12,131 stories from Trav S.D.
April 29 is the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), considered by many to be one of the principal fathers of modern ballet. Most (if not all) of the 80 ballets he created are lost …
Bert Woodruff (1856-1934) is best known (to some of us anyway), for his iconic role as Pop, New York's last horse-drawn trolley driver, in Harold Lloyd's Speedy (1928). Speedy was one of Woo…
Born 100 years ago this day, Margrethe Blossom Dearie (1924-2009), known professionally as Blossom Dearie. She is not to be confused with Blossom Seeley or Blossom Rock! H'm…I used to thin…
I've just realized a long-standing goal by reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). I've wanted to do that since reading about them in Mark Twain's own memoirs many decades ago. …
Some 50 episodes after my last appearance (Look at Chicolini), I had the good fortune this week to return as a guest on the Marx Brothers Council Podcast to talk about my new book The Marx B…
Synchronicitously, I learned about Renate Müller (1906-1937) from two trusted sources within days of each other a few months back. One was Eve Golden, who wrote terrific articles about t…
As we wrote in our recent send-off to Robert McNeil, hard journalists are generally outside of our biographical wheelhouse on Travalanche. But celebrity journalism is a horse of a different …
The 20th century produced so many great Southern chroniclers of crackerdom (William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee and childhood friend Truman Capote, James Agee, Kat…
With late April and all of May clogged with events, your correspondent has been hard at work trying to get some events on the calendar for June. A couple of new book talks are in the works, …
For obvious reasons, I was going to wait and launch promotion of my newest book at Marxfest next month, but, like a thief in the night, sales have already begun online, and today being World…
April 23, 1896 was a pivotal date in the histories of both live vaudeville and cinematic exhibition. On that day, Koster and Bial's Music Hall topped off their presentation of six variety ac…
Like the man says " that anniversary is today! And I'd love to share a little article about it here with you…but for the fact that I'm presenting a talk on that very topic this Sunday Apri…
True fact: over a period of 16 years, through 8,000 blogposts, I have only used the phrase "bad movie" on Travalanche eight times, and in most of those cases, I either put the phrase in quot…
The title of today's post is to clarify that is not about the excellent recovery sit-com (2017-2020) starring Ron Livingston and my man Mat Fraser. Though it would be very hip to learn that …
For Harold Lloyd's birthday, a new finding aid to help you navigate our nearly four dozen posts on the great silent comedian: Poster Boy for the 1920s (Main Biographical Post) Selected Short…
I head this post with Rembrandt's 1662 painting The Syndics of the Drapers Guild naturally because since 1911 the image has been used to represent Dutch Masters cigars, famously associated w…
Comedian Conan O'Brien (b. 1963) has been in show business for about 40 years, and he's been known to the wider public for about 30 of those. By rights, I ought to hate him more (I'll get to…
As I pen this, it's the 500th anniversary of Verrazzano's historic discovery of New York harbor, But I've already blogged about that, on my other blog. So now we treat of the screenwriter/di…
PBS's Robert MacNeil (1931-2024) passed away back on April 12. On the Newshour, Jim Lehrer, like most of MacNeil's friends and colleagues, used to call him "Robin", but I'll refrain from tak…
With the exception of the Marx Brothers (and there are five of them) Charlie Chaplin (1889-1975) is the stage and screen performer about whom I've written the greatest number of articles on …
We have a duel objective in giving the Travalanche treatment to Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his distinguished family this morning. The first is that the Peales figured in the Ameri…
On April 14, 1894, the first Kinetoscope parlor in the world opened, at 1155 Broadway in Manhattan, not far from Madison Square Park and the Garden. Originally, my headline was more specific…
Word has just come down that the conjoined Schappell twins, Lori and George (b. 1961) passed away on April 7. Wait! You're already a little confused, I bet. How can identical twins be differ…
When I was a kid, grown-ups spoke of a fabled time long before I was born when there were as many as FOUR American tv networks operating simultaneously, keeping me spellbound in much the sam…
April 12 was the birthday of the film actor known as Chief Thundercloud (1899-1955). As it happens, there is a "thundercloud" surrounding the actor's true identity. His real name has been gi…
