11,717 stories by "Trav S.D."
Launched this day in 1936, the original radio incarnation of The Green Hornet, an interesting pop culture character for all sorts of reasons. For example, it is one of the few such character…
Some brief notes on minor independent silent film produce Charles C. "C.C." Burr (1891-1956). Burr was an advertising man from Brooklyn who hung out his "Mastodon Films" shingle in 1920, pro…
I had already planned to do a post on Cicely Tyson (b. 1924) for Black History Month, just a couple days from now. But the news of her death yesterday at age 96 makes the matter more pressin…
There is much I know about John Forsythe (Jacob Freund, 1918-2010) that would not tempt me to write a blogpost about him. For example, he was the voice of Charlie on the original Charlie's A…
Charles Morton (1908-1966) must have wondered what the hell hit him. At age 19, with only some vaudeville and stock company experience behind him, the Madison Wisconsin native was signed by …
Holocaust Remembrance Day seems an appropriate, if vaguely irreverent time to plug An American Pickle (2020), Seth Rogen's low-key, high concept, double-Jewish-identity comedy. I suppose the…
Sometimes, especially in the case of magicians, I learn about an artist first from stumbling across their ephemera. Thus was the case with McDonald Birch (1902-1992). Birch was born in McCon…
Born 100 years ago today, Donna Reed (Donna Belle Mullenger, 1921-86). Reed was a farm girl from Iowa, possessed of a loveliness so great that she was drafted for the film business at the ag…
Aloha, Friends and Frenemies! We've been laying low the last few tumultuous weeks but I'm here to tell ya today that there is much in the works for February and beyond, so please take heed a…
Composer Hugo Riesenfeld (1879-1939) was a character at once interesting and pivotal to show business history, foundational to the early movie industry. Born in Vienna, Riesenfeld graduated …
A wave of the wand on behalf of Gerald Heaney (1899-1974) a.k.a. The Great Heaney. Heaney was a kid working at his dad's jewelry store in Berlin, Wisconsin when he chanced to meet Blackstone…
I first became interested in Joan Leslie (Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel, 1925-2015) when I noted that she was one of the few key cast members of Yankee Doodle Dandy I knew nothing about! (…
As Gracie Allen was to George Burns, as Mary Livingstone was to Jack Benny, so was Portland Hoffa (1905-1990) to Fred Allen. Hoffa was both Allen's wife and his comedy partner on stage and r…
I strongly suspect that plus-sized paragon Amelia Hill (b. circa 1865) was a New York native, based on her repeated stittings at the Charles Eisenmann photo studio, and later references to h…
As an 80th birthday present I have thrown away my entire previous post on Neil Diamond, in which I called him "Elvis for old Jewish ladies". I hurt a friend's feelings with that one, and upo…
As we mentioned the other day in our Herbert Rice post, this weekend the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is hosting a couple of programs related to the use of illustrated songs, presented b…
I was a huge fan of Puerto Rican-American actor Gregory Sierra (b. 1937) whom we learned late last night passed away of cancer back on January 4. The early to mid-70s were Sierra's heyday, w…
George Balanchine (Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze, 1904-1983) is revered as the co-founder (in 1948) and longtime artistic director of the New York City Ballet and the associated School …
Though it has been released and in my possession for a good little while I have held this plug for Gay Marshall's most recent album 'til today for symbolic reasons. We first caught Gay's act…
We love that America's loveable new father figure took his oath of office on the birthday of Leon Ames (1902-1993), who played dads in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Little Women (194…
Before the homonymic Supermen George Reeves and Christopher Reeve, there was yet another muscle man to bear the suname on movie screens, a body builder who had held the title of Mr. America …
We have several reasons (four, to be precise) for being enthusiastic about little person Herbert Henry Rice (1887-1938), who was born on this day (January 21). The first is that he was born …
My first witness to the transfer of Presidential power was the real-time sight of Richard Nixon getting onto a helicopter, having resigned his office in disgrace. Though I was too young to e…
I was tempted to subtitle this post "The Luckiest Guy in the World", for the subject of our article was. Robert Ozell Mosely (1922-1996) was an off duty coast guard sailor who was spotted by…
This Martin Luther King Day, I share a little post on What-Might-Have-Been and What-Might-Could-Be. Out of curiosity I did a little delve into King's television presence in the '60s. As you …
