1.
Stan Freberg
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Stan Freberg was an American author, recording artist, voice actor, comedian, radio personality, puppeteer and advertising creative director, whose career began in 1944. He remained active in the industry into his late 80s, more than 70 years after entering it, Freberg was born Stanley Friberg in Pasadena, California, the son of Evelyn Dorothy, a housewife, and Victor Richard Friberg, a Baptist minister. Freberg was a Christian and of Swedish and Irish descent, as Freberg explained to Rusty Pipes, After I replaced Jack Benny in 1957, they were unable to sell me with spot announcements in the show. That would mean that three minutes Id have to drop a commercial in. I want to be sponsored by one person, like Benny was, by American Tobacco or State Farm Insurance, I refused to let them sell me to any cigarette company. Frebergs first wife, Donna, died in 2000 and he had two children from that marriage, Donna Jean and Donavan. He married Betty Hunter in 2001, Freberg was employed as a voice actor in animation shortly after graduating from Alhambra High School. He began at Warner Brothers in 1944 by getting on a bus, as he describes in his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, he got off the bus and found a sign that said talent agency. He walked in, and the agents there arranged for him to audition for Warner Brothers cartoons where he was promptly hired. He often found himself paired with Mel Blanc while at Warner Bros. where the two men performed such pairs as the mice Hubie and Bertie and Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. In 1950, he was the voice of Friz Frelengs Dumb Dog in Foxy By Proxy and he was the voice of Pete Puma in the 1952 cartoon Rabbits Kin, in which he did an impression of an early Frank Fontaine characterization. Freberg is often credited with voicing the character of Junyer Bear in Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears, after Rogers was killed during World War II, Freberg assumed the role of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoon Whats Brewin, Bruin. Featuring Jones version of The Three Bears and he also succeeded Rogers as the voice of Beaky Buzzard. Freberg was heard in many Warner Brothers cartoons, but his screen credit on one was Three Little Bops. His work as an actor for Walt Disney Productions included the role of Mr. Busy the Beaver in Lady. Freberg also provided the voice of Sam, the orange cat paired with Sylvester in the Academy Award-nominated short Mouse and he voiced Cage E. Coyote, the father of Wile E. Coyote, in the 2000 short Little Go Beep. Freberg was cast to sing the part of the Jabberwock in the song Beware the Jabberwock for Disneys Alice in Wonderland, with the Rhythmaires and Daws Butler. Written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul, the song was a rendering of the poem Jabberwocky from Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass
2.
Harry S. Truman
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Harry S. Truman was an American politician who served as the 33rd President of the United States, assuming the office upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the waning months of World War II. In domestic affairs, he was a moderate Democrat whose liberal proposals were a continuation of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, but the conservative-dominated Congress blocked most of them. He also used weapons to end World War II, desegregated the U. S. armed forces, supported a newly independent Israel. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, and spent most of his youth on his familys 600-acre farm near Independence, in the last months of World War I, he served in combat in France as an artillery officer with his National Guard unit. After the war, he owned a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri, and joined the Democratic Party. Truman was first elected to office as a county official in 1922. After serving as a United States Senator from Missouri and briefly as Vice President, he succeeded to the presidency on April 12,1945, upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Germany surrendered on Trumans 61st birthday, just a few weeks after he assumed the presidency, but the war with Imperial Japan raged on and was expected to last at least another year. Although this decision and the issues that arose as a result of it remain the subject of debate to this day. Truman presided over a surge in economic prosperity as America sought readjustment after long years of depression. His presidency was a point in foreign affairs, as the United States engaged in an internationalist foreign policy. Truman helped found the United Nations in 1945, issued the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to contain Communism and his political coalition was based on the white South, labor unions, farmers, ethnic groups, and traditional Democrats across the North. Truman was able to rally groups of supporters during the 1948 presidential election. The Soviet Union became an enemy in the Cold War, Truman oversaw the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and the creation of NATO in 1949, but was unable to stop Communists from taking over China. When communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, he sent U. S. troops, after initial successes in Korea, however, the UN forces were thrown back by Chinese intervention, and the conflict was stalemated throughout the final years of Trumans presidency. Scholars, starting in 1962, ranked Trumans presidency as near great, Harry S. Truman was born on May 8,1884, in Lamar, Missouri, the oldest child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman. His parents chose the name Harry after his mothers brother, Harrison Harry Young, while the S did not stand for any one name, it was chosen as his middle initial to honor both of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young. The initial has been written and printed followed by a period
3.
