11,704 stories by "Trav S.D."
October 28 is the birthday of multiple sit-com mother Susan Harris (Susan Spivak, 1940). Harris is the step-sister of film editor and producer Marion Segal Freed, who was married to George S…
Obviously, the sand bar we know as Coney Island is uncountably old, and was trafficked by Native Americans long before the Dutch and English began poking around out there. But according to t…
Thank you Edward Parker Bolman for the hot tip that today marks the 101st birthday of the still-living performer and designer Juli Lynne Charlot (Shirley Ann Agin, b. 1922). As you can see f…
October 25 is World Opera Day, and not coincidentally the birthday of both Georges Bizet and Johann Strauss II. The bicentennial of the birth of the latter composer is in just a couple of ye…
October 24 is World Kangaroo Day; naturally we observe it with a look at the Australian marsupial's old-school show biz niche: kangaroo boxing. I was startled to learn some time ago that it …
It seems nothing but meet and right that they should be a silent screen star named Gloria Grey (Maria Dragomanovich, 1909-47), there also having been a Gloria Swanson, a Gloria Stuart, a Glo…
Lucy Monroe (1906-1987) was called "The Star-Spangled Girl" and "The Star-Spangled Soprano" not merely to indicate that she was patriotic, a la the girl in the eponymous Neil Simon comedy. S…
I snapped the above at the late Mari Lyn Henry's place just over a year ago. She was a big Sarah Bernhardt buff, and today being Bernhardt's birthday, I thought I would share this wonderful …
A MINOR comedy auteur to be sure, but one nonetheless, and some of his films are rated as modern classics by some. Howard Zieff (1927-2009) first gained fame for advertising photography and …
And why not? We've done as much for most of the other major classic comedians here, and this will help you navigate your way through the many posts we've done about the team. And, anyway, It…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is surely our second most notable English opium eater, after Thomas de Quincey, though certainly the one whose artistic productions are the more celebrate…
Happy Bela Lugosi's birthday! We've amassed several posts about the Hungarian heart-breaker here on Travalanche over the past few years. In honor of the day we introduce this new hub to help…
October 20 was the birthday of the man credited with devising the modern stage revue, Édouard Marchand (1859-1905). In 1886 he was hired by the Folies Bergère to devise stage shows for …
October 19 was the birthday of actor George Nader (1921-2002). Lebanese-American Nader was a local L.A. kid who studied theatre at Occidental College, got experience at Pasadena Playhouse, a…
I'm just the kind of sucker who can be taken in by a screen name like Bob Custer (Raymond Glenn, 1898-1974). I literally did wonder whether the western star was related to the ill-fated Gene…
I stopped doing "bundled" biographical posts a very long time ago, but this week three Hollywood actresses passed away within days of each other, adding up to a theme of sorts. It's possible…
October 16, 1923 was the release date of Alice's Wonderland, the film that set 21 year old Walt Disney on a successful career track as a professional animator. Previous to this, Disney had r…
50 years ago today (October 16, 1973) was the first time the acronymic band name ABBA was put to paper. It stands for the initials of its four members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus,Â…
40 years ago today, The Right Stuff (1983), Philip Kaufman's quicksilver adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about the American space program, premiered (appropriately) at the Kennedy Center. The…
Not be confused with Lieutenant General Chesty Puller, the most decorated U.S. Marine in American History. Although Chesty Morgan (Ilana Wajc, b. 1937) was pretty well decorated herself. It …
A century ago this year (1923), the UK-based firm Lever Brothers introduced Lux Soap on the market. Five years later, the J. Walter Thompson agency cooked up an ingenious campaign to get Hol…
The date on which I write this post on Cliff Gorman (Joel Goldberg, 1936-2002) has significances beyond the fact that it was his birthday. One is that it also happens to have been the birthd…
Happy National Farmers Day! As I've indicated now and again, I am 100% farm stock, descended from Connecticut Yankees on one side and Smokey Mountain Hillbillies on the other (with the odd e…
Art Blakey (1919-1990) has been higher in my consciousness in recent months from hearing Steve "Epstein" Krantz's stories about managing jazz clubs back in the '80s. Blakey was in his last d…
First, some personal reflections on the bad news. To someone who was a kid during the Yom Kippur War, which just had its 50th anniversary (surely among the reasons for the timing of the Hama…
