On this day in 2011, Professor Hokum W. Jeebs (Robert Stabile, b. 1951) breathed his last.
This is a story of the New Vaudeville, but sounds for all the world like something from the Very Old Vaudeville, the kind of thing you’d read about in the Police Gazette, the kind of crimes that went down in the saloons of The Bowery, or The Barbary Coast, or for that matter, Seattle in the days of Pantages and Sullivan & Considine.
Jeebs was from Syracuse, and trained in music education. He’d used his colorful old school stage name since he was a teenager, and has busked in San Francisco and worked in Disney theme parks before settling in Seattle. He was known for riding a customized tricycle with a piano on it, and playing ragtime and other old-time music forms. He founded a venue called Hokum Hall in Seattle, and screened silent movies in addition to creating his own performances. He lived in a part of town called Fauntleroy.
Friend and long time reader Douglas Gray tipped me off to the story a few months ago. He told me:
“[Hokum] was a friend of mine for 20 years or more…When I was working for Holland America Cruise Line, I booked Hokum as an entertainer. Risky, but passengers could honestly say ‘I’ve never seen anything like him.’ I can go on and on about his act. My favorite parts were : “Codfish Ball” played on the toy piano, “Cocktails for Tuba”, where he strolled through the audience and blatted out any request in the face of the requester, and a song dedicated to the Dionne Quintuplets that began ‘Fifty little tiny toes, Everyone a red, red rose…’ For a few years, Hokum and I both played in the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band. He played tuba, of course. ”
One night in early 2011, Jeebs’ domestic partner heard him cry out and she ran down the stairs to find him bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Cops caught the culprit a short time later, a 19 year old drifter named Angelo Felice, who claimed Jeebs had brought him into the house for sex and drugs. Felice had robbed him at knife point and then stabbed him repeatedly, running off into the night. He was later located in a ravine covered in mud.
Felice pled guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to 14.5 years in prison. Which means? That he’ll be getting out in a couple of years, unless his sentence was reduced and he’s already out there — though I’ve come across nothing to that effect in the press. I know he was a kid when he did what he did, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for violent offenders as a general rule. And when you take out one of my vaudevillians? Let him stew in his cell awhile more.
Guess I’m gettin’ old.
For more on vaudeville, please consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.