Maude Fulton

Talented Maude Fulton was born on 14 May, 1881 in Eldorado, Kansas, the daughter of Titus P. and Lulu Fulton. Her father was a newspaper editor who over the years operated several papers in Butler and Crawford counties in Kansas before his death sometime in late 1890s. By 1900 Maude was working as a stenographer and living with her mother in St. Louis, Missouri. She would go on to be a vaudeville entertainer, stage and screen actress, concert pianist, dancer, composer, screenwriter, playwright, theater manager and magazine writer. Theatergoers at the time best remembered her for the plays "The Brat" (1919), which she wrote and played the lead role and "The Humming Bird" (1924). In 1918 her manger, George Ebey, bought the Bishop Theater in Oakland, California and renamed it the Fulton Playhouse. The theater remained open until the early years of the Great Depression. At midnight on 20 December, 1920 she married actor/playwright Robert Ober in Boston, Massachusetts. The couple divorced some five or six years later. Fulton and Ober were both born in 1881 and died in 1950. She retired in 1941 after her heath began to decline and spent the last six years of her life under hospital care. Maude Fulton passed away on 9 November, 1950 in Los Angeles, California. New York Times, 23 December, 1920, Sheboygan Press Telegram 11 Nov 1950, US Census records