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- Cole Brings Plenty was born on 18 August 1996. He was an actor, known for Into the Wild Frontier (2022), The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger (2024) and 1923 (2022). He died on 5 April 2024 in Edgerton, Kansas, USA.
- Kip Niven was raised in Prairie Village, Kansas (a suburb of Kansas City in affluent Johnson County), and graduated in 1963 from Shawnee Mission East High School. After spending a year at Baylor University, he changed his mind and entered the theater program at The University of Kansas, where he performed in dozens of plays.
Niven had an impressive resume that includes films such as Magnum Force (1973), Earthquake (1974) and Midway (1976). He had performed on countless television shows, including memorable parts on The Waltons (1972), Law & Order (1990) and Walker, Texas Ranger (1993). He had roles on Broadway, in regional theater and episodic radio shows. He was probably best known for his three-year stint as Steve Marsh on the TV sitcom Alice (1976). Niven and the star of that series, (actress Linda Lavin), married in 1982. The marriage was turbulent and they subsequently divorced.
Kip was first married to Susan and had two children Jim and Kate. She tragically died in a car accident in 1981. He and his 3rd wife Beth lived in Kansas and had a daughter Maggie, who was born in 1994. He also had two grandsons.
In 1995 Kip returned to the Kansas City area where he grew up. He continued to work in local theater and on a comedy radio show. - Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.- Jerry Fogel was born on 17 January 1936 in Rochester, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), The Day of the Locust (1975) and Police Story (1973). He was married to Sandra Adele Millstein, Barbara Kay Fromm and Brenda Elaine Levison. He died on 21 October 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Dennis Allen was born on 10 July 1940 in Raytown, Missouri, USA. He was an actor, known for Me, Natalie (1969), Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967) and Love, American Style (1969). He died on 1 December 1995 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Owen Hart was one of twelve children from a legendary Canadian wrestling family. His brother Bret is also one of the most well known wrestlers of all time. Owen was one of the best wrestlers in the business and his major accomplishments include being the 1994 King of the Ring, former Intercontinental Champion(2), former European Champion, and co-holder of the Tag Team Championship (4). Sadly, Hart plunged to his death on May 23, 1999 during a PPV when he was performing a spectacular entrance. Hart was only 34 and is survived by his wife Martha, his son Oje and his daughter Athena.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Despite growing up in a small town in New Jersey, Keith Loneker knew early in life that he had bigger things in store for him. You'd never know by his hulking body that this giant is an underdog. Loneker has overcome many personal obstacles to defy the odds his entire life. In high school he endured a painful hip injury. Doctors said he would never play sports again. Keith decided not to accept the doctor's opinion. He became a gym rat working out 3 hours a day to rehabilitate his ailing hip. After a year of training, Loneker proved doctors wrong when he stepped onto a football field for the first time in 2 years. Loneker, who was just happy to be back among his pals playing ball, was not aware that his raw talent on the football field would land him a Division 1 scholarship with the University of Kansas. The scholarship also did not come easy to Loneker. Many local Division 1 football programs passed on Loneker. They said he was too short, injury prone, or he just didn't have the talent. Glen Mason, the former head coach of the University of Kansas, balked at Loneker's critics and offered him a full scholarship. It was apparent early in Loneker's college career that he was a special player. He played as a true freshman. Loneker was an all Big Eight tackle three years at the University of Kansas. After graduation Loneker prepared for the NFL draft. His agent and many publications projected he would be a third round draft choice. Loneker had a party at his house in New Jersey on draft day with family and close friends. Loneker was shocked when after eight rounds his name was not called by an NFL club. His family and friends could see the disappointment in his eyes after the NFL draft had finished. Then as everyone thought he may get upset, Keith turned his misfortune into fuel.. Not getting drafted made Loneker hungry to prove his critics wrong once again. He walked on with the LA Rams and immediately began turning heads with vicious play on the field. The coaches knew they had plucked a gem and Loneker not only made the team but went on to start by the end of his rookie season. Keith enjoyed his five years in the NFL and is thankful he had the chance to fulfill his childhood dream. Keith didn't realize that his football career was about to transition into a movie career. A former teammate who was working in Hollywood as an agent called Loneker and told him he had a part that he thought he'd fit perfect. Loneker had never acted before, but decided to make a tape for an audition. The producers of the film hired him off his tape alone. To Keith's surprise he landed the role of "White Boy Bob" in a Steven Soderbergh film "Out Of Sight". The part was small, but Loneker got to showcase his talent with stars like George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, and Ving Rhames. Loneker continued his career in film and landed a small part in, "Rock Star" with Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Anniston. Nothing has come easy for Loneker during his life, but that doesn't stop this man from trying to fulfill all of his dreams. This small town Jersey boy has shown all his critics who judged him that nothing can stand in the way of a motivated man. Some people might call Loneker's success luck, but those who know him say it is character, hard work, and a big heart that made this underdog what he is today.- Best-known for performing the most popular baseball poem, "Casey at the Bat." Filmed as one of the first talkies, 5 years before The Jazz Singer (1927), Casey at the Bat (1922), was included in Ken Burns' Baseball (1994). Hopper, a fervent New York Giant fan, first performed the then-unknown poem to the Giants and Chicago Cubs, on the day his friend, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Tim Keefe had his record 19 game winning streak stopped, August 14, 1888. The dying General William T. Sherman was also in the audience that evening, along with Keefe and his brother-in-law shortstop/attorney John Montgomery Ward. 2 months later the Giants won New York's first world championship.
