Volume I: Narrative History

Chapter 11: Epilogue Edwin Thanhouser's Retirement

In Bayville, Long Island, on the estate which he had purchased in 1916, Edwin Thanhouser began the construction of Shorewood, the beginning of a complex of several buildings intended to be his new home.

Edwin's son Lloyd later recalled Shorewood: Note

In 1916 Edwin bought a 10-acre tract of wooded shorefront property at Bayville, Long Island. Before the United States' embroilment in World War I put an end to further private construction, the tract, appropriately named Shorewood, was improved along its Bayville Avenue side by a massive stone wall, wrought iron entrance gates, and a solidly built gate lodge. The contemplated main house, to be erected on higher ground overlooking the water, was never built.

The Thanhouser family moved into the gate lodge when it was completed, and this remained their permanent home for the next eight years. Each autumn Edwin and Gertrude closed the Shorewood lodge and, as a rule, "followed the sun" to Florida and other Southern climes. Each spring they would return to Shorewood.

After World War I the town of Bayville evolved into a different kind of community. Soaring income tax rates and scarcity of domestic help compelled the closing down of big estates, and numerous small residences and summer cottages began springing up all over. In tune with this trend, Edwin subdivided Shorewood into small lots which were sold at auction in the spring of 1925. The sale was highly successful and Edwin netted a substantial profit on his investment.

In another recollection Edwin's son Lloyd told of life at Shorewood: Note

Those were the days that you had servants. Did I tell you about the servants out at Shorewood on Long Island near Oyster Bay? Bayville was the actual site of it. I told you about Dad's building, planning to build a house there and instead building a very grand gardener's cottage which was warped into the wall in front of the estate. My mother and father always had at least three servants, a chauffeur, Note a cook and a chambermaid. Well the mixed sexes always led to a triangle, and one day the chauffeur came over to the golf club, the old Engineers' Country Club [in Roslyn, N.Y.], and picked up my dad and mother to take them home. And, he said, "Mr. Thanhouser, I have bad news for you. My wife has left us."

He also had a gardener, an English gardener, by the name of James Cooke. Whenever you ask Jim what a flower was he would say it was a red flower or a yellow flower, he never knew. One day he said he was leaving because he was offered more money from the widow next door who had just come into money, presumably. A few weeks later he came and asked for his job back. My father said, "Why," and he said "I can't stand this woman, she swears at me." "But what does she say?" "She told me to get the hell out of there."

Edwin's granddaughter, Joan Thanhouser Sherman, recalled an interesting incident: Note

During World War I citizens were encouraged to have victory gardens, and at Shorewood Edwin and Gertrude wanted to do their part. Edwin bought a bushel of seed potatoes, carefully planted them, and nurtured the crop for a season. Then came the harvest, and when the ground was dug up the total amount of potatoes gathered amounted to precisely one bushel. This became a family joke and was told for many years.

For several years Edwin Thanhouser stored a quantity of his early film negatives, apparently mainly from the 1910-1912 years, in a bank vault he secured for the purpose at the New Rochelle Trust Company. Note By the mid 1920s he tired of paying the rent and had the reels taken to the dump. Although he saved many clippings, photographs, and memorabilia from this theatre stage days in Milwaukee and elsewhere, no items from the Thanhouser Company or the Thanhouser Film Corporation were retained.

From February 20 to March 20, 1924, Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser were aboard the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's Orca, which departed from New York City on an itinerary which included Havana, Kingston (Jamaica), the Panama Canal, Cartagena (Colombia), Curacao, Martinique, and various West Indies stops, then to Bermuda, then back to New York.

At the many ports of call, the Thanhousers took numerous snapshots, which were subsequently pasted into a family album.

Following the subdivision of their Shorewood estate in 1925, Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser purchased a large, white, wooden-sided mansion, Wampage Shores, Note facing Manhasset Bay at Sands Point, Long Island. Note In 1939 and later years transatlantic Pan American World Airways Clipper "flying boats" docked not far from their shore. As they did when they lived at Shorewood, each winter the couple closed their home and traveled to warmer locales. Over a period of years they went around the world twice and took numerous trips to Europe, Hawaii, the South Pacific, and elsewhere.

