11,865 stories by "Trav S.D."
Originally posted in 2012 Today is the birthday of Julius “Nipsy” Russell (1918-2005). Those of us a certain age remember him as the guy who used to go on all the game show…
Originally posted in 2010. Penny Singleton (born this day in 1908) is best known today for playing the title role in the film and radio adaptations of Chic Young’s comic strip B…
Originally posted in 2012 Today is the birthday of the great American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945). A native of Worcester, Massachusetts (you can hear it in his accent), he later wen…
Today marks a sad anniversary, for on this day in 1885, the most famous elephant star of them all, Jumbo met his untimely end on the railroad tracks. Born in the Sudan in 1861, Jumbo had pre…
Today is the birthday of the great American author James Fenimore Cooper (1759-1851). I am one of the few Americans whose pilgrimage to Cooperstown was completely unconcerned with baseball, …
Today (according to IMDB is the birthday of African American show business Renaissance man William “Billy” McClain (1870-1950): musician, acrobat, minstrel performer, producer, a…
Filed under: Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Cutting Room, Dark Carnival Burlesque, Hell on Heels
Every Sunday in September TCM is showing dozens of works by Alfred Hitchcock from morning until…well into the next morning. It’s not the entire canon, but it’s enough…
Today is the birthday of Jon “Bowzer” Bauman (b. 1947), a fitting occasion I warrant to recall the syndicated variety show he starred in along with another dozen or so guys in th…
Today is the birthday of stage and screen comedian Billie Ritchie (1878-1921). A native of Glasgow Scotland, Ritchie got his start in music hall with Karno’s Speechless Comedians, spri…
Here’s a little tidbit that would have been a perfect column item if your correspondent had such an old-fashioned thing as a show biz column. But I do have a blog, so here is where we …
Today is the birthday of Roald Dahl (1913-1990). I thought I’d observe the day not by talking about his popular children’s books, but about this amazing television show the Duche…
Today is the birthday of a man whose name will probably never be better known that it already is, but whose career forms an important link between show business past and show business presen…
Filed under: BROOKLYN, Burlesk, Coney Island, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS, SOCIAL EVENTS Tagged: beauty pageant, Coney Island, Miss Coney Island
Originally posted in 2009 Mae Questel’s most sustained legacy was as a voice-over actress for Fleischer Studios, where she provided the voices of Olive Oyl and Betty Boop t…
Originally posted in 2009. Jesse Lasky (born this day in 1880) is best known these days for being one of the founders of Paramount Pictures (you see his name in the titles of those early…
Today is the birthday of Gladys George (Gladys Clare, 1904-1954). By age five she joined her parents travelling vaudeville act and they were billed as “The Three Clares” but she …
Today is the birthday of Laddie Cliff (Clifford Perry, 1891-1937). A native of Bristol, England, he began performing at the age of six. dancing in a minstrel show, and subsequently became kn…
Today is the birthday of concert violinist David Rubinoff (1897-1986). Born in what is now Belarus, he studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Warsaw, and was brought to the U.S,. by V…
Today is the birthday of the great libertarian pundit, original thinker, humorist, author, critic and journalist H.L. Mencken, a.k.a. “The Sage of Baltimore” (1880-1956). Mencken…
Originally posted in 2010. My opinion of him has somewhat softened since then, having seen some more of his work… During my recent sojourn at Slapsticon, I saw an obscure Hal Roa…
Originally published in 2011 M. Chevalier was never in American vaudeville but he deserves an honorary nod here due to his origins in French music hall and his success as an American recordi…
Today is the birthday of Alice Lake (1895-1967). Originally from Brooklyn, Lake started out as a dancer and toured the Keith circuit with a one act play called “The Bobbed-hair Bandit&…
On 9-11, I remember watching live local news coverage with a television reporter parked out in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital, where a small army of volunteer doctors, nurses. EMTs, e…
How little do we dream on these sere days when clarity above all seems within our grasp that the shadows have crept past the noon mark and that we have entered the twilight month the dusk of…
