Beautiful Jim Key

by Mim E. Rivas

  The next engagement was quietly canceled, giving Jim a month to rest. But he was back in action in three weeks.

  Gray’s Armory, Cleveland, Ohio—April 30 to May 5, 1906. Seating capacity 2,500; twelve performances. Broke record for paid admissions.

  Armory, Toledo, Ohio—May 6, 1906. One night; broke box office record.

  But the numbers didn’t tell all. Jim Key was not just a box office star. He had become a cult hero whose abilities were not simply human, but superhuman. The excitement of 45,000 fans that had come out to stand in line for his shows at Memorial Hall in Columbus took on a kind of religious fervor. The Columbus Evening Dispatch described Jim’s show as transformational, as if being in the presence of his larger-than-life energy was to be healed of all impairments. The two-page article, subtitled “In the Audience Was Leslie Oren, Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy,” described the way that Leslie “saw” and “heard” the whole performance “by the aid of his teacher and not a point was missed by this youngster as his laughter indicated. At the conclusion the child was taken upon the stage and ran his hands over the horse’s head and face. He also touched the cash register and felt over the other paraphernalia used in the performance.”

  The Evening Dispatch included a photograph of Leslie Oren at his typewriter, and ran the story that the twelve-year-old pupil at State School for the Deaf and Dumb had written for the newspaper about Jim. He noted:

  I sat on his back, he did not kick or shake me off, because he is kind, and gentle, and tame. I kissed and loved the dear old horse. I patted his smooth nose. He counted and spelled and read like a little boy…. I love Jim Key, I love all animals. I am happy, because I saw Jim Key.

  But for all the healing that his audiences seemed to receive in Jim’s presence, his own impairments weren’t improving. By the start of summer, Dr. Key was certain he couldn’t keep Jim’s aches and pains secret much longer. Probably only Monk had counted how many mornings he watched Dr. Key and the Davises having to hoist the big bay up, and the press-wary dog wasn’t telling. As before, once Jim Key was up and standing, he seemed to move about just fine. But their next venue was going to be daunting. It was a whole summer at the new White City for the second year in a row, where Jim had to break his own box office record. Looking ahead, the Doc must have chosen the last night in Toledo to tell Jim that it was time to go home. He promised to build him his own amphitheater in Shelbyville so the folks could come see him there.

  Jim no doubt made his indignation known. William Key struggled for days to decide what to do. As a healer, he was bound to do what he would have recommended to any one of his patients, and that was to go home. But he couldn’t break his earlier promise that going home had to be Jim’s choice.

  They carried on with the White City engagement. Box office receipts weren’t counted, but the general manager reported, “Great crowds every day.” From August 28 through September 22 they were scheduled to play the whole month back in Cincinnati. Before this engagement, it seemed that Jim had suffered one of his worst episodes. This time, after he was helped up to his feet, the symptoms didn’t go away. He was hurting. But he still whinnied and whined anytime the prospect was raised of canceling the rest of his tour or even one show.

  Dr. Key felt obliged to keep Rogers informed about the progression of Jim’s rheumatism. Maybe both men knew on some level that the month in Cincinnati would be their last for the season. Though they were booked through the end of November, once the cooler days and mornings began, it was going to be that much harder on their star. Maybe Jim had come to the same conclusion. In any event, Beautiful Jim Key rose to the occasion as never before. As the chief attraction of Cincinnati’s Fall Festival, back at the Music Hall, he performed to overflow audiences show after show, day after day. On that last week, Bill Key asked him one more time if he was ready to go home, proposing one solid year of rest and healthy living in Tennessee, and then a return to public life. Jim gave him a relieved, self-satisfied nod yes.

  Rogers appeared to take the news in stride. When he saw his partners off at the station, it was with the understanding that they would go out again in the spring of 1908. In the interim, he invited the Keys and the Davises to come and spend some time at Glenmere, Beautiful Jim Key’s second home.

  A. R. Rogers didn’t linger at the station but hurried away to attend to pressing concerns related to his newest high-class attraction, Fighting the Flames, in which he had invested and was now president of the company. And as he went, he must have broken down in tears, those of a man who had just lost the greatest love of his life.

  Rogers never saw the Keys or the Davises again.

  The parting was understandably also very sad for the Doc and Jim, as each, in his own way, considered that Rogers had become much more than their promoter or manager or business partner. He was their friend. With all his contradictions, strange idiosyncrasies, brilliance, energy, and foibles, he was one of them.

  The mix of jubilation, exhaustion, and relief that they all felt for some time to come may not have hit them until Dr. Key, Jim, Monk, Dr. Stanley Davis, and Sam Davis arrived all the way back at the Shelbyville depot, where a sizable crowd had come out as a welcoming committee, including Mrs. Maggie Key, Stanley’s sweetheart Lillie Buchanan, and Sam’s gal, Essie.

  Bill and Jim may have experienced the same feeling that would come over them in the quiet of their Bible study time, a feeling of peace and grace that the Doctor enjoyed in the Psalms, or from one of the passages they had marked for memorization. The feeling was summed up in 2 Timothy 4:7: I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.