Hopper recited Casey for almost 40 years in films, on stage, records, radio etc. Known as the "Husband of His Country" for his 6 marriages. He became totally hairless, with blue-tinged skin, possibly from reaction to a patent medicine. Even so, his powerful voice and great sense of humor mesmerized women all his life. One of his wives was the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Their son, the white-maned William Hopper, played private investigator Paul Drake on Perry Mason for many years. - Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A lifetime member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a U.S. senator from the state of Missouri from 1935 to 1945. He was chosen as incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate for the 1944 presidential election. Truman was inaugurated as the 34th vice president in 1945 and served for less than three months until President Roosevelt died. Now serving as president, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition that dominated the Congress.
- Dort Clark was born on 1 October 1917 in Wellington, Kansas, USA. He was an actor, known for Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Bells Are Ringing (1960) and Wonderful Town (1958). He was married to Marilyn Sable. He died on 30 March 1989 in Wellington, Kansas, USA.
- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Colorado-born Herk Harvey majored in theater at Kansas University, directing and acting in stage productions and later returning to the school in a teaching capacity. He broke into the film business as an actor in some of the movies being made by Centron Corporation of Lawrence, Kansas, an educational and industrial film production company for which he subsequently went to work as a director. In 1961 he took a working vacation from Centron to try his hand at feature filmmaking, producing, directing and co-starring in the creepy horror film Carnival of Souls (1962), shot in Kansas and Utah.- Barry McGuire was raised in Arkansas City, Kansas, graduated from the University of Denver and broke into Broadway in his first role in 'Bernadine', which opened on February 2, 1953. After retiring, the actor, puppeteer and magician settled into tiny Elk Falls, Kansas around 2010.
Decades earlier, his creative genius had spurred an artistic revival in this dying town. He had transformed stone foundations into tiered native flower gardens that brought a new wave of tourists to this forgotten place. Through the work of a group of artists, Elk Falls became a thriving haven of creativity. McGuire had a theater constructed, and entertained tourists with puppet shows and magic acts. He left Elk Falls to return to acting. His credit list includes regional stage productions from New York to Florida to Indiana, and California.
After three years in Elk Falls, he moved to California in 2013 to live closer to friends. He died on March 7, 2023, his 93rd birthday, in Winfield, Kansas. - Andrea Walters was born on 3 July 1953 in Rockford, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Lucky Numbers (2000), General Hospital (1963) and Death Doll (1989). She was married to Mark Ganzel and Mike Saccone. She died on 27 November 2018 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Victoria Catlin was born on 23 September 1952. She was an actress, known for Twin Peaks (1990), Ghoulies (1984) and Howling V: The Rebirth (1989). She died on 28 February 2024 in Merriam, Kansas, United States.
- Actor
- Soundtrack
American cowboy star of silent films, Jack Hoxie was raised in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and in Idaho, learning riding and roping at an early age. He became a popular and successful rodeo star, winning national championships. In 1914, after touring the U.S. in a Wild West show, he came to Hollywood and got work as a stuntman. He had a handsome, stalwart quality that, along with his skills as a cowhand, quickly gained him the attention of producers and studios. Born John Stone, he changed his name to Hartford Hoxie and then to Art Hoxie when producer Anthony J. Xydias of Sunset Productions signed him for a series of low-budget Westerns. By 1921 Hoxie was successful enough to catch the eye of Universal Pictures, which hired him away and placed in him in more prestigious westerns. Although not a star of the magnitude of Douglas Fairbanks or Charles Chaplin, Hoxie was a prominent name among western stars. His career faded quickly after sound, as even though he looked the part of a cowboy, his skills did not extend to sounding like one (he could barely read). He continued to appear, albeit in smaller roles, well into the 1930s, when he left Hollywood to star in his own western-style circus. By the end of the 1930s he had retired to a ranch in Oklahoma, where he lived out his days in obscurity. He died in Kansas in 1965 at the age of 80. He was survived by his brother, lesser-known cowboy actor Al Hoxie.- Ruth Hampton was born on 25 April 1931 in Throop, Pennsylvania, USA. She was an actress, known for Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Johnny Dark (1954) and Ricochet Romance (1954). She was married to Robert L. Clary, Randall A. Wood and Byron Palmer. She died on 25 August 2005 in Merriam, Kansas, USA.