Red Skelton
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Richard Bernard Red Skelton was an American entertainer. He was best known for his radio and television acts between 1937 and 1971, and as host of the television program The Red Skelton Show. Skelton began developing his comedic and pantomime skills from the age of 10 and he then spent time on a showboat, worked the burlesque circuit, then entered into vaudeville in 1934. The Doughnut Dunkers, a sketch of how different people ate doughnuts written by Skelton and his wife launched a career for him in vaudeville, in radio. Skeltons radio career began in 1937 with a guest appearance on The Fleischmanns Yeast Hour which led to his becoming the host of Avalon Time in 1938. He became the host of The Raleigh Cigarette Program in 1941 where many of his characters were created and had a regularly scheduled radio program until 1957. Skelton made his debut in 1938 alongside Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks. He was most eager to work in television, even when the medium was in its infancy, the Red Skelton Show made its television premiere on September 30,1951, on NBC. By 1954, Skeltons program moved to CBS, where it was expanded to one hour, despite high ratings, his television show was cancelled by CBS in 1970 as the network believed more youth-oriented programs were needed to attract younger viewers and their spending power. Skelton moved his program to NBC, where he completed his last year with a regularly scheduled show in 1971. After he no longer had a program, Skeltons time was spent making up to 125 personal appearances a year. Skeltons artwork of clowns remained a hobby until 1964 when his wife, Georgia, sales of his originals were successful and Skelton also sold prints and lithographs of them, earning $2.5 million yearly on lithograph sales. At the time of his death, his art dealer believed that Skelton had earned money through his paintings than from his television work. Skelton believed his lifes work was to make people laugh, he wanted to be known as a clown because he defined it as being able to do everything and he had a 70-year career as a performer and entertained three generations of Americans during this time. Born on July 18,1913, in Vincennes, Indiana, Richard Skelton was the fourth and youngest son of Ida Mae, Joseph, a grocer, died two months before Richard was born, he had once been a clown with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. During Skeltons lifetime there was some dispute about the year of his birth, author Wesley Hyatt suggests that since he began working at such an early age, Skelton may have claimed he was older than he actually was in order to gain employment. Because of the loss of his father, Skelton went to work as early as the age of seven, selling newspapers and doing odd jobs to help his family. He quickly learned the newsboys patter and would keep it up until a prospective buyer bought a copy of the paper just to quiet him, when the man asked Skelton what events were going on in town, Skelton suggested he see the new show in town
4.
Albert Einstein
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Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics, Einsteins work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. Einstein is best known in popular culture for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Briefly before, he aquired the Swiss citizenship in 1901, which he kept for his whole life and he continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe. He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and, being Jewish, did not go back to Germany and he settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project, Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but generally denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955. Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works, on 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einsteins papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents. Einsteins intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, the Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of 5 for three years. At the age of 8, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium, the loss forced the sale of the Munich factory. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan, when the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the schools regimen. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning, at the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctors note. During his time in Italy he wrote an essay with the title On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field
5.
