Revised Nov. 2, 2002

Table of Contents:

1. A convict family
2. Gold!
3. A bad time and place to be Irish
4. Children on the stage
5. 'Festive little Maggie Moore'
6. 'They were an era'
7. End of a marriage
8. Phantom cable cars?
9. J.C. Williamson
10. Harry Roberts
11. Voices of the period
12. Playbills
13. Music

J.C. Williamson's legacy

J.C. Williamson married Mary Weir in 1899 and they had two daughters, Marjorie and (Aimee) Viola. After his death, his widow sold the company to the Tait brothers. Mary Williamson died in 1937. Viola married Wallace Horsley and at the time that Ian Dickers published his biography of her father in 1974, she was living in New South Wales.

The J.C. Williamson Company used to have a Web site, but it seems to have been taken down, and I don't know if the company is still in business or not. (I'm leaving the link up anyway.) Additionally, a theatrical foundation in Australia and a collection of opera programs in the National Library of Australia both bear his name.

J.C. Williamson's name is recognized to this day in Australia, but Maggie is all but forgotten, both in her native San Francisco and in her adopted Australia. The individual who took the other photo of Maggie's grave wrote saying "I found her listed in a 1926 necrology of notable figures several years ago. When I lived in the San Francisco area, I took the opportunity to seek her out, along with a few others at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma. I have tried, but have not had any luck finding biographical information about her on the Internet."

She was even forgotten by her family -- Mary Burke Riehm had at least eight and possibly nine children, but as far as I know only John, my great-grandfather, has any surviving progeny. So why did he not pass on stories of his famous aunt? Here's my theory: John was a miner and seems to be something of a black sheep. His marriage ended in divorce and his only son, Rex (my grandfather), had a peripatetic childhood, going from relative to relative in at least three states, and Grandpa didn't talk much about it later on. Rex, by the time I knew him anyway, was inherently stable, but the inherent instability of his upbringing must have done its damage -- like when he lived with the relative who shall remain nameless, who used the money sent to her to provide for Rex to buy things for her own son instead; the endless procession of stepfathers (his mother was married six times, according to family legend); the uprooting and uncertainty of what might happen next... Among the relatives he did mention, though, were his aunt Grace Riehm De Zarate, with whom he lived in San Francisco. He would have been 16 when Maggie died. Did he even know about her? If he did know, did he think she was just a weird old woman, another eccentric character in a very eccentric family? Whatever he knew wasn't passed along to his descendants. Rex's two children, Jack and Margaret (my mother) never mentioned her; and when I discovered the extent of Maggie's career and told Jack, he was as surprised as I was. Mom, who had something of a love affair with both Hollywood and the old West, probably would have been pleased as anything to know, but she died in 1982, long before I found out.

As one 18th-century English thespian noted, "an actor's name is writ in water."

Created 20 Feb 1999 by Reunion, from Leister Productions, Inc. Revised January 10, 2003