elusive Miss Emerine. Instead, she was referred to a booking agent named Ernie Young, who, during the winter of 1924, placed her as an “entertainment dancer” in some of Chicago’s more disreputable strip clubs, for a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. This kind of employment paid for her rent in a tumbledown boardinghouse and kept food on the table, but it might soon have led to disaster if Young had not, after a few days, transferred her to the Oriole Terrace, a Detroit nightclub at East Grand Boulevard and Woodward Street. This was no sleazy venue. Detroit was, in fact, the home of some of
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