Summary:
Sheila was one of the many extraordinary talents who made up the Straw Hat Review. The Straw Hat was started by a group from Cal in the language arts department, circa 1947. They performed three different shows during the summer months at the Town Hall in Lafayette.
Oral History:
Helene Kremer: Okay, we are here, it’s April 27th 2018, we’re speaking with Sheila Seagrave and her daughter Cyrene…
Sheila Seagrave: Seagrave is my maiden name, like all the rest of my names.
H: And Cyrene, her daughter, Cyrene Francis, and you became involved in Lafayette in 1947. can you tell me about that?
SS: That’s very interesting. There’s a group that started the Straw Hat, Bi Berryhill was the director and in charge or everything, and all this group that started graduated from Cal Berkeley in Theater Arts, it was Jane Bennett, her maiden name, and she married Gordon Connell, who played the piano for the Straw Hat, he wrote music that I sang, and he later married Jane Bennett and that was her maiden name and they went to New York and she became very famous and was in a movie with Lucille Ball and they lived in New York and they were in many, many shows back then, and they lived there until they both died.
H: And you brought a bunch of memorabilia and this photo album and in this photo, is this the Straw Hats or…
SS: This is completely Straw Hat, This is David Fullmer.
H: On the left?
SS: Yes, and he played the trombone, this is Gordon Connell, the most magnificent pianist, he also wrote the songs that I sang, and that’s a picture of me, and this is Maurice Logan, no, Maurice Engelmann, he played the violin, the piano, and he wrote songs, everything on stage was original, every song was original, and they were done by this old Straw Hat group. Everything on stage was original, every song was original, and they were done by this Old Straw Hat group…
H: And this photo was taken…
SS: At the theater ‘bout three in the morning.
H: The Town Hall Theater in (inaudible)
Cyrene: Everybody’s names are written on the back of all these photographs. That’ll be helpful when you’re scanning it.
SS: And we get to Straw Hat and we cleaned it out and it was perfect for our show ‘cause it had about three hundred and fifty people, and so we were there three summers, and this one is a picture of me and Bill Tuttle and we’re singing a duet here, the song is “Where is the Moon’, and he went on after the Straw Hat went back to Cal and became a lawyer. Here’s Jane Bennett-Canal, she graduated for the Anna Head School, she was the Student Body President there and one of my best friends, and we did much theater together through the years, and this is her husband when he was a Straw Hat and these are pictures of him, when I went back East, they went back to New York and I went back to see them, and let’s see, this next one, this is a show, this is Byberry Hall, she was the director, she was in charge of absolutely everything, director and the whole brains behind the Straw Hat. She didn’t do much onstage but she did this particular… This is Carol, Carol Brum, she graduated from Cal and she had a nice singing voice and she did a lot of the shows and this is Jane again here, Jane Bennett-Canal.
H: It looks like you are touring, is this the same group or…
SS: The story of this was David Fulmer’s older brother was a director in the Honolulu Theater and he knew Dick Smart who owned half of the Big Island of Hawaii and he went to Broadway and was in a show and his brother told Dick Smart to be sure and see our show on the way back to Honolulu where he lived. He came and saw it and took all of us to Hawaii, and we did a show there called the “Forty-Nine State Review” so you know what year it was, ’58, and here’s our whole cast, here, all of this, well, there’s some that are not on stage—where did I put my glasses?—this is our whole cast here…
H: You don’t need to name everybody, that’s okay, let’s get back to…
SS: This is Dick Smart here.
H: Let’s get back to the Town Hall.
SS: Town Hall, yeah.
H: What was the building like? I’m sure you’ve been back since you…
SS: Yes, we cleaned out the whole place, we went in it and we had that bar and the floor was dirt, they had horses in there at one time, and so between intermission we’d go down and sell sandwiches at coach and everybody could meet the cast, and it’s amazing, the people we met and where they were from, and…
H: Were you living in Lafayette at that time?
SS: I was living in Berkeley with a friend because my whole family had just left Berkeley and moved back to Reno, Nevada where my mother was born and raised and where my grandmother had a ranch, that’s where my parents ended up.
H: Did you get to know any other locals in Lafayette at the time? Were there any regulars?
