Music To My Ears 7

I had hoped to use the name of the act to hunt down some actual information about this duo but the best I could find was the location of The Hotel Penn Alto.  Philadelphia? Pittsburgh?  Nope, Altoona, home of the horse shoe curve rail tracks.  I've been to Altoona though it's been so long that I don't really have any memories of the place.  I figured that this picture was probably from the 1950's so I did look up some census numbers.  In 1950, 77,177.  In 1960, 69,407.  Basically, Altoona is one of those medium sized American cities that has been in a state of decline for a very long time.  The fact that the act was playing the hotel lounge in a small city hotel helps explain why this duo left almost no record of their careers.  Acts that headline in Altoona don't get a lot of recognition.  Still, it's almost impossible to make it in show business.  For every job, there are hundreds of talented performers capable of getting up on stage and entertaining people.  It's why so many of them quite and get a regular job.  Mary Reagan, or Ann Parker or whatever professional name she was using when this picture was taken actually made a living as a singer.  That's admirable.

Click on Music To My Ears in labels to see more.

Are these the same kid?

Anyone who has followed The New Found Photography knows there aren't a lot of baby photos to be seen.  I know some people think pictures of babies are just soooo cute.  Not me.  I think baby photos are just plain boring.

These two cabinet cards go back to my early days of collecting when I cared more about age than the image itself.  Too, I'm from Apollo, have been to Altoona, and I'm sure that attracted me as well. And to go with a more modern usage, how often do you see a re-purposed cabinet card?  Mr. Schreckengost may not have been much of an artist/photographer, but he certainly was frugal.  Why buy card stock with your own logo, when it's just as easy to put a sticker over another photographer's studio mark.  And for the record, I was probably around 14 or 15 when I picked these up.  I just turned 59.

So why do I think this might be the same kid?  Written on the back of the second photo, "Marie Carskaddan, Apollo, 13 months-Dec. 1895."  Anyway, they look like the same kid to me.

 I haven't found anything, on line, about A.S. Wolfe, Schreckengost, or Howard, though, when I was in grade school, I got beat up, a lot, by a classmate named Schreckengost.  Bobby, I think, but don't quote me on that.  Nothing on little Marie, either.

A Little Girl From Altoona

I'm in a cabinet card kind of mood. The cabinet card like the carte de visite was an early attempt to come up with a standardized format. Cabinet cards were approximately 4.25x6.5 inches. The back of this card was textured and I had to use the descreen setting on the scanner to get rid of the Newton rings. Altoona is a small city in west central Pennsylvania.