Saturday, September 18, 2021
Ray Cox (1881-1957) was billed in vaudeville as the "Southern Girl" or "The Girl from Dixie" and she played a sort of modern Southern belle character. Some sources give her birthplace as Bat…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:18PM[SHARE]I have spent the last few weeks getting to know Samuel Johnson (1709-1794) a little better. One wants to. He's a riddle: so well known and yet so unknown. Rarely has a literary figure of Joh…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:48AM[SHARE]Friday, September 17, 2021
All honor today to actress and activist Frances E. Williams (Frances E. Jones, 1905-1995), not to be confused with the Frances Williams we wrote about here. This Frances Williams was a produ…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 16, 2021
A King yesterday, and a King today! Many there are who would make themselves royalty, but it's fair I think to say, both undistiputed and indisputable, that Riley "B.B." King (1925-2015) was…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:06PM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 15, 2021
When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, Roy Acuff (1903-1992) was still considered an eminence in the field of country music " I mean, a living one, he was still performing at the Grand Ole O…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 14, 2021
We've had over 50 occasions to mention American International Pictures (AIP) on Travalanche, but no real uber-post to link to. I've done a couple on their most famous auteur Roger Corman, bu…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:03PM[SHARE]Wow. Did NOT see that coming. The opposite of the usual just happened. Normally you see the name of some nonagenarian (like Jimmy Carter or Betty White) trending on Twitter and you click and…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:03PM[SHARE]Silent movie actress Margaret Gibson (1894-1964) has over 150 film credits, but today any chatter about her tends to be about her private life and several crimes she may or may not have comm…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:06PM[SHARE]Sid Marion, sometimes billed as Sidney Marion (Sidney Marienberg, 1900-1965), was a performer about whom we know little on the private end, but a good deal professionally. Born in Massachuse…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:48AM[SHARE]Monday, September 13, 2021
All hail, Bill Monroe (1911-1996), Father of Bluegrass Music. If you're like me, when you hear that bluegrass was cooked up in the 1940s, you'll, be like "Wha-? Huh? Isn't that way too recen…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:12PM[SHARE]Some sources, apparently without authority, give September 13, 1660 as the birthday of the landmark British author Daniel Defoe (d. 1731). I therefore post on him today in an abritrary spiri…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:03PM[SHARE]You know you've done a lot of biographies when new ones start seeming like composites of old ones; thus Vera White sounds like a mash-up of Vera Vague or Vera-Ellen and Pearl White. In sooth…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 12, 2021
Today we acknowledge big bandleader Shep Fields (Saul Feldman (1910-1981). You'll find nearly as many images of Fields blowinto liquid with a straw as you do of him playing his clarinet or s…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:42AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 11, 2021
There is a great episode of Mad Men, where hero Don Draper gets taken to an Off-Off Broadway play by his second wife Megan, an aspiring actress. It is an experimental thing with guys in suit…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AM[SHARE]Friday, September 10, 2021
I'm not one of the numerous people who have to run and hide every September 11. I'm very much the opposite. I've obsessed on it since it happened; I've been working on a book length poem abo…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:06PM[SHARE]Thursday, September 9, 2021
I was going to head this post: "50 years ago today: John Lennon's last good album" but that would not be in a very positive spirit, would it? But I think it is true. To my taste, after the b…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:48AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Queenie Smith (1898-1978) was a familiar character actress well into the 1970s, with a career that had begun over a half-century earlier. Sounds like a blues singer, right? A mix of Mamie Sm…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 7, 2021
"Believe me, if a Turk could get out of Turkey and come here, even now, he would kiss the ground. To oppressed people, America is still a dream." This quote from Elia Kazan (Elias Kazantzogl…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:03PM[SHARE]One might be forgiven for assuming that character actor Irving Bacon (1893-1965) was a brother or some other relative to director Lloyd Bacon, since the former acted in some of the latter's …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AM[SHARE]Monday, September 6, 2021
Labor Day, 1921 saw the launch of the first Miss America pageant (it fell on September 8 that year). It seemed fitting for us to mark the occasion in some way, as there is some overlap with …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 5, 2021
We have all sorts of reasons to be interested in stage and screen star Doris Kenyon (Doris Margaret Kenyon, 1897-1979). One is that singer/actress Doris Day was named after her (her mother w…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:24AM[SHARE]Today is September 5, 2021 and you know what that means. That's right! It's 100 years to the day since Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle held his wild party at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel. Four …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:24AM[SHARE]Comedienne Luella Gear (1897-1980) wasn't in vaudeville but she worked with so many who were that she seems a veteran by proxy. She was almost entirely a creature of the Broadway stage, havi…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:24AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 4, 2021
Tonight! For Hispanic Heritage Month, learn about Latin Burlesque Heritage in Bella Sin's talk on same! Class is Donation based $5 and upVenmo @clevelandburlesque or paypal.me/bellasin Re…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:42PM[SHARE]It seems an injustice to make this Pat O'Malley (1890-1966) an also-ran, for he had once starred in films and has over 400 credits, but by the mid '30s he was busted down to bit player, henc…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:32AM[SHARE]In an industry which has given us an Al Lewis and an Al Kelly, to say nothing of an Al Flosso and an Al Mardo, it seems an Al Baker (1874-1951) would be inevitable. In spite of the quotidian…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:32AM[SHARE]Friday, September 3, 2021
Child star Wally Albright (Walron Algernon Albright Jr, 1925-1999) had range " his face could look cheerful and confident or haunted and melancholy, and this kept him working steadily in bot…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 2, 2021
I'm fairly certain that I have never enjoyed a movie LESS than Val (2021) the new vanity doc about movie star Val Kilmer (b. 1959). My wife suggested it, so I figured we'd hate-watch it, the…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:24PM[SHARE]The career of chorine/model/bit player Jean Spangler (b.1923) was modest; her life presumably short. But we don't really know. Spangler's credits and vital stats can be summed up briefly. Sh…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Notes on and nods to Richard Arlen (Sylvanus Richard Mattimore, 1899-1976). Sylvanus? Sylvanus. That could have been his screen name right there, full stop, just the one name like Elvis, Che…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 31, 2021
An overdue thing on Fredric March (Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel, 1897-1975), a topic so Brobdingnagian and daunting I've deferred it for years, choosing to write around it in various pos…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:18PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
