This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
The cities around Rock Island have contributed their share of performers to the nation's media—to Hollywood, Broadway, to newspapers, radio and television. But none was more successful or colorful than Harry R. “Tim” Moore.
Tim Moore was born in 1887 in a family with 13 children who grew up in Rock Island. His maternal grandfather was a former slave who had come to Rock Island during the Civil War to help guard Confederate prisoners housed on the island.
Moore dropped out of school at the age of eleven (excelling, he said, only in recess), and began a long and distinguished career as a performer. He worked in medicine shows, was briefly a semi-professional boxer, played the vaudeville circuit from 1916 to 1925 with "Tim Moore's Chicago Follies," starred in several movies and then on stage in Blackbirds, only the fourth Broadway musical to do more than 500 shows.
Moore went on to similar triumphs in Europe and Asia. In 1943, he turned down an offer to star as George "the Kingfish" Stevens in a new weekly production of the popular Amos 'n' Andy radio show because the show was scheduled for Sunday, a time for church, not work.
At the age of 58, he retired to Rock Island to fish for channel cats in the Rock and Mississippi rivers.
Here, he was discovered here after a three-year search by producers working on a television version of Amos 'n' Andy, after auditioning 800 other actors and rejecting them all. Moore debuted as the Kingfish for CBS on June 28, 1951, playing the rascally, conniving character for two years—79 episodes—until pressure from the NAACP, concerned about racial stereotypes, put an end to the show.
Moore remained in show business for a few years, appearing on Ed Sullivan, hanging out with a crowd that included Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, and George Jessel.
Tim Moore died of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis on December 13, 1958. By then, his original vaudeville routines had become the inspiration for a new generation of black performers including Pigmeat Markham, Redd Foxx, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
