible, morbidly obese and evil woman, Wilhelmina was a constant source of stress in Walter’s life. She was never actually photographed, but the accompanying drawing comes from a crude playbill Walter commissioned upon the occasion of his mother’s performance in some Gilbert and Sullivan farce in the Eckington Theater in 1931. Wilhelmina played the house organ for the program’s intro each week, and later said that her greatest accomplishment in life was outliving Walter by nearly two years.

OTIS Q. PUDDINGBOTTOM (1894-1949)

For years, Walter believed he was an only child. Not so. His wretched mother gave birth to twins that cold, dank morning in 1894. Fearing that two children would leave less food for her, she gave one to a traveling agricultural exhibit. Luckily for young Otis, he landed with a wealthy family in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin where he amassed quite a fortune in corn and pigs.

On three separate occasions that we’re aware of, Otis attempted to persuade his brother to abandon the Eckington and join him in Wisconsin. But Walter, so star-struck by his imagined radio fame, refused to consider it. They lost contact with each other, and Otis died in 1949 when a pig took a bite out of his spine.