Eddie Cantor

Eddie Cantor was born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1892 and lost his parents by the age of three. Upon receiving the news that her grandson was now an orphan, his grandmother, Esther, took care of him. They eked out a meager existence in the basement of a tenement on Henry Street; Esther sold candles and ran an employment agency for girls who hoped to get work as servants.

As Eddie got older, his close proximity to the opposite sex was not in the least bit annoying to him. He began to show signs of being an entertainer by singing in the streets, juggling and just plain making a spectacle of himself. He also took jobs at local businesses.

The streets of the Lower East Side were not unlike that of our tough urban neighborhoods today. You basically had a choice-make something of yourself or end up in trouble with the law. Eddie credited Grandma Esther and the Henry Street Settlement with keeping him on the right track. The Settlement still exists in the same spot today.

As he reached his teens, he began to win local talent contests at theatres like "Miner's Bowery," and he started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Cary Walsh's Coney Island saloon, where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano.

He made his first public appearance in vaudeville in 1907 at New York's Clinton Music Hall.

In 1912, he was the only performer over the age of twenty to appear in Gus Edwards' show, "Kid Kabaret," where he created his first blackface character, "Jefferson."

He later toured with Al Lee as the team, "Cantor and Lee."

Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway's top producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, "Midnight Frolic," in 1917.

A year later, Cantor made his Broadway debut in the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1917," and from then on, Eddie Cantor had a very long and illustrious career on the stage.