- Born Lafayette Russell on May 31, 1905, "Reb" Russell grew up in Coffeyville, Kansas. A superb athlete all through his school years, he was a star running back on the University of Nebraska football team, and gained even more fame when he switched to Illinois' Northwestern University, where he played fullback and was named an All-American in 1930.
It was inevitable that a big, good-looking, famous football star would be courted by Hollywood, and Russell was eventually given small parts in a few films at Fox Pictures, but nothing really came of them. However, he did sign a contract with independent producer Willis Kent to star in a series of low-budget westerns. He made nine of them, with titles like The Man from Hell (1934), Lightning Triggers (1935) and Blazing Guns (1935), for Kent during 1934 and 1935, and "low-budget" is perhaps a charitable description of them. For all his athletic prowess, riding ability and good looks, Russell just wasn't much of an actor, but even if he had been he wouldn't have been able to overcome the threadbare production values, lame and trite scripts and overall shoddiness of the films themselves. They were distributed through the states-rights syndication system, which meant that basically not a whole lot of people saw them, and Russell never really made an impression on either fans or Hollywood itself. By 1935 he and Kent had parted ways. He left Hollywood and toured with several traveling circuses during the rest of the 1930s. In the 1940s he returned to Coffeyville, married and raised a family. He bought several ranches, becoming somewhat of an expert on livestock breeding. He died in Coffeyville of a heart attack in 1978. - Actress
- Soundtrack
Patricia Ellis called herself "the Queen of B pictures at Warner Brothers". With only three years of theatrical experience in New York under her belt, she started in films in 1932. Alongside other ladies considered to have potential (such as Ginger Rogers and Mary Carlisle), Patricia was selected as a WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) baby star. Within a few years she had worked her way up from juvenile supporting roles to second leads, averaging seven films a year. By 1937, she was given starring roles in comedies and the occasional mystery or crime picture, with such co-stars as James Cagney, Adolphe Menjou, and Joe E. Brown. Reviewers called her "comely and spontaneous" in the baseball farce Elmer, the Great (1933) and "personable" in Here Comes the Groom (1934) co-starring Jack Haley and referred to her "blonde winsomeness" in Boulder Dam (1936).
The problem was that the majority of her screen roles were purely ornamental and the films themselves were, without exception, second features. Towards the end of her run, Patricia appeared in the 1937 English comedy 'The Gaiety Girls' (with Jack Hulbert and a young Googie Withers) and, against type, played a femme fatale in Fugitive at Large (1939). At the end of the decade she called it a day, leaving Hollywood, first to appear in "Louisiana Purchase" on Broadway and then to marry George T. O'Malley, future president of Protection Securities Systems in Kansas City.- Sarah Leanne Scantlin was born to Elizabeth and James Scantlin. She had one brother named James V. Scantlin. She graduated from Nickerson High School in 1984 and attended Hutchinson Junior Community College where she made the cheerleading squad, the Dragon Dolls. On September 21, 1984, just a couple weeks into her freshman year, she was struck by a motor vehicle (drunk driver who fled the scene) while walking with friends and sustained a traumatic brain injury and spinal cord damage. She was in a minimally conscious coma-like state for 20 years. In January 2005, she surprised family, friends, and medical professionals alike when she began speaking. She retained much of her long-term memory but did not comprehend that she was no longer 18-years-old. Time magazine featured her in a 2007 special edition that focused on the brain and the "mysteries of consciousness." In July 2007, she fed herself for the first time in 22 years. Sarah died of respiratory issues and failing blood pressure on May 20, 2016.
- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Thomas Waller was born in 1904. He was one of the most important pianist in the history of jazz. He studied piano with James P. Johnson, one of the masters of the stride piano in the 1920s. Fats began recording his first piano solos in 1923. He worked in the revue "Hot Chocolates" in the late 1920s as a composer. Along with Duke Ellington, he is one of the most prolific composers in jazz. His best songs are, "Ain't Misbehavin' ", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Black and Blue", "Blue Turned Grey Over You" and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now". He formed his own group in 1934, Fats Waller and his Rhythm, and recorded many records for RCA Victor. Two of his most notable film appearances were in Stormy Weather (1943) and King of Burlesque (1936). He died in 1943 on a train during a trip to California. He was just 39 years old.- Actor
- Additional Crew
American character actor and producer/director. A third-generation Kansan, raised in Hutchinson, Kansas, Smith was the son of Delos V. Smith and Bessie Bloom. He was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Kansas, participated in the first Round the World University Afloat, attended graduate school at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and College de France. He was involved in the performing arts throughout his life, first as impresario of the General Motors Symphony of the Air radio show from 1930-36, then as a singer in a multitude of opera companies. He acted, produced, and directed on Broadway and on the London stage, and appeared in a number of Hollywood films and television programs. Following his retirement in 1981, he returned to college in Hutchinson, Kansas, studying at Hutchinson Community College for much of the final two decades of his life. At his death, he had no immediate survivors.- Auriol Lee was born on 13 September 1880 in London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Suspicion (1941) and A Royal Divorce (1938). She was married to Frederick Lloyd. She died on 2 July 1941 in Hutchinson, Kansas, USA.
- Actor
- Location Management
- Transportation Department
Tony Swartz was born on 24 September 1943 in Davenport, Iowa, USA. He was an actor, known for Battlestar Galactica (1978), About Schmidt (2002) and Battlestar Galactica (1978). He was married to Helen Blume. He died on 27 September 2016 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.- Peg Hillias was born on 24 June 1914 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA. She was an actress, known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Producers' Showcase (1954) and Studio One (1948). She died on 18 March 1960 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Francis Vaselle Aiello was born June 6, 1915, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. He worked many odd jobs after graduating High School, including working with his father, Carmine, who owned a tailoring shop. He earned the nickname "The earl of Warwick" because of his persistence trying to obtain a job at the most luxurious hotel in town, The Warwick Hotel (he sat in the lobby for weeks every day). However, he was a "newspaper seller" when he first saw 'James Cagney' on film and became an immediate fan. He imitated Cagney for a long time to his friends and family, much to their approval, before deciding to hitchhike to Hollywood to get an interview with Cagney, but this attempt failed, so he returned home to New York. Later he tried it again, and this time he landed a job on the vaudeville circuit doing impressions of Cagney. A Warner Bros. talent scout saw his act and hired him for the role of the young version of Cagney's "Rocky Sullivan" in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). After that he made 17 films until he disappeared from the celebrity circuit in 1941. His whereabouts from 1941 to about 1961 are unknown, but sometime in the early 1960s, he decided to ride the rails as what he, himself, called a "Hobo" until he became too ill and was taken from a train when it pulled into Junction City, Kansas. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and sent to a long term care facility in Chapman, Kansas where he passed away only weeks later on April 7th, 1983.
- Costume Designer
- Art Director
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
Robert "Bob" Fletcher was a prolific costume designer for both stage and screen with more than six decades of experience in the field. He is best known for his work on the first four Star Trek films, and is considered the father of the classic Klingon and Vulcan, as we know them today. He passed peacefully in Kansas City on April 5th, 2021 at the age of 98.- Holly Harris was born on 27 December 1920 in St. Charles, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Once Upon a Tune (1951), Act of Vengeance (1974) and Dogs (1977). She was married to Duhhaine Waeker. She died on 23 July 2010 in North Newton, Kansas, USA.
- Jim Scantlin was born on 14 March 1938. He was married to Betsy Scantlin. He died on 25 January 2016 in Hutchinson, Kansas, USA.
