Vaudeville performer Professor Hokum W. Jeebs was a gifted piano-player whose collection of ragtime music dated back to the mid-1800s, according to a close friend.

Born Robert Stabile to an Italian-American family in upstate New York, the 60-year-old — who was known by the stage name he adopted as a teenager — was fatally stabbed in the chest early Wednesday in the West Seattle home he shared with his partner, Dr. Anita Shaffer, said Jeebs' longtime friend and fellow performer, Doug McKechnie, of Oakland, Calif.

Seattle police later arrested a 19-year-old man, who was booked into the King County Jail just before 3 p.m. Wednesday on investigation of homicide. The man, who does not appear to have a criminal history, is expected to make his first court appearance Thursday.

According to police, a woman called 911 at 12:15 a.m. Wednesday to report that her partner had been stabbed by another man inside their house in the 9300 block of 44th Avenue Southwest. It was not immediately known where police arrested the 19-year-old or why they consider him a suspect.

McKechnie said their last conversation was Tuesday night: "He was saying, 'I've never been happier ... .' "

Jeebs, a street performer in San Francisco in the 1970s, also worked for a time as a performer at Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in Tokyo, according to McKechnie and Jeebs' online biography on the Puget Sound Theater Organ Society's website. He moved to Seattle in the early 1990s and co-founded Hokum Hall, now known as Kenyon Hall.

In 2002, a Times reporter profiled Jeebs and his former business partner, Louis Magor, and wrote: "The shows are wacky productions rooted firmly somewhere between 1860 and the 1930s. They've done Ragstravaganzas, operettas and variety shows, Laurel and Hardy laughathons and Buster Keaton silent flicks."