Who was Joseph Jefferson?
The choice to name the Committee after the successful nineteenth century actor Joseph Jefferson III included an accurate expectation that the awards would popularly be termed the Jeffs. Committee members also considered the professional accomplishments and particular ties to the city of Chicago of the namesake of the awards. Two aunts of Joseph Jefferson III were members of the first professional theatre company to perform in Chicago. They arrived in 1837, the same year as the incorporation of the city. Joseph Jefferson III, aged 9, appeared with his actor parents one year later. (It is interesting to note that the attorney representing Joseph Jefferson II’s company for licenses and other matters was Abraham Lincoln.) In a letter to theatre manager J. H. McVicker written in 1882, Joseph Jefferson III recalled, “I was the comic singer…and ‘small first villager’, now and then doing duty as a Roman senator, at the back, wrapped in a clean hotel sheet, with my head just peering over the
