A pioneer showman who became one of the richest men in America, Scottish immigrant John J. Murdock worked his way to the top of the ladder. He started as a stagehand in Cincinnati, then moved to Chicago in the 1890s, and made a name for himself in the vaudeville business. He ran a theater on the top of the old Masonic Temple Building which hosted top acts of the era and launched dozens of careers.

Murdock built a house on Center Avenue in Lake Bluff for his family, which included a stage and lighting fixtures featuring a music motif. He served as Treasurer of the village and helped build a clubhouse for the volunteer “fire laddies,” as he called them.

John J. Murdock lived in Lake Bluff with his wife Grace Ervilla and children John J. Jr. and Ethel. He employed his brother-in-law William Sleeper as a theater manager and the Sleeper family also lived in Lake Bluff, probably with the Murdocks on Center Avenue. Murdock’s niece Martha Sleeper became a movie actress.

In 1913, the Keith family hired Murdock to manage their chain of vaudeville theaters out east, and the family moved to New York. Murdock later helped engineer a deal which saw Joseph Kennedy’s fledgling movie business merge with Keith Theaters. The new company made “talkies” such as King Kong and signed young talents like Katharine Hepburn, John Barrymore and Fred Astaire. This movie business came to be known as RKO Pictures – the “K” in RKO is for Keith.

Over the years, John Murdock amassed a fortune of more than $60 million (today, around $1 billion). He gave much of it away for cancer research.