Joe Flynn almost made his motion picture debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, however his scene was left on the cutting room floor. But after a run of bit parts in movies and TV through the 1950s and early 1960s, Joe’s career took off. He enjoyed major success as Captain Binghamton, the spoiler to Ernest …
James Whale didn’t care what people in Hollywood thought of him. Whale was openly gay in 1930s Hollywood, at time when gay actors and actresses had to hide their sexual orientation at a risk of jeopardizing their careers. He was an innovative director. Universal Pictures owed its stellar success in the 1930s much in part …
Irene Gibbons was an Oscar-nominated costume designer in Hollywood for thirty years. She took over from Adrian at MGM, and went on to establish her own company, Irene, Inc. She was known only as “Irene” in her screen credits. Doris Day wrote in her 1975 autobiography that she got to know Irene quite well. One …
The challenge word on sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “nice”. Syd Barrett was a founding member of Pink Floyd. He provided the musical direction and psychedelic influence in the band’s early work. He recorded two albums with Pink Floyd and two solo releases before mental illness and heavy drug use put him into a self-imposed seclusion lasting more …
No doubt Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man. He was one of the world’s greatest electrical engineers. Aside from his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla contributed to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court …
Thelma McQueen was born in Tampa, Florida in 1911. She trained as a dancer and took her stage name from the “Butterfly Dance” after performing it in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She never liked the name “Thelma” and legally changed her name to “Butterfly.” Although she appeared in an uncredited role in …
The challenge word this week on Monday Artday is “paris”. On July 3, 1971, The Doors’ Jim Morrison died of a heroin overdose in the bathtub of his Paris apartment, essentially ending Robby Krieger’s career. I see that a band calling itself “Riders on the Storm” is on tour, with a stop near me in …
Diane Nemerov was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family. Her parents were fur merchants. Her older brother, Howard, served as United States Poet Laureate in 1963 and again in 1988. When she was 14, she met and fell in love with Allan Arbus, a photographer who would later abandon photography for …
Just a few years after his discharge from the US Navy, Leonard Schneider was arrested in Miami, Florida, for impersonating a priest. He had stolen several priests’ clergy shirts and a clerical collar while posing as a laundry man. He then solicited donations for a leper colony in British Guiana after he legally chartered the …
All Brenda Ann Spencer wanted for Christmas 1978 was a radio. That’s all. Just a radio. Her father bought her a rifle instead. On Monday, January 29, 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on children arriving at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, across the street from her house. She killed two school …
