Yes, everyone knows that, after years of experimentation, the movies gained a voice in 1927, with Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. But moviegoers in Aberdeen, Scotland, had been getting sound with their celluloid fare for almost two decades before Jolson boasted, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." That was because the Star Picture Palace and the Gaiety Theatre had added a new dimension to cinema entertainment several years before World War I. At the Star, owners Nellie Grace and her husband Bert stood behind the screen, unleashing an array of sound effects as the comedies and dramas unrolled on the other side of the stretched sheet. Moreover, at appropriate moments the voices of Nellie and Bert became those of Louise Fazenda or Charlie Chaplin or almost any major star, Buster Keaton included. (Whether Bert had a try at the Tarzan yell is not known.)
     Nellie Gates, the surviving member of the team, lived well into the era of the talking film, which, of course, wrote finis to her special talent. Nellie died, at 91, in the spring of 1972.

© 1999 Raymond William Stedman