Vince, Alex Picard’s son, was a protégé of his father and uncles, and was trained by Phil Shevette. He practiced and performed on the horizontal bars in vaudeville and with the circus through high school (performing with Hagenbeck and Wallace from 1924-1927). By 1928 his career in show business was over. He “retired” at 24.

Vince and his father were very close and I suppose it it was natural that he would follow his father into show business. Alex kept the horizontal bars at his house in Saginaw, at 407 Holland Avenue. The boy probably started practicing on the bars when he was young, perhaps ten years old. That would have been in 1914, the year the war started in Europe.

It is hard to imagine how Vince Picard developed himself physically to perform at the level he did and guess that he stopped as he got older and was simply not able to keep himself physically at such a peak. He did enjoy the good life and all that this suggests and, though he missed it greatly, could never get back what he lost after 1928.