Sunday, June 9, 2024
June 9 was the birthday of stage and screen actress Bessie Barriscale (Elizabeth Barry Scale, 1884-1965). Barriscale was the older cousin of Mabel and Edith Taliaferro; of the three, Mabel T…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AMSaturday, June 8, 2024
June 8 was the birthday of Edwin S. Votey (1856-1931), inventor of, among other things, the player piano. Votey grew up in Ovid, New York, then moved to West Brattleboro Vermont with his fam…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:18AMFriday, June 7, 2024
That’s right! There’s more! In fact there’ll be even more than THIS post over the next few weeks, truth to tell. The wonderful news for folks who couldn’t attend Marxfest is that it …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:32PMBorn 100 years ago today, the great Broadway actress and nightclub performer Dolores Gray (Sylvia Dolores Finkelstein, 1924-2002). Not to be confused with the similar looking Dolores Fuller,…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:06AMThursday, June 6, 2024
Someone who watches vintage celebrity interviews as often as I do was bound to discover Skip E. Lowe (Sammy Labella, 1929-2014) sooner or later. I’d heard of him long before I ever saw him…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:06AMWednesday, June 5, 2024
Today we venture outside our wheelhouse a smidge, but not TOO far, for the post concerns the coming together of two previous subjects: Cyndy Fujikawa, who wrote this wonderful six part serie…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AMTuesday, June 4, 2024
Have no fear, I have no attention of taking down or running down the idiosyncratic genius of Bruce MacLeish Dern (b. 1936). The title refers to the fact that this post will divide aspects of…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:54AMMonday, June 3, 2024
I am in the midst of a very mushy “soft roll-out” of my latest book. The Marx Brothers Miscellany became available to purchase about six weeks ago, and I certainly hawked it at the just-…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:32PMSunday, June 2, 2024
Two old time actors of note were born on June 2, 1874. Lulu Glaser came from Pennsylvania Dutch stock. She was only 17 when she began to show up in New York stage productions, initially unde…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AMToday we salute one of the key figures in the silent movie Renaissance of the last several decades: author, collector, preservationist, director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:12AMSaturday, June 1, 2024
June 1 is National Game Show Day apparently, a holiday one mightn’t have thought society required (“Those poor neglected game shows! Let us…let us take a day to memorialize them!”) B…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:36AMFriday, May 31, 2024
It’s quite true! And (a fact that should be much more widely known) it was started by none other than P.T. Barnum! The final iteration of Barnum’s American Museum burned down in 1868, bu…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:42AMHappy National Smile Day! With several Coney Island events fresh in our rear view mirror, and the Mermaid Parade just three weeks away, the natural topic of exploration today would appear to…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:24AMThursday, May 30, 2024
Here’s news so good I had to share it in my Marxfest talk at Coney Island USA last Sunday…and that is Woman with a Beard Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok, her ground-breaking Brechtian st…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:54AMWednesday, May 29, 2024
We’ve only got about 20 posts in the Bob Hope (1903-2003) section of Travalanche, but still it seemed useful to create a post which laid them out in a sensible order for ease of perusal. A…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMWho was television variety’s biggest comedy giant? My answer may throw you for a loop, but I have a sound rationale. Other names may spring automatically to mind through force of habit, an…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMItem One: Coney Island. A couple of weeks ago the Daily News announced a plan by Thor Equities to build a casino and other commercial retail in Coney Island. Though Thor has behaved rapaciou…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AMMonday, May 27, 2024
Well it’s Memorial Day, and this year we unavoidably think of those fallen in the battle between Freedonia and Sylvania in Duck Soup…as well as the many Marxfest events of the past 10 da…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:32PMSunday, May 26, 2024
A celebration today of actress Pam Grier (b. 1949). Grier was working as a receptionist at American International Pictures when the producers wisely judged that her talents were being wasted…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:06AMSaturday, May 25, 2024
Among show biz buffs, Bennett Cerf (1898-1971) has become the poster child for How American Pop Culture Has Changed And Not for the Better. Cerf was the co-founder of the Random House publis…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:12AMFriday, May 24, 2024
Most of us think of Charlie Chaplin’s Waterloo as arriving with the release of Monsieur Verdoux in 1947, or his exile from the U.S. in 1952. But his alienation from the public had commence…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:18AMThursday, May 23, 2024
May 23 is National Taffy Day. The word taffy is a variant on the English word toffee, and though today we think of them as quite different candies, both words have always been used with a ce…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:12AMWednesday, May 22, 2024
It’s more than likely that I would have done a post on Harvey Milk (1930-1978) eventually anyway, but a few weeks ago I was reminded of something that pushed it to the top of the agenda: h…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:32AMTuesday, May 21, 2024
A century ago today, a couple of rich numbskulls with the erroneous idea that they were somehow superior to the other members of the human race brutally killed a 14 year old boy just to prov…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AMPeggy Cass (Mary Margaret Cass, 1924-1999) would be 100 years old today. Cass was one of the thousand or so older celebrities you’d see on game shows and talk shows as a kid in the ’70s …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:12AMMonday, May 20, 2024
May 20 was the birthday of of silent and pre-code screen star Estelle Taylor (1894-1958). Taylor was a Wilmington native, raised by grandparents who owned a piano store. She was briefly marr…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AMSunday, May 19, 2024
I don’t know if I’ll get around to writing about ALL of Charlie Chaplin’s numerous progeny here but several have interested me, and so we have done posts on Charlie Jr, Sydney the Youn…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:42AMSaturday, May 18, 2024
You would have particular cause to know the screen work of Candice “Candy” Azzara (b. 1945) if you were around during the 1970s. That Brooklyn-accented voice, slightly daffy demeanor and…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:24AMFriday, May 17, 2024
May 17, was the day character Horace McMahon (1906-1971) came into the world. Not to be confused with Horace Mann, where you’ll get an entirely different sort of schooling! The tough looki…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:24AMThursday, May 16, 2024
We’ve marked Music Hall and Variety Day here in the past because we think it is a marvelous idea. Today, I hope you will forgive me if I hijack the occasion for my own nefarious variety pu…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AMWednesday, May 15, 2024
May 15 was the birthday of Joseph A. Campbell (1817-1900), founder of the Campbell Soup Company (est. 1869). We take the product for granted now, especially since it has been overtaken by be…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:32AM 
