Elvis is Back
In the fall of 1968 The Singer Sewing Machine Company developed plans to sponsor a Christmas Season Special for Elvis Presley. The show ended up not being a Christmas Special, but a special featuring Elvis as a singer. The show aired on NBC TV on December 3, 1968. Now this special is called the Elvis’ [...]
The Broadway Tradition
The first American Theatre Wing award to celebrate excellence in the theatre were held on Easter Sunday April 6, 1947. Eleven awards were presented in seven categories. There are presently 25 categories of awards, plus several special awards. The award was named for Antoinette Perry, an actress, director producer and the wartime leader of the [...]
She Wrote About Vainness
Carly Elisabeth Simon was born June 25, 1945. She has had a long career as a singer song- writer. Her first recording was with her sister Lucy, as the Simon Sisters and they had a minor hit with the song Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod in 1964. In all they recorded 3 albums together. In 1971 [...]
A Dancer is Born
Robert Louis Fosse was born on June 23, 1927 in Chicago. He was the youngest of six children. Fosse moved to Hollywood with the ambition of being a dancer in movie musicals. In 1953 he found himself choreographing a sequence in Kiss Me Kate. Because of premature balding he was limited in the roles he [...]
San Francisco Songs
Golden Gate Written by Al Jolson, Dave Dreyer, Joseph Meyer & Billy Rose and recorded 1928 Rose and Dreyer. San Francisco This song was introduced in the 1936 movie San Francisco. The motion picture’s title song was written by Bronislaw Kaper and Walter Jurman, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. I Left My Heart in San [...]
A Keystone Girl
One of the many silent film stars who appeared in films made by Mack Sennett and Keystone Pictures was Louise Fazenda. Fazenda was born in Lafayette Indiana on June 17, 1895 to a merchant broker named Joseph Fazenda. He moved his family to Los Angeles when she was a young girl. Louise Fazenda got her [...]
The Long and Winding Road
40 years ago on June 13, 1970 the Long and Winding Road by the Beatles hit number one of the Billboard Charts. It was their last Number One. The single stayed at the top spot for two weeks. The song was credited to the writing team of Lennon/McCartney, but it was nearly completely Paul McCartney’s [...]
Happy Birthday Miss Gumm
On June 10, 1922, the youngest child of former vaudevillians Frank Gumm and Ethel Milne was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Frances Ethel Gumm, also called Baby, had her first stage performance at the age of two and a half when she appeared with her sisters Mary Jane and Dorothy Virginia singing Jiggle Bells at [...]
Edwin Booth – An American Hamlet
If it wasn’t for the fact that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the most famous Booth would perhaps be his brother Edwin, an American Actor, who was born on November 13, 1833 near Bel Air, Maryland. Booth was the son of another actor, Junius Brutus Booth, who was also a famous actor of the [...]
Bloody Babs
She may have wanted to live, but on June 3, 1955 Barbara Graham, who was nicknamed “Bloody Babs” by the press, was executed in the California gas chamber. On that same day the accomplices, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins were also executed. They had been convicted of the murder of Mabel Monohan. Graham was the [...]
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