Friday, September 4, 2020
This day in 1972 marked the final closure of San Francisco's Playland at the Beach, a great historic amusement park, and really the last of a great collection of attractions that had been in…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:54AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 3, 2020
I try to build double meanings into the titles of ,my posts " shame on you if you didn't already get the one that heads this one. Alan Ladd (1913-1964) was famously on the diminutive sid…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:32AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 2, 2020
I'm sorry I missed Marge Champion's more significant birthday last year but we'll attempt to redress the wrong by bestowing maximum attention upon her today. What a remarkable life and caree…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:42AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Guido Deiro (1886-1950) was Italian aristocracy, a count from the countryside from an area near Turin which literally bore his surname. The family grew cattle, grapes, and a variety of fruit…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:54AM[SHARE]Monday, August 31, 2020
I thought I would finish out August with a post on the Beatles' Help! album, five years and three weeks after its Golden Anniversary. Well…I've done posts about all of their later records …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 30, 2020
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)Â has been more in our consciousness of late, thanks to the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein's publication (and the superlative exhibition about same at the Morga…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:36PM[SHARE]Saturday, August 29, 2020
Let us begin by clarifying that Lurene Tuttle (1907-86) was also a prolific actress of the screen; it's merely that she achieved a dominance in radio unmatched by her work in other media, th…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]I imagine many people, like me, grew up watching Elliott Gould in the '70s, little dreaming the nature of his career in the previous decade. I'm here to tell ya about it! Born Elliott Goldst…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:32AM[SHARE]Friday, August 28, 2020
Sam Levene is an important guy to know about. He acted constantly on Broadway, in films, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century. The reason you may not have heard of him i…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 27, 2020
I consider the case of Tuesday Weld (Susan Weld, b. 1943) to be one of maddeningly unfulfilled promise. One of the screen's great beauties as well as one of its great talents, she had the po…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:54PM[SHARE]Fate appears to be conspiring to make me (and thus you) aware of The Sisters G: I caught them recently (they are hard to miss) in Paul Whiteman's The King of Jazz (1930) and Frank Fay's God'…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:24AM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Well, now: in the heat of current events we are apt sometimes to neglect benchmarks. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of my play House of Trash in the 2000 New York Internatio…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32PM[SHARE]How appropriate that National Dog Day falls during the dog days of August! Having already offered up close and personal peeks at Rin Tin Tin and Pete the Pup, we thought it it only right…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:54AM[SHARE]Some brief acknowledgment this day for June Collyer (Dorothea Heermance, 1904-1968). June was the older sister of Bud Collyer, who voiced the character of Superman on radio and in animated c…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:54AM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Three cheers today for James Millhollin (1915-1993), a character actor mostly associated with supporting roles as nervous, sweaty, punctilious, uptight, and pop-eyed clerks and bureaucrats. …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:12PM[SHARE]Buster Keaton fans know this well but it may be news to the wider public: Buster's younger brother Harry, a.k.a "Jingles" (1904-1983) was in the family vaudeville act for a time and also…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AM[SHARE]Monday, August 24, 2020
Today we raise a pint bottle to Hal Smith (1916-1994), best remembered for playing Otis, the town drunk on The Andy Griffith Show (1960-66). The gag was that he was generally the only regula…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:12PM[SHARE]Friday, August 21, 2020
Autumn is soon upon us and that means Old School is back in session " virtually, like all the other schools. Today being the 3rd anniversary of the passing of Jerry Lewis, seems a propitious…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:06PM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Pete Hamill passed away on August 5. Like many New Yorkers, I had read his columns and articles for years in the Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, New York Magazine and the Village Voice, …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:36PM[SHARE]It's National Aviation Day! To observe the occasion, I thought I would take a look at a genre that specifically celebrates professional aviators and those that support them: pilots, mechanic…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:12PM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Today we celebrate suis generis Caucasian comedian and kindred spirit Martin Mull (b. 1943). Can I say enough good things about Martin Mull? No. No, I can't. Originally from Chicago, as w…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:42AM[SHARE]Monday, August 17, 2020
It is the 100th birthday of Maureen O'Hara today and TCM has made her the focus of today's Summer Under the Stars programing. It is especially remarkable that she was born in 1920 when you r…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:36AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 16, 2020
And now a tribute to a giant of a man, whose stance was so great it straddled two genres: Glenn Strange (1899-1973). Classic horror fans know him as the man who was tapped to replace Boris K…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:36AM[SHARE]Actor Reni Santoni (b. 1938) passed away a couple of weeks ago. I had long planned a post on him and kept kicking the can down the road. I didn't eulogize him on August 1 (the day he pass…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:36AM[SHARE]Saturday, August 15, 2020
Billie Rhodes (Levita Axelrod, 1894-1988) started as child performer in vaudeville and melodramas in her native San Francisco. By age 17 she was appearing in films (mostly comedies) for Kale…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:06AM[SHARE]Friday, August 14, 2020
A six gun salute today to Charles Burton "Cowboy Charlie" Irwin (1875-1934), a.k.a. C.B. Irwin, a legendary figure in rodeo and Wild West culture. Irwin was a second generation blacksmith fr…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:12AM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Wonderfully, the origin of this post was the photo above, which I came across on the internet while searching for something else. One doesn't just stumble across the films of Pauline Frederi…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Just got the news from TMZ that African American comic actor Raymond Allen (b. 1929)Â has passed on. From Kansas City, Missouri, Allen garnered his first film credit at the young age of 17…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:36PM[SHARE]Monday, August 10, 2020
In a little over a week we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. In observation of that…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:32AM[SHARE]It turns out that instead of being dead, as any reasonable person might have assumed, Eric Bentley was merely 103 years old! Older even than Shaw at the time of his passing. But now Bentley …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:18AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 9, 2020
The title of this post derives from the fact that it is not about the most important and most criminal Paul Kelly (and shame on you if you never heard of him). The original "Paul Kelly" (bor…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