Frank Zappa
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Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse rock musicians of his generation, as a self-taught composer and performer, Zappas diverse musical influences led him to create music that was sometimes difficult to categorize. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century classical composers such as Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and he began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands, later switching to electric guitar. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. He continued this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the format was rock. Zappas output is unified by a conceptual continuity he termed Project/Object, with musical phrases, ideas. His lyrics reflected his views of established social and political processes, structures and movements. Unlike many other musicians of his era, he personally disapproved of and seldom used drugs. During Zappas lifetime, he was a productive and prolific artist, earning widespread acclaim from critics. He had some success, particularly in Europe, and worked as an independent artist for most of his career. He remains an influence on musicians and composers. His honors include an induction into the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the 1997 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at number 71 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Zappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother, Rosemarie was of Italian and French ancestry, his father, whose name was Anglicized to Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Partinico, Sicily, with Greek and Arab ancestry. Frank, the eldest of four children, was raised in an Italian-American household where Italian was often spoken by his grandparents, the family moved often because his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defense industry. After a time in Florida in the 1940s, the returned to Maryland. Due to their homes proximity to the arsenal, which stored mustard gas, gas masks were kept in the home in case of an accident and this had a profound effect on Zappa, and references to germs, germ warfare and the defense industry occur throughout his work. Zappa was often sick as a child, suffering from asthma, earaches, a doctor treated his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium into each of Zappas nostrils
6.
Curly Howard
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Jerome Lester Horwitz, better known by his stage name Curly Howard, was an American comedian and vaudevillian actor. He was best known as the most outrageous and energetic member of the American farce comedy team the Three Stooges, Curly was generally considered the most popular and recognizable of the Stooges. He was well known for his voice and vocal expressions as well as his physical comedy, improvisations. An untrained actor, Curly borrowed the woob woob from nervous, Curlys unique version of woob-woob-woob was firmly established by the time of the Stooges second Columbia film, Punch Drunks. Curly was forced to leave the Three Stooges act in 1946 when a stroke ended his showbusiness career. He suffered through serious health problems and several more strokes until his death in 1952 at age 48, Curly Howard was born Jerome Lester Horwitz in the Bensonhurst section of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, he was the youngest of the five Horwitz brothers, because he was the youngest, his brothers called him Babe to tease him. The name Babe stuck with him all his life, although when his older brother Shemp Howard married Gertrude Frank, who was also nicknamed Babe and his full formal Hebrew name was Yehudah Lev ben Shlomo Natan ha Levi. A quiet child, Curly rarely caused problems for his parents and he was a mediocre student but excelled as an athlete on the school basketball team. He didnt graduate high school, and instead he kept himself busy with odd jobs and constantly following his older brothers. He was also a ballroom dancer and singer and regularly turned up at the Triangle Ballroom in Brooklyn. When Curly was 12, he shot himself in the left ankle while cleaning a rifle. Moe rushed him to the hospital and saved his life, the wound resulted in a noticeably thinner left leg and a slight limp. He was so frightened of surgery that he never had the limp corrected, while with the Stooges, he developed his famous exaggerated walk to mask the limp on screen. Curly was interested in music and comedy and would watch his brothers Shemp and he also liked to hang around backstage, although he never participated in any of the routines. From an early age, Curly was always in demand socially and he married his first wife, Julia Rosenthal, on August 5,1930, but the couple had their marriage annulled shortly afterwards. Curlys first on-stage break was as a musical conductor in 1928 for the Orville Knapp Band. Moe later recalled that his performances usually overshadowed those of the band, though Curly enjoyed the gig, he watched as older brothers Moe and Shemp made it big as some of Ted Healys stooges
7.
