Samurai

Written on the back, "This Poster Is Good Shot."   I agree.

Getting Drunk As a Group Activity

They look too old to be frat boys, so maybe the company softball team.  I noticed that some of these guys brought some really big containers.  Kind of makes the red solo cup look inadequate.  Take a look at the third photo and see that there is a Kodak Box Brownie camera in front of the keg.  There is also one guy with a Dr. Pepper tee shirt.  Fun story.  I was born in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1955.  It was hard to find Dr Pepper where I grew up.  It was considered a southern hillbilly drink.  If you drove forty miles south and crossed into West Virginia it was everywhere. 

The Distinguished Actress

broadway.cas.sc.edu

Several posts ago I mentioned that I had bought an envelope of theatrical photographs.  Well, they arrived yesterday, and this is the first post from that collection.

This cabinet card is, to put it mildly, damaged.  The bottom margin that would have identified the photographic studio, and quite possibly, the actress is gone, and I'm not willing to spend days searching images of nineteenth century theatrical photography looking for a match.  While it would be a time consuming exercise, it wouldn't necessarily be a pointless search. It was a fairly common practice during the cabinet card era for famous performers to drop by the local photo studio and have pictures taken.  As I've noted in some of my previous posts, photographers would provide free pictures in exchange for the right to sell those same pictures to the general public. 

Now, I'd like to recommend one of my favorite online photographic resources.  broadway.cas.sc.edu  (You can click just below the title.) It's a great site documenting theatrical photographs from the Broadway stage.  The collection is housed at the very un-Broadway University of South Carolina.

Redondo

This one is labeled "Judah & Beverly Redondo Beach."  Take my word for it.  Redondo Beach, south bay, Los Angeles County, hasn't been this empty in at least fifty years.  No date, but I'm betting teens or twenties. 

Drunk Husband

Dated "DEC 54."  He must have been a handful.

More June Roselle

Different outfit, different lighting, and a bird cage.  All the June Roselle photos are 4x5 prints made on a double weight, fiber based paper. 

June Roselle

A couple of days ago,  I went on eBay and bought an envelope of theatrical photographs.  Those haven't arrived yet, but it did remind me that I already had a few theatricals sitting on my desk that hadn't yet been added to the blog. 

Written on the back of the top image, and the only one with any information, "June Roselle, daughter of composer L. Crist Carson."  In my search for information, I started with Carson and found absolutely nothing.  I tired the usual sources, IMDB, the internet move data base, IBDB, the internet Broadway data base, and of course, the plain old general Google search.  Then I decided to try the same approach with his daughter.  After all, show business has a lot of multi generational artists.  There wasn't much there, either, but something. 

June Roselle understudied Florence Henderson, on Broadway, in the title role of Fanny.  Fanny ran from 1954 to 1956, book by Joshua Logan and S.N. Behrman  music and lyrics by Harold Rome.  She was listed as having been a replacement for a handful of performances, so she did act on Broadway.  And then, that's it.  Nothing, nada.  No other Broadway  credits, nothing on IMDB, so no movie or television career.  It's as if she just disappeared. 

So, did she decide that show business wasn't for her?  Did she get married and go the family route?  Perhaps she died.