“The Marx brothers were all born in New York City, but Chicago was the true birthplace of the act called the Marx Brothers, one of the world’s funniest comedy teams.
“The Jewish clan’s showbiz-obsessed matriarch, Minnie Marx, decided to move the family in 1909 to Chicago, where three major vaudeville talent agencies were based. ‘Chicago was a big vaudeville center, and my mother lost no time in storming the offices of the luckless booking agents,’ her son Groucho recalled.
“Four brothers piled into the family’s apartment at 4649 S. Calumet Ave.: Arthur or Adolph, aka Harpo, 21; Julius, aka Groucho, 19; Milton, aka Gummo, 17; and Herbert, aka Zeppo, 8. The oldest brother, Leonard, aka Chico, 22, was off on his own, working for a music publisher in Pittsburgh and playing piano in a vaudeville duo.
“Groucho, Gummo and Harpo were in a singing group organized by their mom, the Four Nightingales. ‘We were hopeless amateurs,’ Groucho recalled. As Gummo put it: ‘We would sing what were the popular songs of the day — until we sang them.’
“Based in Chicago over the next decade — crisscrossing the country and performing at local venues including Pilsen’s Thalia Hall and Uptown’s Wilson Avenue Theatre — the brothers honed their iconic stage personas.
“‘Like any other litter of undisciplined, high-spirited kids, we were apt to bust loose at any time with horseplay, in a kind of spontaneous combustion,’ Harpo wrote in his 1962 memoir ‘Harpo Speaks.’ When the brothers noticed an insect crawling across a stage, they ‘got down on hands and knees and began to follow the bug, making bets whether it was a beetle, a cockroach, or a bedbug,’ Harpo recalled. ‘This kind of nonsense, on company time, was of course a valid excuse for the manager to bring the curtain down and cut us off without a cent.’
“Chico joined in 1912, after he made an unannounced appearance in the orchestra pit at Waukegan’s Barrison Theatre, plinking piano keys in his quirky style. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ recalled Harpo, who promptly threw an orange at Chico. ‘When Groucho and Gummo saw what was going on they started whooping too. We heaved everything we could get our hands on into the orchestra pit — hats, books, chalk, erasers, stilettos.’
“The Marxes moved into a greystone at 4512 S. Grand Blvd. (now King Drive) around 1912, renting it until they borrowed $9,000 to buy it in January 1914. The mortgage holder was Moses E. Greenebaum.
Minnie, an immigrant from Germany whose father was a magician and ventriloquist, ran a talent agency in the Crilly Building, 35 S. Dearborn St., a vaudeville hub.
“In summer, when vaudeville theaters shut down, the boys went to White Sox games. To escape the stockyards’ ‘fetid smell,’ they trekked to North Side beaches to ‘inhale the cooling breezes of Lake Michigan,’ Groucho recalled. But 51st Street Beach was where Zeppo got into a fight with a lifeguard. His brothers came to his defense and were jailed for disorderly conduct.
“The Marx Brothers finally earned a Chicago Tribune review when their show ‘Home Again’ came to the Palace Music Hall, 127 N. Clark St., in December 1914. ‘They are anxious to please, and please they did,’ Percy Hammond wrote.
“‘The havoc of the wild and wooly Chicago days,’ as Chico’s daughter put it in her book, ended when the Marx Brothers set their sights on Broadway. They went east in 1920, on their way to stage and movie stardom.” (Loerzel, Chicago Tribune, 4/12/26)