John Fazio Interviewed

[RJNorton]

Many thanks to Steve for sending this article. Steve writes, "I found the original newspaper article about the performance of Still Waters Run Deep at the hospital which Booth and the conspirators targeted on 17 March 1865. It was a December 1881 interview, not of E. L. Davenport, but fellow actor John Mathews who was also in that performance. Davenport was with Mathews when Booth told them he would be attending the performance at the hospital. It seems that the bit about Booth coming into the theater and talking with Davenport about breaking in a new horse was a later writer's imagination. Mathews says he only found out later that Booth was disappointed that Lincoln wasn't there.

The interview is part of a larger article written by reporter Frank A. Burr that appeared in the Philadelphia Press. Unfortunately, issues of the Press as late as 1881 aren't in any of the newspaper archive databases that I checked. So I've included a reprint of the article which appeared in the 07 Dec. 1881 Washington Evening Star on page 6. The article looks like it's too big to post to the forum, so I've included a clipping of the relevant part from the Louisville (KY) Courier Journal of 07 Dec. The version of the article that appeared in the 05 Dec. edition of the Boston Herald gives the original article dateline as 03 Dec. 1881. (Unfortunately, the Herald scans of the article are of poorer quality)."