SS: I grew up in Berkeley, and I went to school so of course I knew everybody there.
H: I’m sorry, you went to what school?
SS: Anna Head School for Girls, which is now Head-Royce. They have boys there now and we used to all the… I was the… we did the Opera Martha, HMS Pinafore, Pirates of the Penzance, and I was always the leading man in all of those…
H: Great!
SS: …And that’s my youth. And then I went to USC and studied down there and I studied in New York and I studied in San Francisco, so where do you want to go from there?
H: You have programs in here from…
SS: All of ‘em, yeah.
H: That’d be great to see.
SS: Oh, that’s mine.
Cyrene: The script. These are the scripts.
SS: Where’d you put them?
C: It’s in a pile underneath. See, it’s colorful? Down on, like, the bottom. It’s not in plastic because there’s a stack of them. Here you go.
SS: Yes, these are all programs.
H: Great. And so it was summer shows.
SS: Yes, yes, and I did three different ones every summer, so it got to standing room only.
H: Wow, this is excellent, and the advertisements on here too, like the Tunnel Inn. That was at the west end of town and they just tore it down.
C: Was that the old…
H: Cape Cod House, yeah.
C: I sent you pictures of it when they had started to tear it down, ‘cause I knew that you guys used to hang at the old Cape Cod. You loved…
SS: Oh yeah, the Cape Cod. Long before and long after.
H: Right. So was it hard? Because the buildings, I mean the building was older…
SS: What do you mean hard?
H: Hard, was it difficult because of temperatures, was it super hot? It was cool?
SS: No, we had it wide open.
H: Oh wow.
SS: Yeah, it was great.
H: Nice. And so did you have matinees or were they nighttime shows?
SS: Nighttime shows, yeah. And see the different shows we did. We did usually three different ones a summer.
H: Wow, these are amazing.
C: I took a huge stack, all the extra programs and took them to the Town Hall a number of years ago and a month later that pipe broke and flooded the Town Hall and they lost all of the duplicate pictures of all of these so a lot of stuff was lost.
SS: But you still had the same thing here.
C: I think so. I think these are all duplicates.
H: These are amazing. Truly amazing.
SS: That’s my own script, this stuff for a show.
H: Was this for a show at Town Hall?
SS: This is my own private one, I just kept for… all the songs I sang, and this one stays on the…
H: The recording we were listening to, that was when you were at Carnegie?
SS: When I was, yes, that was when I studied at Carnegie, that was my music teacher back there. That one, and I also have another record where I auditioned for NBC.
H: That’s what my next question was gonna be, if you had ever done any radio singing.
SS: For Radio San Francisco I did. There’s a copy of that
H: That’s excellent.
C: The KSFO.
H: Do you still sing, Sheila?
SS: (sings) No. No, unfortunately. If you don’t use it, you lose it. I could, but it’s pretty weak.
C: She doesn’t have enough gin in her.
SS: Need more than gin. So these are lots of publicity pictures from Honolulu, Dick Smart and Winona Love was a famous classical hula dancer and she was in our show over there.
H: So these are little clippings right here though, correct?
SS: Yes, her cane and I don’t know who, well he was somebody else, I forget.
C: This is Honolulu.
SS: I haven’t looked at it in so long.
H: So my former mother-in-law was the society columnist for the Oakland Tribune…
C: We probably know her.
H: Robin Orr.
SS: Oh yes! My God! Yes!
H: So I was thinking as soon as I…
SS: I met her and I’m trying to think when or where.
H: Stacy…
SS: So long ago.
S: When Dad passed away, no. I remember reading Robin Orr…
SS: And I just know the name.
S: We grew up in Piedmont.
H: Oh, okay, right. She married my ex-husband’s father after he lost his wife.
S: Crazy.
H: But when I saw these I was thinking maybe she had written, well actually, she would be the same age as you if she was still living.
SS: We didn’t do much of Oakland, San Francisco columns did more for us.
H: Oh, she still talked about Orinda and stuff, you know, and I mean…
SS: There might be some in there I haven’t looked at ‘em since I put ‘em in there so I have no idea.
H: These are brilliant, you know, and it’s so difficult to find this stuff now even though Google goes back in the archives, it’s really difficult to find this. Yeah, that’s it, you know
S: And you’re pretty good about keeping dates on things.
