'Love, Drama on the Road' by Jeanne Williams.Temple Daily Telegram: Massengale/Sadler

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Love, Drama on the Road

by Jeanne Williams - Telegram Staff Writer

Temple Daily Telegram - August 9, 2010

CAMERON — Not only did the traveling tent show circuit applaud Harley Herman Sadler

with stardom and a lucrative livelihood, it also introduced him to the love of his

life, Willie Louise “Billie” Massengale of Cameron.

The love story of Harley and Billie would have made an entertaining play for the

traveling tent show stage but their lives ultimately could have been illustrated by

Greek theater masks of comedy and tragedy.

Their story opened with happiness, with Billie cast as a Cameron city clerk who in the

line of duty issued Sadler a permit to open his tent show in Cameron. Years later, the

couple reminisced that they wed after a three-day whirlwind courtship, culminated by

Billie’s dramatic exit through her bedroom window and a middle-of-the-night elopement.

Another version had Harley getting his permit, and later that night slipping the pretty

city clerk a note scribbled on a gum wrapper asking her for a date. “Billy accepted the

invitation; like many girls, she had a crush on the winsome young actor,” stated the

biography “Harley Sadler and His Tent Show,” by Clifford Ashby and Suzanne DePauw May.

“The infatuation apparently ripened into a true love. The next time the show came to

Cameron, Billie feigned a head ache and sent her family to watch unknowingly the antics

of their future son-in-law while she remained at home packing a suitcase.”

Later that night, when the family was asleep, she slipped out of her window into

Harley’s arms, and sped into the night, witness in tow, for a proper midnight wedding.

The town marshal, William T. Massengale, Billie’s father, and her tall, muscular

brother chased down the tent show the next day, but Billie remained with her new

husband.

Not surprisingly, the Massengale family liked Harley and joined his tent show. Billie,

described as “young, pretty and as likeable as her popular husband” served as business

manager and the troupe’s leading lady. Gloria, the couple’s only child, born in 1922,

performed in the vaudeville as soon as she could walk on the stage.

Sadler’s mother-in-law, Augusta Louise Carter Massengale, and other relatives worked in

the traveling show. Billie also became a fashion icon among rural women, as she modeled

the latest big-city fads as she sold ads, tickets, popcorn and bottled remedies.

Billed in Texas as “the first man to make a million dollars from a tent show,” Harley

Herman Sadler left the family farm in Arkansas to seek his fortune on the traveling

stage and wound up as an oilman and legislator, according to The Handbook of Texas On-

Line.

Traveling tent shows of the 19th and 20th centuries brought the theater to rural

America, not only staging plays, but offering sideshows and selling medicines. Tent

shows, commonly charging 15 cents a head, played before a packed house of fans from big

cities to small rural communities.

Sadler achieved fame and wealth with the tent show circuit. His show business

beginnings were humble, starting as a high school dropout who joined a carnival troupe

before moving around with roving repertoire companies. Sadler eventually signed up with

Roy E. Fox’s Popular Players as a comedian and baritone horn player, advancing to the

show’s top billed comic, becoming manager and buying out the company he renamed Harley

Sadler’s Own Show.

Troupers were not trained performers, and a few moved into motion pictures and became

stars, such as Jennifer Jones, Chill Wills, Will Geer, Lyle Talbot, Milburn Stone,

Charles Winniger and Clark Gable, whom Sadler fired in the 1920s for stage fright. “I

fired a million dollars,” Sadler said later.

Tent shows were pushed into the wings by motion pictures, and while the Sadler show

experienced the financial ups and downs of business, the mask of tragedy changed the

family’s course. Inconsolable after the 1941 death of their daughter, Gloria Sadler

Allen, Sadler sold the tent show, entered the oil business and became Texas state

representative and state senator from Sweetwater, serving multiple terms.

The family was unable to flee the mask of tragedy. Sadler died suddenly of a heart

attack in 1954. Billie never recovered from her daughter’s untimely death in

childbirth, became an alcoholic and, after her husband’s death, committed suicide at

her home in Austin in 1955.

Today, in the Massengale-Sadler family plot in Cameron’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the famous

show business family rests in peace, not prominence. Plain grave stones reveal names

and dates, but not a whisper of the Sadlers’ flamboyant past and the adventurous

circuit they traversed across Texas with their traveling tent show.