Buster born into theatrical world

Buster Keaton’s skills as an entertainer were influenced by family.
His parents, Joe and Myra Keaton, were vaudevillians; his father-in-law, Frank Cutler, was a writer of one-act plays and verse, and his wife’s uncle, Burt Cutler, was a musician and composer of more than casual note.
Dr. Vergil E. Noble, adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, led off the 20th annual Buster Keaton Celebration, “The Timeless Comedy of Buster Keaton,” Friday morning at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
Noble traced the roots of Buster’s mother, Myra, noting the Cutlers arrived in New England in the early 1600s, including her direct ancestors at the Bay Colony 14 years after the Mayflower delivered the first English settlers to the new world.
James Cutler settled in Watertown, Mass., in 1634 and two centuries later, the 10th generation of Myra’s ancestors began to move westward, first settling in Vermont.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1954, which opened those territories to white settlers, prompted more movement by several families of Cutlers.
Brothers Frank, Charles and Martin Cutler arrived in Rock Bluff, Neb., then a jumping off point for the West. By the early 1870s Frank was listed in a Michigan county directory as a “traveling minstrel.”
Later, the Cutler Comedy Company was made up of Frank and wife Elizabeth and their children, Burt and Myra, then little more than a toddler.
Keaton wrote years later that “my own mother (Myra) was born into show business.”
His father, Joe, met Myra when they performed with Capt. Billy Bryant’s vaudeville company; she joining at age 16.
When Keaton regarded Myra as more than a fellow entertainer, her father Frank sent Myra to live with relatives in Nebraska.
The attraction was too great. On May 31, 1894, Buster’s parents were married, with Myra described as “Joe’s water cress, his little buttercup.”
A little more than a year later — Oct. 4, 1895 — Buster was born in Piqua, while the Keatons were there as part of a touring vaudeville troupe.