SS: As I was very datey as I was taught very early to put the names on everything.
H: “Who says summer months are dull and slow? Actors busy in summer workshops.” So did you rehearse all of your… everything was all rehearsals around here as well?
SS: Oh sure. We were rehearsing one show and then we did another, and a lot of the material we did at Cal, and you know how the skits went, and dancing, songs, and they did hysterical skits, one after another, I thought of one the other day, we had the curtain down and we had a small skit in front while they were changing the things, and I was trying this one, and I was down on the floor scrubbing with a brush, and my husband goes across the stage like this with his briefcase and he gets to this end and he stops and he looks at the audience like this and he comes back and he pinches me on the bottom and I look up at the audience and I say, “There will only be two quarts today, Mr. Farnsworth”, which is a blackout, you know we did these quick little things like this all the time to give time for the change and the skit one after the other after another, and then they put my songs in between dances, Caroline was a great dancer, she did all the choreography. Caroline is here…
C: Here she is. She was the one who worked at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette for years and years.
H: This one here? I recognize her. She did all the buying for the patio furniture and did a lot of…
SS: I think this is, yeah, there’s a lot more here. This is Honolulu—there she is right there, she was a fabulous dancer, and here’s our lineup, here’s our group here, and Dick Smart and all the Hawaiians that were in the show, and there I am in Waikiki.
H: Do you have any photos in here of Straw Hats here in Lafayette?
SS: Yeah, that’s Winona Love, she was in the show, and these are when we left Hawaii to go home, and this is the 1947, there’s our whole group, David Fullmer, that’s me, that’s Bill, and there’s Carol and she was in it for a while, Carol and Guy, and he did a lot of, again the names are leaving me, he did a lot of the variety, he was on the stage, Byberry and the whole managers, and there’s Gordon and Jade and Maury, and then I have another one, ’35 Reunion.
H: Look at that!
SS: There’s Gordon, there’s me, there’s Carol, that’s…
C: Yeah, you’ll recognize Carol and Guy, you memorized what she looks like.
SS: Jane and Gordon and…
C: Jane went on to do “Auntie Mame”… oh, Jack Hecht.
SS: Jack Hecht, he did the piano later shows.
H: So what was it like, gosh, all of those years later, to do the reunion in 1979?
SS: Oh, it was a ball, we came back and… and this is when we did the show at the St. Francis Hotel, they gave us a room between shows so… this is a publicity shot, Bill and me, and that’s about it.
H: Sorry, I just didn’t want it to show up on the, ‘cause it’ll be loud. That’s okay. Let’s see, these are amazing though.
SS: I haven’t looked at these in years.
H: You wanna take some out? You wanna take a look at them?
C: Yeah, take some out and see what’s going on.
SS: What’s going on here?
C: There was a Lafayette paper way back in the day…
SS: Oh yeah. Oh This was the show, and this is John… I’m asking, and here’s Byberry Hill and her story, but this was a show from Cal, was this a revue… yeah, this was a show, an ice skating show that I had nothing to do with…
H: This one you wrote down was from the Lafayette Sun, and that was in July 31st, 1957.
C: Well here’s another program.
SS: These are just write ups of the shows. The revues tried the big time, yeah, it’s just a review of the shows, “Summary of Straw Hat…”
C: This in ’48?
H: I didn’t realize, you just did this in the summertime?
SS: Yeah, oh yeah.
H: But you didn’t do it all year ‘round?
SS: Well we did a show at the St. Francis Hotel in February of ’49, they just kind of (inaudible) show down…
C: You told me, that’s… Mom talked me into moving here to Lafayette when I used worship with my husband and I moved to after we got married and she said, “Live in Lafayette”, she says, “I loved it, we used to go and there was nothing but outside in between “cleaning out the barn”, she called it, they said you’d walk and how beautiful it was and it was all orchards…
H: When did you move here?
C: I moved here in ’83, 1983, married in ’84, lived here three years on Old Tunnel Road, had kids, moved to Pleasant Hill, and moved back here in ’94.
H: When you can afford to.