Harpo Marx
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Arthur Marx, known professionally as Harpo Marx, was an American comedian, actor, mime artist, and musician, and the second-oldest of the Marx Brothers. In contrast to the mainly verbal comedy of his brothers Groucho and Chico, Harpos comic style was visual and he wore a curly reddish blonde wig, and never spoke during performances. He frequently used such as a horn cane, made up of a lead pipe, tape, and a bulbhorn. Harpo was born on November 23,1888 in Manhattan, New York City and he grew up in a neighborhood now known as Carnegie Hill on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on East 93rd Street off Lexington Avenue. The turn-of-the-century building that Harpo called the first real home they ever knew was populated with European immigrants, just across the street were the oldest brownstones in the area, owned by people like David L. Loew and William Orth. Harpos parents were Sam Marx and his wife, Minnie Schoenberg Marx and his mother was from East Frisia in Germany, and his father was a native of Alsace in France and worked as a tailor. Harpo received little education and left grade school at age eight during his second attempt to pass the second grade. In January 1910, Harpo joined two of his brothers, Julius and Milton, to form The Three Nightingales, later changed to simply The Marx Brothers, multiple stories—most unsubstantiated—exist to explain Harpos evolution as the silent character in the brothers act. Harpo gained his name during a card game at the Orpheum Theatre in Galesburg. The dealer called him Harpo because he played the harp and he learned how to hold it properly from a picture of an angel playing a harp that he saw in a five-and-dime. No one in town knew how to play the harp, so Harpo tuned it as best he could, starting with one basic note and tuning it from there. Three years later he found out he had tuned it incorrectly, but he could not have tuned it properly, if he had, Harpos method placed much less tension on the strings. Although he played this way for the rest of his life, he did try to learn how to play correctly and they spent their time listening to him, fascinated by the way he played. In the autobiography Harpo Speaks, he recounts how Chico found him playing piano to accompany silent movies. Harpo had changed his name from Adolph to Arthur by 1911 and this was due primarily to his dislike for the name Adolph. The name change may have happened because of the similarity between Harpos name and Adolph Marks, a prominent show business attorney in Chicago. His first screen appearance was in the film Humor Risk, with his brothers, although according to Groucho, it was screened once. Four years later, Harpo appeared without his brothers in Too Many Kisses, four years before the brothers first released film, in Too Many Kisses, Harpo spoke the only line he would ever speak on-camera in a movie, You sure you cant move
8.
Brian Wilson
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Brian Douglas Wilson is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer best known for being the multi-tasking leader and co-founder of the rock band the Beach Boys. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, Wilson wrote or co-wrote more than two dozen Top 40 hits for the group, in the mid-1960s, Wilson composed, arranged and produced Pet Sounds, considered one of the greatest albums ever made. The intended follow-up to Pet Sounds, Smile, was canceled for various reasons, as he suffered repeated nervous breakdowns, Wilsons contributions to the Beach Boys diminished, and his erratic behavior led to tensions with the band. He remains a member of the Beach Boys corporation, Brother Records Incorporated, Wilsons work with the Beach Boys helped raise pop music to the level of high art. Wilson effectively set a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and his songs became inextricably tied with the zeitgeist of the early 1960s, and he helped develop the sound of the wistful Flower Power era that proceeded. In later years, Wilson was regarded as a godfather to an era of musicians who were inspired by his melodic sensibilities, chamber pop orchestrations. His honors include being inducted into the 1988 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and winning Grammy Awards for Brian Wilson Presents Smile and The Smile Sessions. In lists published by Rolling Stone, Wilson ranked 52 for the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2008 and 12 for the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time in 2015. In 2012, music publication NME ranked Wilson number 8 in its 50 Greatest Producers Ever list and he is an occasional actor and voice actor, having appeared in television shows, films, and other artists music videos. His life was portrayed in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy, Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20,1942, at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, California, the son of Audree Neva and Murry Wilson. He was the eldest of three boys, his brothers were Dennis and Carl. He has English, Swedish, Dutch, German, and Irish ancestry, when Brian was two, the family moved from Inglewood to 3701 West 119th Street in nearby Hawthorne, California. Murry Wilson said, He was very clever and quick, I just fell in love with him. At about age two, Brian heard George Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue, which had an emotional impact on him. A few years later, he was discovered to have diminished hearing in his right ear. The exact cause of hearing loss is unclear, though theories range from him simply being born partially deaf to a blow to the head from his father, or a neighborhood bully. While Brians father Murry was ostensibly a reasonable provider, he was often abusive, a minor musician and songwriter, he also encouraged his children in this field in numerous ways. At an early age, Brian was given six weeks of lessons on a toy accordion and, at seven and eight, at Hawthorne High School, Brian was on the football team as a quarterback, played baseball and was a cross-country runner in his senior year
9.
