Heartland

I've had this photo for years, and I didn't think I'd ever post it.  Anyway, while I'm not a big fan of Ken Burns, I've been watching a bit of his documentary series on country music.  It seems to me that if you're doing a series on country music, you'd include more performance footage.  Like maybe an actual complete song.  As I said, not a big fan.  While I was watching tonight's episode I remembered I had this photo in my collection.  It took me a bit to find it.  I've got a lot of boxes with photographs I haven't yet posted.  I looked up Heartland on Google.  I found a band by that name from Huntsville, Alabama, founded in 1996.  I have no date on this image, but the hair styles say seventies or eighties.  Too, the 309 area code is from Illinois, the actual heartland. 

Sincerely

She has a very theatrical presentation, so I tried various show biz data bases looking for Merry Bee, the more conventional Mary Bee and even Terry and Teresa Bee.  All for naught.  Perhaps she's not an actress but a clairvoyant, or opera diva, or someone leading the Bohemian lifestyle.  In any case, I couldn't find anything about this unique woman. 

Jimmie Allen, Air Cadet

This one's another photo from my recent purchase, an envelope of military memorabilia, although, technically, it's not military at all.

Jimmie Allen wasn't in the Army Air Force.  In fact, Jimmie Allen wasn't even real.  He was the title character in the radio serial, The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen.  The show ran from from 1933 to 1937, and poor Jimmie stayed sixteen years old for the entire four year run.  Two former pilots, air aces from the first world war, Bob Burtt and Bill Moore, both from Kansas City, had an idea for a radio show about a young man who becomes a pilot.  They wrote up a script, shopped it around, and a weekly 15 minute radio series was born.  In the pilot (About an aspiring pilot) young Jimmie was a telegraph operator at an airport in, you guessed it, Kansas City.  Asked to send a coded telegram, he figures out that it's about the hijacking of a plane carrying a million dollars.  He turns to his friend and mentor, Speed Robertson, a pilot,and together they thwart the hijacking and become heroes.   Speed gets made a secret G-Man, and Jimmie,with his friends help, becomes a flying cadet.  And yes, the show was aimed at children.

So, is this a picture of the actor who played young Jimmie?  Sadly, no.  After Burtt and Moore sold their script, professionals were brought in the make the actual show.  The director was a man in his mid forties, John Frank, who cast himself as the much younger Jimmie.  Well, it was radio, where if the voice was right, old could play young, young could play old, men could play women, and women could play men.

There was an attempt to resurrect The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen after World War 2, but it didn't work out.  Perhaps it was because they used many of the old scripts and substituted things like jet for plane.  

Written on the back, "STOP, LOOK IN HERE. Bring em back alive, Bobby."

Ramon Novarro

I'm not one to collect autographed pictures of actors, but I was scrolling through EBay, 99cents, free shipping, click and it was mine.

So, who was Ramon Novarro? He was born Jose Ramon Gil Samaniego, in 1899, the son of a successful Mexican dentist. In 1916, fleeing the Mexican revolution, Ramon and his family ended up in Los Angeles. A year latter, in 1917, Ramon was earning money as a dancer, singing waiter, piano teacher, and movie extra. For five years he struggled in his career, the occasional small part, but mostly background. And then he was cast as the lead in The Prisoner of Zenda. Three years latter, in 1925, now renamed Ramon Novarro, he had the biggest success of his career. The lead in Ben Hur: A Tale of Christ. His film career continued into the sound era, getting the romantic lead opposite Greta Garbo in Mata Hari, in 1931. That was it, the peak. After that, it was a slow slide into smaller and smaller parts. Eventually his work was mostly in episodic television.

In 1968, Ramon Novarro, a gay man who often picked up street hustlers. was murdered in his North Hollywood home by two of those hustlers, who thought that, because he had once been a movie star, he must be rich.