- Actor
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Leroy 'Satchel' Paige was born on 7 July 1906 in Mobile, Alabama, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Wonderful Country (1959), Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy 'Satchel' Paige (1981) and The Kid from Cleveland (1949). He was married to Lahoma Brown and Janet Howard. He died on 8 June 1982 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
American stage actor, musical comedy star, and vaudevillian who was a legendary figure of his time and who fathered a family of performers who went on to notable careers in motion pictures. Born Edward Fitzgerald at 23 8th Avenue in New York City, March 9, 1856, to an Irish-immigrant tailor, Richard Fitzgerald, and his wife Mary, Eddie moved to Chicago with his family after his father's death in an insane asylum from syphilis in 1862. His mother reportedly cared for Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's widow, during Mrs. Lincoln's mental illness. At the age of 8, Eddie began entertaining on the street for tips, doing acrobatic dances. He changed his name to Foy when he was 15, and he and partner Jack Finnigan went on the road, dancing for meals in bars. They got work as supernumeraries in dramatic productions and Foy claimed to have worked in such a capacity with the leading actor of his day, Edwin Booth. With another partner, Jim Thompson, Foy traveled for three years in a saloon/theatre circuit through the West, including an extended stay in Dodge City, Kansas, where he met Doc Holliday, 'William Barclay 'Bat' Masterson', and Wyatt Earp. Also on the circuit was a girl singer act, the Howland Sisters. Eddie fell for one of them, Rose Howland, and they married in 1879. In 1882, the four (Thompson had married another singer) returned East, joining the Carncross Minstrels in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, however, Rose Foy and her newborn died in childbirth. By 1887, Foy was back in the West, touring with David Henderson's troupe across the country. He met Lola Sefton in San Francisco and they were a couple for the next decade until her death. (Many sources described them as husband and wife, though no record of a marriage has been found.) After Sefton's death, Foy started his own company and two years later married one of his dancers, Madeline Morando. She gave him eleven children, the seven surviving ones becoming world-famous in their father's act as The Seven Little Foys. In 1903, while playing the Iroquois Theatre, Foy heroically attempted to calm the crowd after fire broke out. Six hundred people died. Foy escaped by crawling through a sewer. Three years after bringing his children into the act, Foy and his family appeared in a film for Mack Sennett, one of only a handful the senior Foy would do. However, his children, in particular Bryan Foy and Eddie Foy Jr., would enjoy substantial careers in the movies. Eddie Sr. continued to headline in vaudeville and musical theatre until his death from a heart attack in 1928 while performing in vaudeville in Kansas City, Missouri.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Vic Savage was born on 14 August 1933 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Creeping Terror (1964) and Street-Fighter (1959). He was married to Lois A. White. He died on 25 May 1975 in Kansas City, Kansas, USA.- Chicago gangster George "Bugs" Moran was born to French immigrants on August 21, 1893 as Adelard Cunin in St. Paul, MN. He left St. Paul at age 19 and moved to Chicago, where he soon hooked up with several of the city's street gangs and got a taste of the criminal underworld. He took to it readily, and before he was 21 he had been jailed three times.
Moran, like most gang bosses of the 1920s, came into his own with the advent of Prohibition in 1920. He became the head of a very successful bootlegging outfit known as the North Side Gang. In that capacity he came into conflict with Chicago mobsters Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. Torrio, who only used violence when absolutely necessary, worked out an agreement with Moran and another gangster, Charles Dion O'Bannion, but that didn't last too long. Moran and O'Bannion detested Capone, often calling him by his nickname "Scarface"--Capone was extremely sensitive about the big knife scar on his face and was known to have killed men who used that nickname in his presence--and O'Bannion eventually paid the price for his defiance of Torrio and Capone: he was assassinated by Capone/Torrio gunmen. Moran attended O'Bannion's funeral--as did Capone and Torrio--and vowed to avenge his friend's murder.
Moran's mob, and the remnants of O'Bannion's gang, engaged in a bloody war with the Torrio/Capone outfit. They tried to kill both Torrio and Capone, once when Capone was spotted getting out of his car on the street and another time when he and his associates were dining in a restaurant. Capone escaped both attempts uninjured, but Torrio was not so luckily. A carload of Moran's gunmen spotted Torrio's car on the street and opened fire, hitting Torrio at least five times. He survived, but shortly afterward decided to retire and turned over the reins to Capone.
Capone and Moran eventually reached a truce, of sorts. While there were no bloody gun battles as there had been in the past, the two continued to take potshots at each other--Moran would hijack some of Capone's bootlegging trucks, Capone would burn down one of Moran's legitimate businesses, etc. However, it wasn't long before this escalated into full-scale violence, and Moran had several of Capone's friends and associates killed. Two of them were Antonio Lombardo and "Patsy" Lolordo, who had been longtime friends of Capone. He vowed to wipe out Moran once and for all. To that end, he engineered an elaborate assassination plot against Moran and his mob at their headquarters on Clark Street in Chicago. On Feb. 14, 1929, Capone sent a squad of killers dressed as police, complete with police car, to the building, expecting to find Moran and his gang there. Unfortunately, they mistook one of Moran's gangsters for him, not realizing that Moran was in fact walking toward the building when he saw the "police car" outside of it, and he turned around and walked away. Capone's killers lined up the seven men they found in the building and machine-gunned them to death, an incident that became known as The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Moran, when asked by reporters who he thought was behind it, replied, "Nobody but Capone kills like that". His organization remained intact, but when Prohibition was repealed, his gang's fortunes declined, and a few years later Moran decided to leave Chicago. He didn't completely forgo the gangster life, however. In 1936, seven years after the St. Valentine's massacre, a hitman named Jack McGurn--aka "Machine Gun" McGurn--who was widely suspected of being the main triggerman in the massacre was murdered in a bowling alley by a squad of gunmen, and a valentine's card was left near his body. A rhort rhyming limerick about McGurn was also left with the body, and since both Moran and his mentor O'Bannion were known to favor pranks and limericks, it was widely assumed that it was Moran who had McGurn killed as payback for the 1929 killings.
