Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/178

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN but only as a sort of animated magic-lantern show. The photoplay was not more than two years old. Films, which had originally been sold outright to exhibitors, now were beginning to be rented through exchanges, and the salesmen, such as Aitken, virtually were peddlers packing a suitcase of assorted reels from nickelodeon to nickelodeon.

Among young Aitken's customers was John R. Freuler, a Milwaukee real-estate operator who had been forced to take over the Theater Comique, a five-cent picture theater on Kinnikinnic Avenue, to protect an investment, and who found that he had no choice but to operate the place himself or close it up. He gave the orphan one pigeonhole in his desk and saw to it in chance moments, taking care as a business man of weight and dignity not to publish to his associates that he was the owner of an institution that had the social standing of a shooting gallery.

Presently Aitken asked Freuler to go his bond with the Lewis Exchange that Aitken might carry a larger stock of films. Freuler suggested instead that he and Aitken organize an exchange of their own. They did and called it the Western, with headquarters in Chicago