Animaniacs
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Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs is an American animated comedy television series created by Tom Ruegger. It is the animated series produced by Amblin Television in association with Warner Bros. Animation during the renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Animaniacs first aired on Fox Kids from 1993 to 1995 and new episodes later appeared on The WB from 1995 to 1998 as part of its Kids WB afternoon programming block, the series had a total of 99 episodes and one film, titled Wakkos Wish. Animaniacs is a variety show, with short skits featuring a large cast of characters, while the show had no set format, the majority of episodes were composed of three short mini-episodes, each starring a different set of characters, and bridging segments. Hallmarks of the series included its music, character catchphrases, the Warner siblings and the other characters lived in Burbank, California. However, characters from the series had episodes in various places, the Animaniacs characters interacted with famous persons and creators of the past and present as well as mythological characters and characters from modern television. Andrea Romano, the casting and recording director of Animaniacs, said that the Warner siblings functioned to tie the show together, by appearing in, each Animaniacs episode usually consisted of two or three cartoon shorts. Animaniacs had a large cast of characters, separated into individual segments, the Warners, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, were three cartoon stars from the 1930s that were locked away in the Warner Bros. water tower until the 1990s, when they escaped. After their escape, they interacted with Warner Bros. studio workers, including Ralph, the security guard, Dr. Otto Scratchansniff, the studio psychiatrist. Pinky and the Brain are two genetically altered laboratory mice who continuously plot and attempt to take over the world, Slappy Squirrel is an octogenarian cartoon star who can easily outwit antagonists and uses her wiles to educate her nephew, Skippy Squirrel, about cartoon techniques. Additional principal characters included Rita and Runt, Buttons and Mindy, Chicken Boo, Flavio and Marita, Katie Ka-Boom, a trio of pigeons known as The Goodfeathers, the Animaniacs cast of characters had a variety of inspiration, from celebrities to writers family members to other writers. Executive producer Steven Spielberg said that the irreverence in Looney Tunes cartoons inspired the Animaniacs cast, Ruegger thought of the premise for Pinky and the Brain when wondering what would happen if Minton and Fitzgerald tried to take over the world. Deanna Oliver contributed The Goodfeathers scripts and the character Chicken Boo, Ruegger modeled the Warners personalities heavily after his three sons. Because the Warners were portrayed as cartoon stars from the early 1930s, Ruegger and other artists for Animaniacs made the images of the Warners similar to cartoon characters of the early 1930s. Simple black and white drawings were very common in cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Buddy, Felix the Cat, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and the early versions of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Sherri Stoner created Slappy the Squirrel when another writer and friend of Stoner, John McCann, when McCann joked that Sherri would be playing troubled teenagers when she was fifty years old, the latter developed the idea of Slappys characteristics as an older person acting like a teenager. Stoner liked the idea of a cartoon character because an aged cartoon star would know the secrets of other cartoons and have the dirt on
10.
YouTube
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YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005, Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, YouTube now operates as one of Googles subsidiaries. Unregistered users can watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos deemed potentially offensive are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old, YouTube earns advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. YouTube began as a venture capital-funded technology startup, primarily from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006, YouTubes early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www. youtube. com was activated on February 14,2005, the first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23,2005, and can still be viewed on the site, YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005. The first video to reach one million views was a Nike advertisement featuring Ronaldinho in November 2005. Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. The site has 800 million unique users a month and it is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. The choice of the name www. youtube. com led to problems for a similarly named website, the sites owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www. utubeonline. com, in October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13,2006. In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, according to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event. On March 31,2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface, Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented, We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter. In May 2010, YouTube videos were watched more than two times per day. This increased to three billion in May 2011, and four billion in January 2012, in February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube was watched every day
11.