Moran's fortunes declined in the 1930s. He spent several stretches in prison, for relatively penny-ante crimes like mail fraud and robbery. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth Federal Prison on a bank-fraud charge, and it was in Leaenworth that he died of lung cancer on Feb. 25, 1957. He was buried in the pauper's section of the prison cemetery. - Hal Jon Norman was born on 27 August 1911 in Wichita, Kansas, USA. He was an actor, known for The Loners (1972), Escape to Passion (1971) and MacGyver (1985). He died on 14 July 2011 in Wichita, Kansas, USA.
- Harold Ensley was born on 20 November 1912 in Arkansas, USA. He was an actor, known for Gunsmoke (1955). He died on 24 August 2005 in Overland Park, Kansas, USA.
- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Director
Writer-producer-director-exhibitor Wade Williams owned the largest independent library of science-fiction film rights and distributed his product worldwide through Corinth Films, Englewood Entertainment and Mass Productions (UK). He also owned theaters in Kansas City, Missouri, and was a contributor to many sci-fi magazines and periodicals (Starlog, Filmfax, etc.). Williams was also involved with animal rescue efforts.- Muriel Finley was born on 15 June 1902 in Salmon, Idaho, USA. She was an actress, known for Sin Takes a Holiday (1930). She was married to Robert Dinwiddie Groves and Edward Cronjager. She died on 5 October 1975 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- B.B. Andersen was born on 18 January 1936 in South Dakota, USA. He died on 29 October 2013 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Myrtle Vail was born on 7 January 1888 in Joliet, Illinois, USA. She was an actress and writer, known for Myrt and Marge (1933), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and A Bucket of Blood (1959). She was married to George Damerel. She died on 18 September 1978 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.- Gretchen Rudolph was born on 30 May 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri. She was an actress, known for My Body Hungers (1967), The Love Rebellion (1967) and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse (1967). She died on 14 October 2021 in Topeka, Kansas, USA.
- Doug Scott lived in Kansas City, MO all his life. He attended Catholic Schools kindergarten through twelfth grade. It was during his time in school that he became an actor. After a very short stint in acting, Doug Scott attended and graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In addition to his two (TV Movie) acting credits, he appeared in many national and local (Kansas City) T.V. commercials. Later in life, in addition to owning and operating a brokering freight company, he had three children: Austin (who preceded him in death); Alicia; and Hunter.
- Myra's family moved when she a child to Kansas City, Missouri. At age 14, she got her start as a dancer then as a singer in the area of 12th and Vine and later 18th and Vine. In 1937 she moved to Chicago but returned to Kansas City in 1940 where she joined Harlan Leonard's band. After a lengthy NY engagement at Harlem's Golden Gate Ballroom. Taylor's voice was first recorded, on RCA's famous Bluebird Records label. Myra and Leonard parted after a disagreement over writing credits. Myra went on tour with Eubie Blake then returned to Kansas City. In 1946, she had a hit with the song Spider and the Fly on Mercury Records, but once again had a dispute over credits. Frustrated over the American music business she spent years in Mexico and Europe. She toured with the USO during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Myra returned to the US, settling in Los Angeles in 1977 where she began her acting career. Myra returned to Kansas City for good in 1994 where she continued her singing career most recently with the Wild Women of Kansas City. Her last performance was in June 2011.
- People's recollections of Carrie Nation range from a female evangelical prophetess, to raving lunatic. Carry Amelia Moore was born into a family that operated a sharecropping plantation, that was in central Kentucky, on November 25, 1846. As a young woman she was unusually tall and not very pretty. She married a young man who, she discovered, was a free mason, a smoker, and an alcoholic. He left her at the age of twenty-one, and from then on she vowed to fight the demon liquor that had taken her man from her. She re-married, with several other women in her community, helped to form the Wormen's Christian Temperance Union, which is still in existence today. Yet Nation now took her crusade a step further, beginning a campaign of "hatchetation". Over the course of ten years, she led groups of women into saloons, wielding an ax, and smashed each place to bits. She made headlines all over the country, and was even the subject of at least four short films, where she was often portrayed in a comic light, by a male actor in women's clothes. Her fame soon got the better of her and she soon drifted into obscurity. She died in a mental health facility on Friday, June 9th, 1911, never living to see the result of her cause: the 18th Ammendment. Several years after the enactment of Prohibition, it was reported that an illegal liquor still has been discovered, on the grounds of Carry Nation's birthplace.
- C.B. Gilford was born on 10 November 1920 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. C.B. was a writer, known for The Fourth Victim (1971), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) and Night Gallery (1969). C.B. died on 27 July 2010 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.
