soon reinvented himself as a respectable impresario north of the Yesler Way "Deadline". In 1902, he bought into Seattle's first well-appointed movie theater (Edison's Unique Theater, established 1897), partnering with the local distributor of Edison phonograph records, creating Seattle's first establishment to combine variety entertainment with movies and Considine's first "dry" establishment. Difficulty in obtaining first-rate acts to play a city so distant from the major concentrations of North American population led Considine to establish one of the first vaudeville circuits (quite possibly the very first), with theaters in Victoria, Vancouver, Portland, Bellingham, Everett, Yakima, and Spokane as well as Seattle. This was the world's first popularly priced vaudeville chain, with ten- and twenty-cent admissions. Considine soon cut (or played down) his old ties to the "restricted district". He played a major role in one of the country's rising fraternal organizations: just before the turn of the century he and John Cort, whose career followed a similar trajectory, had founded the Independent Order of Good Things, which soon became the Fraternal Order of Eagles (F.O.E.). A third founder, H. L. Leavitt, soon bolted to the Loyal Order of Moose. In New York City in 1906 on F.O.E. business, he met and teamed up with Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan to form the Sullivan–Considine vaudeville circuit and associated nationwide booking agency. At it peak, the Sullivan–Considine circuit owned 20 theaters in the Pacific Northwest and was affiliated with 20 in California; they also booked numerous theaters in the Midwest. While Considine and Cort had always been the friendliest of rivals, Considine's rivalry with another Seattle-based vaudeville impresario, Alexander Pantages, ran more to stealing each other's acts (or, failing that, literally stealing the acts' equipment). Still, they too maintained a cordial personal relationship. Their rivalry took place both on their home turf and on the national scene. Murray Morgan characterizes their rivalry as that between a well-connected, savvy businessman (Considine) and a hardworking uneducated genius (Pantages). Pantages simply had a better instinct than Considine for what the public would pay to see, and his total contempt for efforts to "uplift" public taste—and, especially for efforts to impose New York tastes on the country at large—turned out to make good business sense. When Tim Sullivan went insane in 1913, Considine lost one of his main sources of clout and connections. By 1914, Pantages had clearly won out. Considine tried selling out to Marcus