  9

  All Horses Go to Heaven

  We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man—the horse. So we called it sunka wakar, “holy dog.” For bringing us the horse, we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape more beautiful.

  —LAME DEER, LAME DEER SEEKER OF VISIONS,

  quoted by Alice Walker in Horses Make

  a Landscape Look More Beautiful

  KEY, KEY, AND ROGERS WERE NOT AT ALL PREPARED to leave center stage. The forty-three-year-old promoter had the hardest time of it. By 1907, he, Clara, and their three sons lived full-time at Glenmere, while Mercy and Hiram purchased a home near Boston, where the rest of the family would soon migrate. In April of that year, Rogers took an engagement at Cincinnati’s Music Hall in conjunction with a new event, the First Annual Pure Food Drug and Confectionary Exposition, and dared to debut his new Wonderful Educated Horse, “Bonner the Great, the Horse with the Human Brain.”

  The event was entirely disappointing. At once, Rogers canceled the search for a stand-in and proceeded with the work of the Jim Key Band of Mercy. He issued press releases that Jim was taking a year off and would be ready for engagements by early 1908. But when he put off inquiries about hiring Jim, the less interest he heard. Fan mail to the Equine Wonder trickled to a halt. Out of sight, out of mind. Before the year was out, he began to receive letters asking if it was true that Beautiful Jim Key had died. One such letter was from Mrs. Colby, the president of a Springfield, Missouri, humane group. Rogers hardly knew how to respond and was afraid to write to Dr. Key, not wanting to hear the worst.

  Jim was not dead in the least, and after a brief depression he had begun to kick off a most lively existence in Shelbyville, where life at Bethany Lane agreed with him. Somewhere in this era he apparently met a mare or two that suited his celebrated tastes, as Bedford County was soon abuzz with the possibility of a future Jim Key Jr. Stud fees were not advertised but could have been sizable.

  Doc and Mrs. Key hosted frequent shows in the amphitheater out back, and for a while there was a steady stream of hundreds of visitors stopping by to say H-E-L-L-O. As long as they came bearing gifts and could get past Monk, they were welcome. The Doc and Maggie created a room in the paneled, blanket-lined stables that was devoted to Jim’s and the Doctor’s extensive collection of awards, ribbons, gifts, and tr
ophies.

  Bill Key continued to read his daily newspapers, sharing items of interest with Jim, still using those discussions to keep up his prodigy’s education. After a year passed, both of them had eased into their slower life. Jim’s ailments came and went; the more moderate climate helped. But it was William Key whose health began to decline in late 1907. A handwritten letter he sent to Albert Rogers on December 9 of that year must have come as a shock to the younger man. Dr. Key’s usually energetic clean penmanship, typically written with an ink pen, now wavered across the page without punctuation and in blurred pencil, while his grammar and spelling were failing fast:

  Mr. Rogers, This leves me well Jim Key is doing well he is in good order he is in a grasslot out at my farm he gose in and out of his stable as he wishes run around goes in stable at will and eates as much as he wishes then he gose out and runs around he dont lay down often some times he gets up with don’t help When he dont want to get up we cach him up by the tail give him lift and he will get up he is not much truble to get up…. The horse can make the shows now if northern safeness to him in the future. I will look for you in January write me your ames for another year. Yours Truly, Wm. Key

  Doc Key never told anyone what his condition actually was, with symptoms that also came and went. There is a possibility that he and Jim suffered from the same ailment. Sleeping on a cot in the stables 365 nights a year, or close to that many nights, along with the extremes of climate change, had undoubtedly taken a toll on the Good Doctor. Then again, he was almost seventy-five and not doing so poorly after all he’d lived through.

  But Albert Rogers refused to accept that the letter was anything but an aberration. He immediately wrote to Mrs. Colby to allay her fears about Jim being deceased:

  I appreciate your kind letter and I am very glad to tell you that Jim Key is feeling fine. He is down on my farm in Tennessee, and I had a letter from Dr. Key a few days ago saying that Jim Key was in better condition than he had been for three or four years. I do not know where these rumors crop out every once in a while that Jim is dead, but I hear of them very often, pretty nearly every year since I have had him.

  Dr. William Key and Albert Reynolds Rogers seemed to each suffer from a postfame delusional streak, as if they could feel themselves slipping out of history and refused to believe it. For the Doctor, it was partly because history was preparing to swiftly pass that time when the horse was king, and when those with horse knowledge reigned as well; and it was also because he was aging, unable to grasp hold of the changing times. For Rogers, it was more complicated, perhaps because his place in history had been attached to the destiny of a horse he never really owned.

  As he waited to hear from his promoter, Doc Key began to rehearse with Jim, with the clear intention of going out on the road again. In the meantime, he looked into the prospect of breeding horses in his old age, maybe carrying on in the equine education field, and in early 1909, he had his eye on a pair of German Coach Horses that Shelbyville’s J. G. Jackson was offering for stud service.