- Memphis-born George "Machine Gun" Kelly (born George Kelly Barnes) was unlike most of his contemporary "celebrity" gangsters in that he didn't come from a poverty-stricken background--his father was a well-to-do insurance company executive and George was raised in very comfortable circumstances. Kelly graduated high school and actually attended college (Mississippi A&M, studying agriculture). His academic career was a bust, however, as his grades were poor and he was constantly receiving demerits for getting into trouble, so he left after four months. He married and fathered two children, but his inability to keep a job doomed the marriage and his wife eventually left him and took the kids with her.
Kelly then hooked up with a small-time bootlegger in Memphis, and for the first time in his life, he began to make some real money. However, after several arrests, he left Memphis with a new girlfriend and a new name, George Kelly (he dropped the name "Barnes" because he despised his father), and headed west. He continued his bootlegging career, but in 1928 got caught smuggling liquor onto an Indian reservation--a federal crime, although the hapless Kelly apparently didn't know it--and was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He got out after a year, but his luck didn't hold out. He was arrested in New Mexico on bootlegging charges and sent to state prison there. Upon his release, he went to Oklahoma City and hooked up with a small-time gangster and bootlegger named Steve Anderson. He fell for Anderson's girlfriend, a convicted robber and ex-prostitute named Kathryn Thorne who was suspected by local police of murdering her last husband. She left Anderson for Kelly and they married in 1930.
It was Kathryn who brought out Kelly's "talents" as a big-time criminal; up to that time he had been a pretty small-time bootlegger. She was determined to make her husband "Public Enemy #1", more famous than John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd or any of the other notorious gangsters of the era. She bought him a Thompson submachine gun and had him constantly practice with it (which didn't do much good, as he didn't like the loud noise it made when fired and he was never much of a marksman). However, Kathryn would take his spent shells from target practice and pass them around to her underworld friends as "souvenirs" from the many robberies she claimed her husband had committed. Her marketing campaign began to pay off, and soon "Machine Gun Kelly" gained a reputation (completely unjustified) as a tough, cold and hardened bank robber. In order to please his domineering wife, the intimidated Kelly participated in the robberies of several small-town banks across Texas and Mississippi. His gang would burst in waving their machine guns, while Kelly (whom many witnesses described as "looking terrified") cleaned out the registers. Even the FBI fell for Kathryn's publicity campaign, putting out flyers describing Kelly as an "expert machine gunner". Not satisfied with robbing small-town banks, Kathryn came up with a scheme to get them some "real" money--they would kidnap wealthy Oklahoma businessman Charles Urschel. Kelly and two accomplices broke into the Urschel mansion where the millionaire was playing cards with friends. True to form, Kelly's planning for the operation left much to be desired--he didn't know what Urschel looked like and had no idea which, if any, of the card players was him, so he and his gang wound up taking all of the men. When they later positively identified Urschel they let the other men go, sending along with them a demand for a $200,000 ransom. The ransom was eventually paid and Urschel was released unharmed. However, he had deliberately left his fingerprints all over the house where he was being kept, and even though he had been blindfolded he was able to pay enough attention to his surroundings (noises, smells, etc.) so that the FBI eventually determined where he had been held. They raided the house and arrested one of the kidnappers, who identified Kelly and the rest of the gang. Kelly and his wife were on the run, traveling around the Midwest and spending their share of the ransom money (not knowing that the serial numbers of the bills had been recorded and were being traced whenever they turned up). They eventually went back to Memphis, where they holed up in a rooming house. It didn't take the feds long to find out where they were, and on the night of 9/26/33, FBI agents and Memphis police raided the building. Kelly was trapped in a stairwell by cops and FBI agents aiming machine guns at him, and shouted the famous words, "Don't shoot, G-men! Don't shoot!" He and Kathryn were quickly arrested and flown back to Oklahoma to stand trial for the Urschel kidnapping. They were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Kelly was sent to Leavenworth, where he bragged to reporters that he would soon break out. That got him transferred to the infamous--and much harder to break out of--Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay, being one of the first prisoners to be housed there. Away from his wife's influence, Kelly became a model prisoner, popular with guards and inmates alike. He was transferred back to Leavenworth in 1951, and on 7/18/54, died there of a heart attack. - T Max Graham's broad range and distinctive voice have served him well over the years. His motion picture career began with David Lynch's cult classic Eraserhead and has continued through director Kevin Willmott's upcoming independent feature Bunker Hill, in which Max appears alongside James McDaniel (NYPD Blue) and Saeed Jaffrey (Gandhi). In between, Max has appeared in such films as Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil, Kansas and numerous television movies. Max has long been a favorite of Kansas City theatre audiences, appeared in TV series such as The Bill Cosby Show, and has logged countless hours in the studio. His commercial client list reads like the Fortune 500: Sony, AT&T, Sprint, McDonald's, United Airlines, Panasonic and GM are just a few. Max has also lent his considerable interpretive talents to numerous narration and documentary projects.
