11,744 stories by "Trav S.d."
William “Buddy” Lester (1915-2002) was the younger brother of comedian Jerry Lester, though he would come to overshadow him. The brothers performed in vaudeville and nightclubs i…
Brooklyn-born Sid Silvers (1901-1976) got his show business start in the early 1920s as the vaudeville stooge to comedian and accordion player Phil Baker, interrupting the act with comic bus…
I emerged just now from an uncharacteristic separation from my computer to find my feed exploding with the sudden, sad news that friend the Neo-Burlesque pioneer Miss Bonnie Dunn has passed …
Charley Rogers (1886-1956) was an old cohort of Stan Laurel’s from his music hall days. Originally from Birmingham, UK, Rogers had moved to the U.S. by 1912, where he toured vaudeville…
Having already done a post on Jonathan Harris, we thought it only equitable that we should publish our Lost in Space post on the birthday of Guy Williams (Armando Joseph Catalano, 1924-1989)…
A tribute today to child actress Mary Ann Jackson (1923-2003). There were many performing Jacksons, beginning with her mother Charlotte (1891-1992), who presumably had a stage career before …
Three cheers for Jack Mercer (Winfield Mercer 1910-84), one for each skill. Jack Mercer was one of the few people in cartoon animation who worked in the three wildly different creative a…
Smilin’ Ed McConnell (1892-1954) was born this day. The son of an Atlanta minister, McConnell started out as a gospel and folk singer, breaking into local radio in 1922. Fifteen years …
Gladys Blake (Gladys Timmons, 1910-1983) was a Hollywood supporting player who most often found work as comic relief playing talkative, gossipy friends. Orphaned shortly after her birth, Bla…
Sara Berner (Lillian Ann Herdan, 1912-1969) was better known by her voice than her face at the peak of her fame. She had been a department store clerk with a penchant for comedy dialects and…
An overdue tribute to Hollywood legend Nick Cravat (Nicholas Cuccia, 1912-1994). Cravat and Burt Lancaster met as teenagers and formed an acrobatic (trapeze) act called Lang and Cravat which…
Today Josephine Crowell (1859-1932) is remembered chiefly for several memorable late supporting performances (her last three in fact): as a lady on a street car in Harold Lloyd’s Speed…
A tribute to stage and screen actress Claudia Dell (Claudia Dell Smith, 1910-77). Originally from San Antonio, Dell played violin as a child, and moved to New York as a teenager to join her …
A tribute to stage and screen star Peggy Shannon (Winona Sammon, 1907-1941), a prolific artist with a sad end. Born in Pine Bluff Arkansas, she was only 16 when she went into the Ziegfeld Fo…
Pauline Starke (1901-77), a major silent film star during the 1920s, found herself in films almost accidentally. As a teenager, she did extra work in The Claws of Greed (1914) and D.W. Griff…
Born in Oklahoma (then still Indian Territory), Harry Harvey, Sr. (1901-85) broke into show business as a member of Gus Hill’s Honey Boy Minstrels** in 1918. For the next fifteen years…
Today being the birthday of the great Murat Bernard “Chic” Young (1901-73), and having had occasion to make reference to his greatest creation, Blondie, it seems incumbent upon u…
It’s a testament to how badly I wanted to see Stan and Ollie that it only took me a week and a half (and not a year or ten years) after opening day to see it. By now you’ve alrea…
Born this day in 1925 Ramon and Royce Perez Blackburn: the Blackburn Twins. I see many partial biographies of this interesting team of tap dancing twin brothers on the internet; you are read…
Please to join me, host Ayun Halliday, Riley Kellogg, Elia Bisker of Sweet Soubrette, Daniela Paiewonsky, Kyra Sims, Mike Andrews, Christine Schisano, and Sam Soghor one week from today as w…
While I have already done a post on Adam West, oddly that will not serve as my Batman post. It’s too mired in the special problems of being Adam West, a subject related but not iden…
Tonight on TCM! A tremendous line-up of some of Laurel and Hardy’s best comedies (only one turkey in the bunch — see if you can guess which). Here’s what they have pl…
When Bob Einstein passed away the other day, I had nothin’. Not only had I already written two other obituaries that same day (Gene Okerlund and Daryl Dragon) but I knew far less about…
I have already written about Zora Neale Hurston, whose birthday it is, here and here, but my wife, knowing how much I admire the writer and cultural preservationist, bought me a copy of a &#…
It is beyond bizarre that I seem not to have done a post yet on Joey Adams (Joseph Abramowitz, 1911-1999). I feel like perhaps I had done one here years ago and now it seems to be missing. A…