  At this point, Rogers had temporarily lost his mind. It was not only his way of referring to Jim Key as his horse, or to Dr. Key’s place in Shelbyville as his farm. In feverish rounds of correspondence, he almost referred to the humane cause as his movement, his creation. He bombarded the officers of the MSPCA and the AHES and the AHA with urgent missives about projects and concepts to aid the work of the organizations. Some of his ideas were brilliant, like his recommendation for a form of planned giving, complete with elegant sample letters suggesting that wealthy individuals include contributions to humane charities in their wills.

  Albert’s gravest concern was that the Jim Key Band of Mercy, now one million members strong, lacked adequate funding. Without money, he couldn’t publish Uncle Bert’s newsletter, or continue to expand the base of his cause. Rogers didn’t mention to his fellow officers that his promotions business had seen a marked drop in income, though he did say that he couldn’t afford to fund the Jim Key Band of Mercy himself. He did say that more funding was also needed for the American Parent Band of Mercy in order to productively harness the energy of its millions of members.

  When the various officers wrote back with tersely worded replies, Rogers began making overtures to the National Humane Alliance in New York, and when no forward motion was obtained, he even occasionally dropped a plaintive line to eighty-five-year-old George Angell. A. R. Rogers knew that Angell was in poor health but either didn’t want to accept it, or felt that the great Apostle of Mercy and Peace needed to be informed of the incompetence of his boards of directors.

  Clara Rogers attempted to cool Albert’s frenzy, suggesting that perhaps he focus his passions on the show business that he knew. Moreover, if they wanted to continue the lavish lifestyle they’d been living, they needed an income. In early 1909, Rogers opened a large-scale musical variety production, coincidentally at the Hippodrome in Boston, in which he had invested most, if not all, of his fortune. Everything that could go wrong did. The show was a bomb. Albert was sued for nonpayment of rent for an apartment leased by one of his company members; performers in his show were said to have used his name in charging meals and hosting parties across Boston. He found no relief in court and was forced to file for bankruptcy. When he next went to take out a loan, he was rejected on the grounds that, according to information from individuals at the AHES, he had hundreds of thousands socked away, not to mention that he owned Glenmere free and clear.

  From his deathbed, the saintly George Angell had first written to Rogers to say that he had heard about the bankruptcy and could offer him financial assistance. Rogers refused but was honored by the offer. Straining for ideas that would redeem him, as they always had, he went to pay a visit to Mr. Angell to discuss the possibility of getting started on a project that Angell had previously approved, a new national humane education organization to be headquartered in New York under Albert’s guidance. One of its first acts he proposed would be to appeal to Congress to enact a national “Be Kind to Animals Day.”

  Apologetic and frail, Angell announced that his directors, two in particular, were up in arms over what they saw as a competing organization. But there was more. Albert’s frail old friend had apparently heard from his officers that Albert had been sued for skipping rent and restaurant charges; Angell felt compelled to be honest about expressing his disappointment. Rogers explained his side of the story; Angell accepted his explanation and promised to intervene. The new project had his blessing.

  A month later, on Saturday, March 20, 1909, Albert opened his newspaper, along with the rest of the nation, to read that George Thorndike Angell “Soldier of Peace” had died. The world collapsed for Albert Rogers. He felt the loss viscerally, as if he could hear the cries of every nonhuman creature on earth mourning the passing of their protector. That is, until he struck upon an idea, an incredible idea. Swallowing his every molecule of pride, he hastily presented his vision to boards of the MSPCA, the AHES, and the AHA. He called it the “Angell Penny Fund,” a fund drive to be organized by the schoolchildren throughout Boston to collect pennies in order to erect a memorial for the hero of the humane cause. The boards said no. They would erect a memorial but not via a penny drive.

  Furious, Albert Rogers went ahead and publicized the Penny Fund himself, under the auspices of the Jim Key Band of Mercy. When he refused to acknowledge the many cease-and-desist letters from the directors of the boards, his very painful rift with the MSPCA and the AHES found its way into the Boston newspapers, with public advisories included that the school board would not permit the Angell Penny Fund to go forward. A memorial was to be erected, but from other sources of funding.

  Then the final blow came when the secretary of the AHES wrote to thank Albert Reynolds Rogers for his years of service as a vice president and wished him well in his future endeavors. With that, Uncle Bert was banished from the movement. At his lowest and perhaps most delusional, he stormed into the offices of the MSPCA at 19 Milk Street and demand
ed a fair hearing. Instead, a fistfight ensued between him and one of the directors, whom Rogers later described in his failed lawsuit as a madman. The reparations he sought were not fiscal; he only wanted his vice presidency back. His last deed of desperation was to write the AHES a lengthy narrative detailing his contributions to their cause and the wrongs done to him, none more unjust than their thievery of his good name and reputation. But all in all he now saw that their behavior toward him went against the goals of mercy, kindness, justice, and peace that George Angell had stood for, and he was better off not to be in their association.

  Unfortunately for all parties, Albert’s idea to found a unifying international umbrella organization that would further develop humane education and policy might have been a worthy endeavor. Such an organization could have been a driving force in the future, when the issue was no longer front and center. It might have also served to better link animal welfare to the conservation and environmental movements, and perhaps even have provided a forum in which to create more cohesion within the humane movement.