- Joe Agosto was born on 17 July 1927 in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy. He died on 29 August 1983 in Merriam, Kansas, USA.
- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Mr. Leahy moved in 1940 to Wichita, where he attended the University of Wichita, now Wichita State University.
During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in the Philippines.
Following the war, he returned to Wichita and began a 60-year career at local radio and television stations.
In the late 1940s, Mr. Leahy became a booth announcer at KAKE. It was there that he created the show "The Host and Rodney" to introduce movies.
KAKE anchor Larry Hatteberg was going to high school in Winfield when he first saw Mr. Leahy on "The Host and Rodney."
"I remember sitting at home and loving the show," Hatteberg said. "I thought it was the greatest thing. It wasn't that they were so scary, he was just so interesting to watch. He would ad-lib whatever came to his mind."
In the early 1960s when the nation's attention was focused on outer space and astronauts, Mr. Leahy created Major Astro.
The afternoon show first ran from 1960 to 1973 on KARD, now KSN. Mr. Leahy reprised the character for a short time in 1985 for KSAS.
In 1985, Mr. Leahy told then-Wichita Eagle film and movie critic Bob Curtright that he created the Major as a father figure.
During the 11 years the show ran on Channel 3, Mr. Leahy "moved" Major Astro from a space station orbiting Earth to a moon base. Then, he took the major to Venus and finally to a base on Mars.
On Sunday, Curtright called Leahy a local icon.
"Every kid from a certain generation knows him," Curtright said.
Fans were often card-carrying members of the Major Astro Club. Members would receive a space newsletter. One fan reportedly cut a hole in the family's carpet to hide and insure her card's safety, said Mr. Leahy's wife, Wilma.
In 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, some of the Major's youngest fans worried he was on it.
This weekend, as word spread of Leahy's death, his fans took to the internet to wish him their thoughts and prayers.
"RIP, Major Astro!" wrote Linda Baughman the guestbook created in Mr. Leahy's memory on Legacy.com.
In an interview with The Eagle on Sunday, Baughman said she remembered as a child running home after school each day to watch Major Astro episodes.
"He was always so kind and positive," Baughman said.
Mr. Leahy is preceded in death by first wife, Billye Leahy, son; Tommy B. Leahy and parents; Thomas B. and Marcelle Leahy. Survivors include wife Wilma, children Lisa (David) Navarro of Wichita, Rodney (Wendy) Mumaw of Mansfield, Texas, Ryan Edward Leahy of Wichita; and five grandchildren.- Writer
- Music Department
Fred Phelps was born on 13 November 1929 in Meridian, Mississippi, USA. He was a writer, known for Hatemongers (2000), The Most Hated Family in America (2007) and Judgment Day. He was married to Margie Phelps. He died on 19 March 2014 in Topeka, Kansas, USA.- Additional Crew
- Stunts
- Actor
Melvin Lawrence Koontz was born on December 1, 1910 in Fort Scott, Kansas. He was one of nine children and a fraternal twin. Mel Koontz and his family moved out to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, and he went to work at fourteen as a popcorn and peanut vendor at the old Selig Zoo in Los Angeles. By the time he was eighteen, he worked himself up to "cage cleaner", according to the 1930 Federal Census. From that humble start, he began to work more and more with wild animals until he became known as one of the premier animal trainers of Hollywood's "Golden Age". Koontz was known as the trainer of "Jackie", the MGM lion, and, by his estimation, he had worked in six hundred movies, and appeared in more than three hundred of them, including doubling for 'Maurice Schwartz' in Slaves of Babylon and Mae West in I'm No Angel. In 1939, he went to New York where he had an animal act in Frank Buck's Jungleland that was one of the major events of the World's Fair. After the fair ended, he returned to California and boarded his big cats and performed at Bird Wonderland until 1946, when he became Chief Trainer of Jungleland, in Thousand Oaks, California, a position he held until he retired, due to failing eyesight, in 1964. A lifetime member of the Loyal Order of Moose, he worked as club steward for Moose Lodge No. 1919 in Thousand Oaks before returning to his birthplace of Fort Scott, Kansas in 1975.- Eddie Holden was born on 5 April 1901 in Oklahoma, USA. He was an actor, known for Battle of Broadway (1938), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and The Mad Monster (1942). He died on 12 July 1964 in Kansas, USA.