Giant of vaudeville found a home in Warwick, By Jeff Page Warwick - Fifty miles from home in Greenwood Lake, he walked onto the stage of the old Roxy Theater in New York and started the act he had been performing for crowds, royalty and heads of state for 50 years. There would be nothing new - with one terrible exception. In his tramp costume and with a big red bulb fastened over his nose, he looked around, spotted a fancy bicycle and snatched it. This was just five months after Pearl Harbor; people needed a lift. There were 3,500 in the audience, cheering and applauding in anticipation. So he got on the bike and rode around the stage. And before you knew it, a pedal broke off. More cheers. Soon the other pedal came off. More laughs. Then the handlebars detached, and as he waved them uselessly in the air, he maintained perfect control of the bike. More applause. How did he do that? The seat came off. No place to sit. The chain came off. No way to pedal. The horn came off and he would accidentally step on it and rear back from the noise and shush the audience - his happy conspirators. When the sketch was over this day in May 1942 he exited as the last person in a line of strutting chorus girls. The applause was huge. They wanted more. He went out for a curtain call. They kept yelling for him, and four more times he went out there for more nods, more blown kisses, more thanks. In the wings after that fifth call, he heard what every performer craves and said to a friend, “They’re still applauding.” Then he grabbed his friend and sank to the floor. Joe, stop your joking. But Joe Jackson, 64, was dead. He had left them laughing. An accidental shtick The family brought Jackson back home to Greenwood Lake. He had discovered the village years before the way many vaudevillians did - by escaping to it as a summer retreat. They buried him in Warwick Cemetery where his gravestone reads: “The Original Joe Jackson. He lived to make people laugh.” Etched into the gravestone is a bicycle in two parts. He invented his bicycle shtick by accident. In his native Austria, Jackson had been a national bike racing champion and a member of a bicycle polo team, the late Greenwood Lake Mayor Wilbur Christman noted in his 1995 book “Tales of Greenwood Lake.” Once, in a match, Jackson’s handlebars came apart. The crowd thought it was a gag and howled. Hmmm, Jackson said, and had a special bike built so he could control its breaking apart. “At one point, the bike would be upside down with the pedals and crank handle where the seat should be. As he tried to ride it, it caught him in the rear,” Christman wrote. Joe Jackson was born Josef Francis Jiranek in Vienna in 1878. He performed all over Europe for 10 years before immigrating to the United States in 1902. During the next four decades he toured the world and the vaudeville circuits in the United States with his act. He reportedly was a personal favorite of Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the present British monarch. Jackson could reach international stardom because he never said a word during his act, wrote Brooks Atkinson, the long-time drama critic of The New York Times. Atkinson went on to compare Jackson favorably with Charlie Chaplin. Joe Jackson was big, a major talent. Audiences laughed in anticipation and roared when his bike disintegrated. Because the act never changed, they knew just what to expect and it never stopped delighting them. He never took his audience for granted and never grew bored with his routine, Atkinson wrote. Long after his death, Jackson was remembered and inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame. On the day Jackson died, Atkinson wrote that part of his tramp outfit was a patch of cloth from the pants of the first outfit he had fashioned 50 years earlier. A small house on Jersey Avenue As far as he traveled, he always returned to Greenwood Lake where, Christman wrote, Jackson and his wife Margaret and their two children lived in a small house on Jersey Avenue. Jackson performed gratis for local charitable events and was a popular man in town. His daughter, also named Margaret, died of pneumonia at age 4. Later, Jackson got his son Joe Jr. interested in following him into show business and the son occasionally stood in - unannounced - for the father, so closely did they resemble each other and so well had Joe Jr. memorized the sketch. Christman reports that Joe Jackson bought a farm in Greenwood Lake and converted the cow barn into a restaurant and tavern where he displayed his collection of exotic beer steins. Joe Jackson remained in Greenwood Lake after his marriage ended around 1922. His wife moved with her mother to Bellevale where they ran a resort for vaudevillians. After Jackson’s death at the Roxy, Joe Jr. took over the act and performed into the Eighties throughout Europe, in fairs around the United States, and on television. Joe Jr. died at 79 in 1991. He, too, is buried in Warwick Cemetery. His epitaph reads: “Like father, like son.”