Early Life
Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey into a show business family. His parents worked for the Barnum and Bailey Circus: his mother, Rae (née Fisher), was a bareback rider and his father, Harry, was an advance man. Rae was from Maryland of German Jewish heritage and Harry was born in Pennsylvania of British parentage. Bud Abbott dropped out of school as a child and began working in Coney Island. When Abbott was 16, his father, now an employee of the Columbia Burlesque Wheel, installed him in the box office of the Casino Theater in Brooklyn. Eventually, Abbott began arranging burlesque show tours.
In 1918, he married Betty Smith, a burlesque dancer and comedienne. Abbott and his new wife soon began producing a vaudeville "tab show" called Broadway Flashes, which toured on the Gus Sun Vaudeville Circuit. Around 1924, Abbott began performing as a straight man in an comedy act with Betty. As his reputation grew, Abbott began working with veteran comedians like Harry Steppe and Harry Evanson.
Read more about this topic: Bud Abbott
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have scarcely felt greater pain in my life than on learning yesterday from Bob’s letter, that you had failed to enter Harvard University. And yet there is very little in it, if you will allow no feeling of discouragement to seize, and prey upon you.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)