Lillian Bounds was born on the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho in 1899. Her father was the federal marshal on the reservation and also the blacksmith. Lillian was the youngest of 10 children and the family struggled financially. Her father died when Lillian was 17. Lillian graduated from high school and went to business college….
Category: The Arts
The Year was 1926
Missing! For 11 days, police, dogs, airplanes and 15,000 searchers scoured the English countryside for the missing wife. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Or had she killed herself? This was straight out of a Stephen King novel. Or an Agatha Christie mystery. Wait! This was Agatha Christie. Agatha was married to the tall, dashing Archie Christie,…
The Year was 2018
What a park! Originally called Greensward, it is Central Park, New York City; 750 acres, commissioned by the New York State legislature in 1853. By 2017, it had everything – almost. To let people know where they were in the park, 21 gates were designated. To avoid competition, in 1862, the Board of Commissions decided…
The Year was 1969
You have seen him on TV. Maybe thousands of times. He has done more than 4,000 shows. But you would not recognize him. If he was introduced to you, you would not recognize his name. It is Caroll Spinney. He just retired this week as, yes, Big Bird. Caroll met fellow puppeteer Jim Henson at…
The Year was 1983
After nearly choking to death as a child, Tennessee Williams had a fear of dying in that way, Tennessee was a brilliant publicist – his own. His name was not Tennessee. And he was not even born in Tennessee. But those lies were necessary for him to be eligible to enter a playwriting contest. So…
The Year was 1896
What is May Irwin famous for? The very first kiss every filmed. May Irwin was born in Canada and named Georgina May Campbell. When she was 13, her father died. Her mother, in need of money to support herself and her two daughters, Adeline and Georgia, had them do a vaudeville act as “The Irwin…
The Year was 1906
I used to be Snow White but I drifted. Mae West The daughter of a corset model, little Mae was on a vaudeville stage by the time she was five. At 13, billed as the Baby Vamp, she was doing the new dance, the shimmy, to packed houses in New York City. Decades ahead of…
The Year was 1937
The brothers were born two years apart. The younger one died in 1937, when he was 38. The older one lived to be 86. Yet it is the younger one who became the most famous. He was George Gershwin, born in 1898 in Brooklyn. Their parents had emigrated from Russia. They wanted Ira, the first…
The Year was 1956
“Do not focus your cameras below his waist.” This was the directive to the cameramen on the Ed Sullivan Show Sept. 9, 1956. You could do that on television. In a live concert, there was no way to censor Elvis’s gyrations. Whatever Ed Sullivan and the show’s producers expected, they were surprised by the polite…
The Year was 1564
The most successful fraud ever? True, according to none other than Sigmund Freud. And Charles Dickens. And Mark Twain. Who were they talking about? Shakespeare. William was born in April of 1564 to a wool merchant. His parents, John and Mary, his sisters and brothers and all three of his children were unable to read…