11,732 stories by "Trav S.D."
Today is the birthday of J. Russel Robinson (1892-1963). (He spelled his first name without the customary second “L”.) Posterity knows him best as the composer of scores of ragti…
Originally posted in 2010 In honor of Billy Shears’ 70th birthday, it seemed like a good time for a brief appreciation of his best record. I’m one of those misguided souls who co…
Sunday tends to be a sleepy day readership-wise on Travalanche so I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a little navel-gazing for the faithful few. Within a few months the Stars of …
Today is the birthday of Richard Carle (1871-1941), a Renaissance man of American show business: vaudeville comedian, stage actor, playwright, producer, songwriter, and actor in silent and s…
“Consul the Great” was the top performing ape in vaudeville, so much so that getting back to the original one takes some digging. The original was purchased from Wombwell’s…
Filed under: Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Bettina May, Chris McDaniel, Dangrrr Doll, Gary Beebe, Gotham Burlesque, Grace Gotham
Today is the birthday of the great television satirist (and frequent Presidential candidate) Pat Paulsen (1927-1997). He attained his fame on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the l…
Today is the birthday of rock and roll pioneer Bill Haley (1925-1981). While some make claims for him as “the first rock and roller” (and plenty of those claims were contemporane…
Today is the birthday of Australian swimmer, vaudeville performer and film actress Annette Kellerman. The clip above is from her 1914 silent film Neptune’s Daughter and includ…
Gale Sisters there were four, two sets of twins in fact (not Quadruplets, as billed): June (1911-1996), Jean (1912-1974), Jane (b. 1911) and Joan (1912-1998). Their real names were Doris, Le…
Today is the birthday of Charles B. Tripp (1855-1930). Born without upper limbs, he taught himself to do nearly everything a person with arms can do: dress himself, shave, write with a pen, …
(adapted from a talk given at the Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, CT, November 2005) Most books on vaudeville devote at most a mention or two to P.T. Barnum (July 5, 1810 " April 5, 1891). In …
Trixie and Monkey’s “AMERICAN MORONS” $15 in advance, or at the door. Sideshows By The Seashore Flipping and stripping for AMERICA! Celebrate America’s birthday with …
Today is the birthday of Dell Henderson (George Delbert Henderson, 1883-1956). A stage actor from Ontario, he started out at Biograph in 1908, around the same time as D.W. Griffith and Mack …
Today is, oddly enough, also the birthday of Neil Simon (b. 1927). I confess to having something of a love/ hate relationship with him as a playwright. On the one hand, he’s the first …
Today is the birthday of that peculiar American phenomenon Mitch Miller (1911-2010). Most of us today know him from scratchy old record albums, listened to for camp value on holidays, featur…
Originally posted in 2010. Probably no surprise here, eh? Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (born this day in 1883) first started doodling for the local papers in his native San Francisco befor…
Originally posted in 2011. When I adapted the Hawthorne short story “The May-Pole of Merrymount” for Metropolitan Playhouse’s Hawthornicopia festival in early …
Originally posted in 2011. How fitting that the Father of American Songwriting was born on the Glorious Fourth (1826). Stephen Foster grew up in Western Pennsylvania where his educ…
It being July the 4th and all, I thought it might be fitting to do an appendix type post celebrating some of George M. Cohan’s material (as opposed to musical) legacy. Especially…
Originally posted in 2009. The only thing I'm proud of about vaudeville is that I got out of it. The houses are not all Orpheums and Keith " not by a long way. There are only a few goo…
Today is the birthday of Gloria Stuart (1910-2010). To hell with Titanic, she had a great career 60 years before, in James Whale films like The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invi…
Today is the birthday of Timmie Rogers (1914-2006). Originally from Detroit, as a boy he danced on the street for change. Gradually he worked up to singing and dancing in nightclubs and blac…
Today is the birthday of one of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Irving Caesar (Isidore Caesar, 1895-1996). Raised on the Lower East Side, his father was a socialist lawyer who ran a boo…
Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci were conjoined twins born in Locana, Italy born on either July 4 or October 4 somewhere between 1875 and 1877. The pair were unique in possessing separate…