SS: This a letter from Byberry Hill, she wrote to me, and she said, “We were certainly happy to have Jane pass on the news that you have decided to work with us this summer. Already, of course, I have five things in mind for you to do, but this notice was sent by air mail so that we may ask you to notify us as soon as possible when you expect to be in for rehearsals. Our work will start this Friday, May 30th, continue through June 20th opening. The final rehearsal’s all day. We would like to have you sometime prior to that time. I think it can it be arranged, however, as I’ve explained to you, I would like to have you at least a week before that, Drop me a line, Jane ByBerry.”
H: Can we go over the timeline of your career briefly? So before you were even doing this… pardon me?
SS: From three!
H: Really? Is that when you started?
C: No, she’s just pulling your leg.
H: Okay. So when did you start performing?
C: Fourteen, you said that earlier. You were fourteen years old.
SS: I would say…
C: When did Gale Case, who was your accompanist…
SS: Yeah, I’m thinking… well, I sang, I graduated from Thousand Oaks School, Primary School in Berkeley, and then I went to Garfield Junior High School, which is now Martin Luther King, and I sang there. They used to take me out of class to comer and sing for the PTA, so I sang from, I would say, all my life.
H: Okay, but I mean more like professional, like you were getting paid to do the Straw Hatters, right?
SS: Actually professional, it was just here and there that I would sing for women’s groups, did a lot of that, and…
C: Churches…
SS: Hmm?
C: You sang a lot in churches.
SS: Oh yeah, I sang at church, every denomination you can think of.
H: When you went to Carnegie, were you there…
SS: Well that’s where my teacher was.
H: I see.
SS: I studied Emma. I studied with her and I was a… when I came home for summer vacation, or break, from SC, my parents were in Reno, and there was a judge there, a good friend of the family, and his wife, from the time she met me when I was fourteen or so, and heard me saying every time she saw me she would grab me and make me sing for somebody, and she had a dinner party, and at the dinner party was the president of NBC in New York. He was getting divorced and he had his pretty little girl he was going to marry, she and her husband was a judge, in fact there’s interesting articles about it and so she wanted me to come and I had Gala with me, who was an accompanist I’ve had since I was fourteen, and was like, “We’ve lived together for ever and ever, and everywhere we went in New York, (inaudible) played for me, so I sang for this…
C: Gale moved to New York.
SS: Yes, well I’m telling you the reason why I went to New York is I was home from SC and I was going back from when we went to their house for dinner, and this guy from New York was there and she wanted me to sing for him so I sang for him and sang two songs, he said, “That’s enough,” he said, “You come to New York and I’ll put you on City Service on NBC.”
H: So what was City Service?
SS: It was a program out of New York.
H: So you were singing… was it a weekly… was it a radio show that you were singing on?
SS: I don’t know, he said he’d put me on it, so that’s why I went to New York, I borrowed my mother’s car and the day after the war was over Gale and I drove to New York and we stayed at the Martha Washington Hotel for the next year and a half and I studied there and I auditioned for everybody and everything.
H: And you auditioned for theater, television…
SS: Radio.
H: You were on the radio.
SS: Not back there, I wasn’t… My father didn’t want me to go back, and when I was there about two weeks, my father died.
H: Okay, so when you were in New York, you were getting paid for your singing during the auditions?
SS: What I was doing was studying and auditioning everywhere.
H: So you didn’t have any paid…
SS: Not yet, no.
H: How did you survive?
SS: My mother and dad.
H: Okay, that’s nice. And so when you were with the Straw Hatters, were you receiving remuneration there too?
SS: Oh yeah, sure. What they would do is whenever they collected, they divided it among us, so I got about ten dollars a week.
H: And then before the Straw Hatters, you were still living in Berkeley. Were you doing paying gigs then too for your singing?
SS: Some of them, yeah.
C: During the war, you did a lot of…
SS: Yes I did, I went to singing in hospitals and during the war the Stage Door Canteen and the feels, I remember my father knew the head of the whole section of Alameda, I think they had ten thousand men there and they asked me to come and I sang there. It looked like a fighting ring out there as I sang for them. I sang in hospitals, I sang, as I say, like all the service people…
H: Right, and after Straw Hat…
SS: I wasn’t paid for that.
H: Oh, so it was volunteer.
SS: Yeah, all volunteer.
