Vaudevillians played musical chairs, personally and professionally, in 1930s Winona

The reviews were aglow but the finances pure woe for two Indiana sisters and their husbands who performed as a vaudeville troupe, crisscrossing the Midwest from Michigan to Kansas in 1911.

“The Musical Reeses are doing a novelty musical act that for cleverness beats anything,” the Wichita Beacon trumpeted, calling their performance “little short of marvelous.”

Blindfolded Babette (Betty) Reese, 21, plinked a xylophone and her 17-year-old sister Freda Christensen sang and played saxophone, while husbands Orville Reese and Walter Christensen added some sax and baritone vocals.

But the cost of train fare, food and lodging nearly eclipsed their entertainment income. So the sisters and their husbands gave up the road for Winona and purchased a furniture store there in 1918, a few blocks from the Mississippi River.

More than a century later, retired Winona music teacher Ruth Anfinson Bures has written an intriguing account of their lives, filled with surprising twists after their teenage marriages morphed far from the norms of 1930s Minnesota. In her book, “Musical Chairs: A True, Forgotten Tale of Love, Music, and Furniture,” Bures unspools a story of real-life musical chairs playing out in Depression-era Winona.

Orville Reese toiled tirelessly directing the Winona Municipal Band from 1920 until his death in 1940, developing youth programs and lobbying for tax funding all while running his furniture store. His wife, Betty, gave piano and sax lessons in a sunny upstairs office. She was nearly 14 years younger than Orville, but had married him the day after her 18th birthday in hopes of teaming up for vaudeville fame.

Those dreams fizzled. As Orville poured more time into the Winona band, Betty grew closer and closer to Freda’s husband Walter. Freda and Walter had met backstage and married quickly so his baritone could join the act. But by the late 1920s, Freda was falling for George Graham, a Winona wrestler, ski jumper, insurance salesman and her personal tennis coach — leaving Walter open to Betty’s advances.

In 1931, when Betty was 41 and Freda was 37, they took a train to Reno, Nev., where residency rules made it possible to get a divorce after six weeks. By year’s end, their divorces secured, Betty had married Walter and Freda had married George. The next summer, Orville married his furniture store’s bookkeeper, Erna Klaviter.

And through it all, they played, conducted and instructed music in Winona.

“There was always a lot of love and cohesiveness with them all,” said Sue Thurman, 72, Betty and Walter’s granddaughter. “We heard the stories, but not until they passed did we realize with some shock that my grandfather had been first married to my Aunt Freda for 20 years.”

Thurman shared scrapbooks, photos and family heirlooms with Bures, who mined the mementos for her book before donating them to the Winona County Historical Society for a display on the municipal band.

The second weddings all took place in Crown Point, Ind., where the Methodist minister was a family friend from South Bend, the city where they had launched their vaudeville careers.

“They knew there would be finger-pointing and tongues tsk-tsking when they returned to Winona,” Bures said. “But they kept their chins up and went about their lives.”

Bures, 78, has played clarinet for 35 years in the Winona Municipal Band, Orville’s old outfit. When the band turned 100 in 2015, Bures joined other band members in researching the band’s history. As she delved into the Reese years and began untangling the threads in the family’s web, she realized there was a more complex story to weave.

“But I also wanted to tell the story of how difficult it is to find musical success even if you’re very, very talented like Babette, Freda, Orville and Walter all were,” she said.

While the names and facts in her book are real, Bures created dialogue for her characters — speculating on their feelings and motivations in what comes across as believable.

Some of her research took her to Shumski’s Flooring, housed in a quaint storefront at 173 E. 3rd Av. in downtown Winona. That’s where the Reese Furniture Co. operated until the late 1960s, and where Betty gave music lessons upstairs.

Bures tracked down Thurman, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., and whose mother Gloria was one of two siblings Betty and Walter adopted in 1933. She fondly recalls her grandparents, who died in the mid-1960s when Thurman was a teenager. According to Thurman, Betty “taught classical music but also had a photo of Elvis on her piano and loved the Beatles, who had just come to America the year she died in 1964.”

Bures contacted some of Betty’s former piano students, “who loved her and found her wonderful and kind,” she said. “She was so devoted to her students, while Orville seemed more motivated for his own glory.”

They’re all complex characters whose interwoven lives have been dusted off, with respect and some wonder — and worthy of a summer read.

“Musical Chairs” is available on Amazon and at the Winona County Historical Society.

Curt Brown’s tales about Minnesota’s history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.