12,033 stories from Trav S.D.
January 15 was the birthday of Lady Beth Bancroft (Elizabeth Jane Wrisley, 1902-1985), billed also as Miss Betty, Lady Betty and especially Buckskin Betty. 1954 can handily be said to be Bet…
Ours is an Ernest Thesiger worshipping house. Thesinger (1879-1961) is best known for playing Dr. Pretorius, the campy, flamboyantly effeminate mad scientist mentor in James Whale's The Brid…
We return today to an evergreen theme on this blog and that's entertainers I once found intrinsically ridiculous and have since acquired respect for. The "lounge singer" thing was held in ve…
Just came across the delightful news that starting at midnight tonight and throughout tomorrow, our friends at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum will be showing (online) several comedies …
Brief but prolific was the screen career of Princess Mona Darkfeather (Josephine Workman, 1882-1977). As the discrepancy between her given and professional names suggests, "Mona Darkfeather"…
Incalculably complex is the legacy of Horatio Alger (1832-1899). Alger had written poetry and several "grown up" novels before striking it big with his best known work Ragged Dick, or Street…
Some of you may justly be wondering….Howard Stern? What angle could this old school show biz blog have to explore on the topic of a contemporary radio shock jock? Well, younger people may …
A few fragments today on magician and ventriloquist Paul Stadelman (1990-1971), a.k.a. "Sandu" (a veritable cross between Sandow and Chandu, eh? I do note that Stadelman's books Secrets of S…
For someone who was nicknamed "the Duse of the English Speaking Theatre", Annie Russell (1864-1936) has become sadly obscure today, but come to think of it, so has Duse! It is a quotidian na…
We've only got fragments on the early ventriloquist Joseph Askins (Thomas Haskey, born ca. 1771), Born in the West Midlands town of Walshall (near Birmingham), Haskey was an apprentice bit a…
And now a hearty yee-hah for the great early western star Jack Hoxie (John Hartford Hoxie, 1885-1965). So media-centric have we become since the advent of film that many have a tendency to t…
Well, if I sometimes fear that this blog is growing too much like too many other show business blogs, today won't be one of those days. Everyone else on earth will be chiming in this morning…
Ye Gods, how did this happen! My good friend Seth Shelden the Nobel Prize winning Harpo Marx impersonator wrote me TWO MONTHS ago to let me know his mom, the educator, scholar and feminist D…
January 9, 1972 was the launch date of a kids' show many of us, of a certain age, associate very much with Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Zoom was produced at WGBH in Boston and air…
There were four MacQuarrie Brothers in silent films. They emerged from the San Francisco theatre scene: George (1873-1951), Frank (1875-1950), Murdock (1878-1941), and Albert, or Al (1882-19…
Tampa Red (1903-1981) was one of the most influential and prolific of early blues guitar plays. Born Hudson Woodridge in Smithville Georgia, he was orphaned as a young child and went to live…
The daughter of MLB player Albert "Cod" Myers, Ernestine (1900-91) was born in Terre Haute to himself and Flora LaTart. When still quite young, she followed the slightly older local Valeska …
Just heard that Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) has passed away at the age of 82 of "natural causes". That's pretty young nowadays to succumb to the call of Thanatos, so I wasn't expecting this …
Our previous post on Loretta Young (1913-2000) was beyond cursory. Written in 2014 when my main focus for new posts was silent film, I wrote (and with substantial brevity) about a single fil…
Let me quickly clarify the meaning of my title. It refers not to the nostalgia of Boomers for their own era (at least not primarily) but for the time before they were born, that of their par…
January 4, 1964 was the premiere date of the ABC tv variety show The Hollywood Palace. As it debuted before I was born, and went off the air in early 1970 when I was four years old, then was…
No (apparent) relation to Charlotte Greenwood, Winifred Greenwood (1885-1961) was also a veteran of vaudeville and stock companies. Originally from the greater Rochester area, she made her s…
Mad respect this day for the example of William Haines (1900-1973) who was given a choice: to be himself or to continue being one of Hollywood's top movie stars. He chose the former. Haines …
Proof palpable that all Danes are not melancholy was comedy-musician Victor Borge (Børge Rosenbaum, 1909-2000). Borge came to America too late for vaudeville but not too late for radio an…
As promised nearly two months ago, our review of David Crump's epochal new biography Fred Karno: The Legend Behind the Laughter. Though I have had the book for weeks, it's taken me that long…