H: What about further down the road, did you have a professional career?
SS: Well, from Straw Hat?
H: Beyond that.
SS: No, I…
C: …Married Dad.
H: I was gonna say.
SS: The day I met him, he was a friend of the Caroline Guys and his sister and he had just gotten his degree, he was a dentist and he had just gotten his degree the day I met him, and he used to come out to the Straw Hat and asked to take (inaudible) and I kept saying, “No, I have a date”, and so about the third time he came in and he said, “Can I take you home?” I said, “Well as a matter of fact, you can.” He said, “Good, ‘cause this is the last time I was gonna ask ya”.
C: Bob Shorback, my father.
SS: So the last show I did before I got married was at the St. Francis Hotel, and then I got married, that was the first of February, and I got married on the twelfth of February, and that was the end of my profession for the next fifty years. That’s saying a lot, for all kinds of things.
H: What else can you tell me about your trips out here in the late ‘40’s as far as being at the Town Hall and coming through Lafayette, were there any favorite restaurants that you would frequent when you were here?
SS: Well, the Curve was the one, but we cooked our own meals.
H: You had a kitchen in the Town Hall?
SS: At the Straw Hat, yeah. The gals cooked, the guys cleaned it up. We never went out.
H: Like firemen.
SS: Once in a while we’d go and have a drink in the bars, we didn’t have time for that.
H: You’d go to the Roundup?
SS: The Roundup? Where’s the Roundup?
C: The Roundup’s still there.
H: The Roundup Saloon? It’s been there since ’35, right there on Mt. Diablo Boulevard?
C: It’s right by where you turn to Chow’s.
SS: Where?
C: Right before you turn in to go to Chow’s it’s the old…
H: The old saloon?
C: We’ll go in it. I’ll take you there.
SS: No, we didn’t have time to drink. We didn’t drink. This was not a drinking group at all. Alcohol is not a question.
H: Right, you were too busy rehearsing and…
SS: And everything was original like you said, so you were busy.
SS: Yeah, but it’s interesting, that whole group, I never thought of it before but nobody drank.
H: You just didn’t have time. That’s it.
SS: No, we sure didn’t. Too busy rehearsing one show and doing another.
H: I wish there had been some sort of way to, you know, made a movie of those plays, it would have been really neat to see. Do you have anything else you’d like to share?
SS: I don’t know. Do you have any…
H: I think I asked all the questions that I had. It’s these clippings that you saved for us that we’re gonna go ahead and scan into the system and then the photo album and the CDs with your singing are amazing.
C: She hasn’t looked at any of these.
H: Well we sure appreciate you coming down.
SS: Delighted that you kept all this. I just kept it all and I just knew that… I’m great for history, I’ve got my own family and all the history…
H: We’re very grateful for your lending these to us and stuff. These are really amazing.
SS: All of these, I’d like these big photographs back.
H: Those are beautiful. Thank you.
C: There’s a trip every Christmas, the day before Christmas I’d go to the old Cake Box before they shuttered down and…
H: Well, you can still get their food at Diablo Foods.
C: Yeah, I didn’t realize that but the original, where you get the wreaths and for Christmas Day
H: I remember that, yeah.
C: One day we were in there and there were two guys and they started talking and were talking about the Straw Hat and I found out they were Byberry Hill’s nephews.
SS: Oh really?
C: And I said, “Oh that’s fun, my mom was in the old Straw Hat,” and they got all gushy.
SS: Well this is the whole thing that they did at the Sun…
C: The Lafayette Sun?
SS: Yeah, the Lafayette Sun. There she is, these are all Jane. She was an incredible actor.
C: If you ever watch the movie “Runaway Bride” with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, the preacher is Gordon Kennell, in the movie, when she keeps getting married, so check him out if you ever see it again.
SS: And she has a whole thing on her and she did this, and I haven’t looked at this for so long. I’ll have to take a look at it, this is…
H: “In the late ‘40’s and early ‘50s, the Kennells played in the little theaters and nightclubs in the Bay Area and toured with the Straw Hat revues.” That’s awesome.
SS: And here’s a memorial for Byberry Hill, San Francisco.
H: I’m gonna go ahead and turn this off. Thank you again.
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