Background
Samuel A. Scribner, son of Alexander Saint James Scribner and Cynthia Cheseboro Scribner, was born August 18, 1859 near Brookville, Pennsylvania, county seat of Jefferson County.
Samuel A. Scribner, son of Alexander Saint James Scribner and Cynthia Cheseboro Scribner, was born August 18, 1859 near Brookville, Pennsylvania, county seat of Jefferson County.
He operated the Columbia Amusement Company, presenting forty or more family-entertainment burlesque shows simultaneously in theaters throughout the Northeast and Midwest of the United States. Early Years Serving as a tuba player in the village band, Scribner spent his whole life in show business. In the summer of 1879 he joined a small circus called, rather grandly, Rogers and Campbell United Aggregation and Grabd Equestriculum Hippo Comique.
Foreign nearly twenty years he worked his way up the ranks of various circuses, traveling by mule train six days a week, six months a year.
By 1892, he partnered with Neil Smith to operate Scribner & Smiths All New Enormous Combined Shows. During the winter months, he acted in and produced melodramas in various theater companies in the United States and Canada.
In the late 1890s, he sold his circus to Barnum & Bailey and switched to burlesque. Columbia Amusement Each week each show would travel from one theater to the next, rotating around the American Northeast and Midwest like forty spokes on a great wheel.
On January 3, 1910, the company opened its flagship theater in Times Square, at the north-east corner of Seventh Avenue and 47th Street.
In its time, Columbia Amusement ruled American burlesque, and Scribner, its imperious operator, was determined to make burlesque both clean and profitable. The combined operation put on fairly clean shows, as had the Eastern Wheel. One of Scribner"s early hires at Columbia was Will Rogers.
In 1904, Rogers was working the roof of Willie Hammerstein"s theater in New New York
Shribner hired him away, raising his salary from $150 to $250 per week. On January 3, 1925, in anticipation of the Fifteenth Anniversary Gala of the Columbia Theater in New York, Rogers sent a telegram stating "I WILL Bachelor of Engineering THERE WEDNESDAY NIGHT FOR YOU TO Doctor of Osteopathy Academy of Sciences ACT ANNOUNCE THE Acts of the Apostles TAKE TICKETS Oregon SWEEP OUT FOR YOU I SAID FOR YOU SAM SCRIBNER" Family.