“Who? Me?” Pap Curtain roared. “Naw! Sugar is my gal! _I’m her daddy!_ Don’t you remember my gal, Skeeter? Dey used to call her Sweet befo’ her maw lef’ me an’ went down to Baton Rouge.”
Skeeter did not answer, and the gloomy procession moved on. Finally Skeeter Butts mumbled:
“Yes, I remembers dat gal when she warn’t more’n hawn-high to a billy-goat. But I’s had expe’unce dis day dat eve’thing ain’t sweet whut’s called Sugar!”
Mr. Shirley Rouke was one of the first-born sons of the silent drama.
The first moving picture ever thrown upon a screen in the city of New Orleans was projected by the capable hand of this red-headed Irishman.
In the famous resort known as West End, on Lake Pontchartrain, half of the inhabitants of the Crescent City assembled to watch the revelation of a two-hundred foot film which showed a man walking down the street, a dog trotting across the street and a horse and buggy going up the street!
Thrilled by this vision, the people roared their applause until the porpoises sporting far out in the lake dived for deep water.
In a short time the thrill and novelty of a plotless jumble of pictures wore off, and Mr. Rouke was quick to inform the Gitagraft Company that the people wanted stories--the pictures must have a punch and tell a tale. Then came an era of real plays and real actors and dramatized novels and scenarios written by authors whose names were famous across the continent.
“Do the newest thing first!” was Rouke’s motto. His active brain devised novelties like a liver secretes bile, and after each sensational innovation the Gitagraft Company counted its receipts, raised Rouke’s salary, and told him to go the extreme end of the limit.
Just as the theatrical managers delight to announce an all-star aggregation of actors, so Shirley Rouke had been the first motion picture director to feature an All-Native picture showing the native haunts and the natural characteristics of one race or tribe of people and using the natives and actors in the films.
At the foot of the Rocky Mountains he produced an All-Indian picture. In the far north, where the midnight sun casts a shadow on the snow, he got an All-Eskimo picture. At the entrance of the Shoguns’ temple in Tokio he began an all-Japanese picture which moved in exquisite beauty through the blossom-laden cherry groves, the wistaria-festooned tea houses, across the sacred bridge at Nikko, and ended at last with the happy lovers climbing the Jacob’s Ladder on the island of Enoshima.