Information Sheet

 

 

R            Draper, Arthur Clinton, 1872-1944.

112                  Collection, 1899-1944.

                                    Two volumes and five folders.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

 

  This collection contains scrapbooks, correspondence, advertising material, scripts, and memorabilia of Arthur Clinton Draper of Lebanon, Laclede County, Missouri.  Clint Draper pro­duced minstrel shows in the central and western states for over thirty years.  He specialized in benefit performances at Elks lodges.

 

Clint Draper was born in Oswego, Kansas, in 1872.  His mother was a music teacher who had moved there from the east, and his father was a physician who had relatives living near Lebanon, Missouri.  Draper was reared in Oswego, after which he moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where for twelve years he was a partner in Carpenter and Draper, a retail grocery busi­ness.  He was also a member of the Colorado Springs Opera House orchestra and a member of the Centen­nial State Band.  He was well known was an amateur entertainer.

 

Draper's break into professional entertaining came with an invitation to join Haverly’s Mas­to­don Minstrels, a popular troupe then playing Colorado Springs.  However, Draper pre­ferred to develop his own show, and he performed with Haverly’s for only a short time.  In 1900 he went into business with Harry Miller of Paris, Texas, a producer of minstrel shows.  In­stead of forming a traveling troupe of professionals, Miller and Draper acted as producers, staging their produc­tions with local amateur performers.  They contracted to provide all scen­ery, props, cos­tumes, songs, special acts, and orchestrations.  They also helped with advertising and publicity, and took full re­sponsibility for rehearsals and final stage production.  The spon­soring organiza­tion agreed to pro­vide a pianist for rehearsals, a carpenter for building stage elevations, and, of course, a theater and the necessary talent for the shows.

 

Miller and Draper were members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it is not surprising that they specialized in benefit performances for that fraternity.  Al­though they con­tracted occasionally with other similar organizations, nearly all of their shows were staged under the auspices of the B.P.O.E.  Working with groups such as the Elks also as­sured that the produc­ers would have a ready pool of amateurs to be directed in the “burnt cork” performances.  Miller and Draper traveled extensively, producing shown on an average of twice a month in a territory that ranged from the Pacific coast to Minneapolis.  Evidently their shows were well received, for they played some towns year after year.

 

The partnership dissolved in 1920, with Miller taking the eastern part of the territory and Draper the western.  Draper continued producing benefit shows through the mid-1930s, one of the last being staged in his adopted home town of Lebanon.  He lived briefly in Grand Island, Ne­braska, in 1935-1936, where he was appointed director of membership activities of the Elks lodge.  Ultimately he retired to his farm near Lebanon, where he died in 1944.  The Lebanon newspaper noted his passing, and remarked on his status as an entertainer.  Quoting the obituary of another minstrel and contemporary, the paper referred to Draper as one of the last “top-flight minstrels,” who ranked in prominence with Bert Swor, Al Fields, and George Primrose, the lead­ing black­face performers of the minstrel era.

 

The Draper collection of minstrel show materials was loaned for microfilming by Emma Gibbs Phillips, who grew up in the Draper household in Lebanon.  The collection con­sists of sev­eral scrapbooks containing correspondence, souvenir programs, scripts for jokes and skits, and many newspaper clippings which detail nearly the whole of Draper's career.  The clippings con­tain reviews of shows staged throughout the country, and they include good de­scriptions of the per­formances and the material presented in them.  All of the reviews are en­thusiastic in their evalua­tions, and most of them comment on the professionalism and effi­ciency of Draper as a pro­ducer.  The correspondence includes several letters containing the same tone of remarks, written by offi­cers of clubs that had sponsored the shows, which were a popular fund-raising gambit.

 

Almost all of the material in the collection had been taped into the scrapbooks.  The tape had become yellowed and brittle, and a majority of the items had become detached from the pages.  Where possible to do so without damage, the tape was removed from the materials.  Most items therefore exhibit tape stains in their corners.

 

Excepting two volumes of clippings, all of the material was removed from the scrap­books and arranged in folders.  The correspondence and souvenir programs were arranged in chrono­logi­cal order, but the scripts and advertising materials are largely undated.  The scripts have been filmed in the order in which they were found in the scrapbooks.  The advertising mate­rial was ar­ranged with Miller and Draper items first, followed by those announcing Clint Draper’s shows. Eleven 35mm color slides of posters used to promote the shows have been filed in the Information Folder. Photographs from the Draper collection have been cataloged as WHMC-Rolla collection R847.

 

 

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