Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/115

Rh vaudeville players now call a "wow", and began interpolating it nightly.

Still I had no idea of the author's identity. The initials, E. L. T., had been appended to the clipping, now long lost or destroyed. We played Worcester, Massachusetts, for one night sometime in the middle nineties, and there I met a Mr. Hammond who had sung bass in the quartet at O. B. Frothingham's church, where my mother was organist, and who now was teaching voice in the Massachusetts city. Hammond wrote me a note asking me to come to the Worcester Club after the performance. If I would do so he would introduce me to the author of Casey.

Casey's long-lost parent proved to be Ernest L. Thayer, known to all Worcester as Phinney Thayer, the son of a wealthy textile-mill owner. Thayer had been a contemporary of William Randolph Hearst at Harvard. When Senator Hearst gave the San Francisco Examiner to his son, the younger Hearst took Thayer to California with him, and there he used to contribute occasional verses, of which Casey was one, to the Examiner. In his modesty Thayer waited so long before advancing his rightful claim to the poem that it has been challenged by innumerable