This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
When the Roaring Twenties reached the Mississippi River, the town of Rock Island did not hesitate—she roared with the rest. Next door, her sister city of Moline, solid, staid and demur, held back. Decorum has always been Moline's first concern.
In spite of the new moving pictures which appeared on the stage of the LeClaire Theater, in Moline, Moliners preferred the more respectable live theater. Even titles such as "The Golden Bed," "Tiger Love," and "Unguaded Women" or movie ads in The Moline Dispatch which asked, "Captain of his soul, or slave of his desires?" were not enough to lure staunch Congregationalists.
They continued, instead, during the 1920s, to patronize their favorite live theater: the Hilton Sisters, Daisy and Violet, who returned each year to the LeClaire Theater to sing and dance.
Daisy and Violet were Siamese twins. They were accompanied by a narrator who described them in anatomical detail between acts. He also explained the unusual fact that one of the twins loved booze, while other was a teetotaler. The boozer was also promiscuous, while the teetotaler was prudish. Moliners were saddened to hear that, unfortunately, when the boozer drank, the teetotaler got numb, and when the promiscuous one romanced, the prude, unwillingly, was aroused.
Anyone reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott or James Fenimore Cooper would understand. Always, as in Ivanhoe, there was the fair-haired spiritual Rowena contending for the love of the hero with the dark-haired, sensuous Rebecca. Cooper merely changed the names.
But no doubt Daisy and Violet were popular in Moline for a reason much closer to home. Just to the west, connected to proper Moline by streetcar lines, lay loose-living Rock Island, its Siamese twin, roaring her way through the Twenties. Moliners understood Daisy and Violet.
Ivanhoe was already popular in the 1830s and 40s when Rock Island and Moline were founded. It’s only chance that we are not living today in Rebecca or Rowena.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