In late 1927 and early 1928 Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser joined about 475 other adventurers on a world cruise aboard the S.S. Belgenland. Many stops were made along the way. For the ship's newspaper, The Ocean Ferry, Edwin contributed an article, "Catching Snakes in Upper Egypt." He related that in Luxor he saw an exhibition of snake charming that interested him deeply. Seeking the source of the reptiles, he learned that a local Arab made a specialty of snake catching. Enlisting his services, several tourists followed him into the fields, where in short order he found a large yellow snake under a flat rock, then, in a clump of grass, a "snake at least four feet long, a lively, ugly fellow, who ran out his fangs and wanted to fight," and, finally "a large cobra - the deadly hooded serpent of ancient Egypt."

The article concluded: "I could get no explanation as to how the man located the snakes, but I have an idea he saw signs of them on the ground, or smelled them. We were told he was one of the very few men in Egypt who had the art of finding and taming wild snakes. He does it regularly during the tourist season."

Later on the around-the-world trip, when the S.S. Belgenland was in the Bay of Bengal, the passengers presented a stage play, Just Off Broadway, on March 2nd and 3rd, with Edwin Thanhouser taking a part in the activities. Around the same time, the tourists went by land to Agra, in India, to see the Taj Mahal.

Edwin Thanhouser, standing in a white jacket in the center, among passengers aboard the S.S. Belgenland. The passengers on the ship, in the Bay of Bengal in early 1928, staged a play. Courtesy Thanhouser family archives Pego Paar. (M-12)

Columnist Robert H. Davis interviewed Edwin Thanhouser in 1930, while Mrs. and Mrs. Thanhouser were vacationing at the Charlotte Harbor Hotel in Punta Gorda, Florida. Coincidentally, Thomas A. Edison, who had a winter home in Fort Myers 25 miles to the south, was there on the same day. Note

Edwin Thanhouser told Davis of motion picture production years earlier, how he almost hired Mary Pickford but declined her offer to work for $65 per week, and:

In conjunction with my wife I produced a seven-reel [sic] serial, The Million Dollar Mystery, which Harold MacGrath novelized for publication during the run of the picture. It was a great success, ran all over the country, and made a fortune. Note

I was one of the syndicate that underwrote a contract to pay Charlie Chaplin $10,000 a week for 12 two-reel pictures a year, with an advance of $160,000 on signing. We trebled our money; the pictures had come to stay.... I sold out the Thanhouser Corporation, made a tour of the world, and now content myself with quail shooting and golf on the West Coast [of Florida]. However, it is something to have been in at the beginning.

As part of the town's 1688-1938 anniversary celebration the New Rochelle Standard-Star printed numerous historical features in various 1938 editions. In the June 13, 1938 issue an article by Dorothea L. McEvoy discussed formation of the Thanhouser studio and related activities. Shown were a photograph of players from The Million Dollar Mystery, a picture of Edwin Thanhouser, and two scenes of the 1913 studio fire. At the time Edwin Thanhouser lived in Sands Point, Long Island and had just returned from a "thrilling trip" to South Africa. He showed a reporter, in his upstairs library, a teakwood chest with hand-made nails, stating that: "it was taken from an Arab's hut."

In the meantime, other former Thanhouser studio employees were also reminiscing. An article in The Los Angeles Examiner, March 26, 1939, stated that Harry Benham, now in the advertising business in Chicago, arrived with his wife for a visit to Hollywood and stayed at the home of his former director's widow, Mrs. John Adolfi.

To honor them, Mrs. Adolphi bid a party of erstwhile Thanhouserites to a dinner buffet, and great was the reminiscing anent those "good old days."

In the party were Marguerite [Snow] and Neeley Edwards, Mignon [Anderson] and Morrie Foster, Ray Johnston, Florence and Dell Henderson, the Harry Seymours, the Bob Frasers, the Sidney Bracys, the Tom Currans, and the Dave Thompsons.

Edwin Thanhouser's granddaughter, Joan Thanhouser Sherman, recalled a humorous incident: Note

In 1938, for one reason or another, Edwin believed that there would be a nationwide shortage of toilet paper, and he set about buying boxes of the stuff and storing it in his house. Soon thereafter he visited a shop and purchased a fancy barometer - the kind with a glass bulb and a long tube containing a bright red liquid. He asked the seller how it functioned, and he received detailed instructions. No sooner did he return home than he realized that it was not working properly, as the red liquid was way too high in the tube. He took it back to complain. The barometer was indeed right, however, and within hours the hurricane of '38 struck Long Island with terrific force, his house was flooded, and the carefully stored hoard of toilet paper was reduced to a soggy mass.