Dinah Shore
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Dinah Shore was an American singer, actress, television personality, and the top-charting female vocalist of the 1940s. After failing singing auditions for the bands of Benny Goodman, TV Guide magazine ranked her at #16 on their list of the top fifty television stars of all time. Stylistically, Shore was compared to two singers who followed her in the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s, Doris Day and Patti Page, Fannye Rose Shore was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant shopkeepers, Anna and Solomon Shore, in Winchester, Tennessee. She had a sister,8 years her senior, Elizabeth. When Fannye was two old, she was stricken with polio, a disease that was not preventable at the time. Her parents provided intensive care for her, suggesting rigorous exercising and she recovered, but she sustained a deformed foot and limp. She loved to sing as a child, her mother. Her father would take her to his store where she would perform impromptu songs for the customers. In 1924, the Shore family moved to McMinnville, Tennessee, by her fifth-grade year, the family had moved to Nashville, where she completed elementary school. Although shy because of her limp, she became involved in sports, was a cheerleader at Nashvilles Hume-Fogg High School. At some point, Fannye became known as Frances, when Shore was 16, her mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack. Pursuing her education, she enrolled at Vanderbilt University, where she participated in events and activities. She graduated from the university in 1938 with a degree in sociology and she visited the Grand Ole Opry and made her radio debut on Nashvilles WSM radio station. In many of her auditions, she sang the popular song Dinah, when disc jockey Martin Block could not remember her name, he called her the Dinah girl, and soon after the name stuck, becoming her stage name. She eventually was hired as a vocalist at radio station WNEW and she recorded and performed with the Xavier Cugat orchestra, and signed a recording contract with RCA Victor Records in 1940. In March 1939, Shore debuted on radio on the Sunday afternoon CBS radio program. In February 1940, she became a featured vocalist on the NBC Radio program The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, a showcase for traditional Dixieland and Blues songs. With Shore, the program became so popular that it was moved from 4,30 Sunday afternoon to a 9,00 Monday night time slot in September
12.
Hopalong Cassidy
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Hopalong Cassidy or Hop-along Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of popular short stories and many novels based on the character. In his early writings, Mulford portrayed the character as rude, dangerous and he had a wooden leg which caused him to walk with a little hop, hence the nickname. From 1935, the character—as played by movie actor William Boyd in films adapted from Mulfords books—was transformed into a clean-cut, sixty-six popular films appeared, only a few of which were loosely based on Mulfords stories. As portrayed on the screen, white-haired Bill Hopalong Cassidy was usually clad strikingly in black and he was reserved and well spoken, with a sense of fair play. He was often called upon to intercede when dishonest characters took advantage of honest citizens, the juvenile lead was successively played by James Ellison, Russell Hayden, George Reeves, Rand Brooks and Jimmy Rogers. George Hayes originally played Cassidys grizzled sidekick, Windy Halliday, Clyde, the most durable of the sidekicks, remained with the series until it ended. A few actors of future prominence appeared in Cassidy films, notably Robert Mitchum, the 66 Hopalong Cassidy pictures were filmed by independent producers who released the films through the studios. The first Hoppies, as the films were known, were distributed by Paramount Pictures to favorable returns and they were noted for fast action and outdoor photography. Harry Sherman wanted to more ambitious movies and tried to cancel the Cassidy series, but popular demand forced Sherman back into production. Sherman gave up the series in 1944, but William Boyd wanted to keep it going, to do this, he gambled his future on Hopalong Cassidy, mortgaging most of what he owned to buy the character rights from Mulford and the backlog of movies from Sherman. In the first film, Hopalong Cassidy got his name after being shot in the leg, hopalongs drink of choice was the nonalcoholic sarsaparilla. Boyd resumed production in 1946, on budgets, and continued through 1948. Boyd thought Hopalong Cassidy might have a future in television, spent $350,000 to obtain the rights to his old films, the initial broadcasts were so successful that NBC could not wait for a television series to be produced and edited the feature films to broadcast length. On June 24,1949, Hopalong Cassidy became the first network Western television series, the success of the television series made Boyd a star. The Mutual Broadcasting System began broadcasting a radio version, with Andy Clyde as the sidekick, in January 1950, at the end of September, the moved to CBS Radio. The series and character were so popular that Hopalong Cassidy was featured on the cover of magazines such as Look, Life. Boyd earned millions as Hopalong, mostly from licensing and endorsement deals. In 1950, Hopalong Cassidy was featured on the first lunchbox to bear an image, in stores, more than 100 companies in 1950 manufactured $70 million of Hopalong Cassidy products, including childrens dinnerware, pillows, roller skates, soap, wristwatches, and jackknives
