Film Actresses from Alabama Before 1960 (5): Cathy O'Donnell

I recently watched They Live by Night on Turner Classic Movies; I don't remember ever seeing this classic film noir before. The movie is based on Edward Anderson's 1937 novel, Thieves Like Us, which I read some years ago. The book is included in a Library of America collection of six crime novels, putting it alongside such impressive titles as James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? In 1974 director Robert Altman filmed another version of the novel, using the novel's title. However, unlike the original film, that one did not star Alabama native Cathy O'Donnell.

O'Donnell was born Ann M. Steely on July 6, 1923, the first child of Harold G. and Ora L. Steely. Younger brother Joe was born two years later. At the time the family lived in Siluria Village, an unincorporated area for the workers at the Buck Creek Cotton Mills. Harold, apparently known as "Henry", was a teacher at Thompson High School and also operated the Siluria Community House, which included a silent movie theater. The facility eventually burned, but later served as the site of the Alabaster YMCA for several decades.

Young Ann probably attended first grade at Thompson Elementary, but the family soon moved to Greensboro. Henry died there in 1935, and Ora moved the two children to Oklahoma City when Ann was twelve. She graduated from Classen High School there and briefly studied at a business college. She entered Oklahoma City University, where she studied drama and appeared in some student productions. In 1944 she left the city and headed to Hollywood.

She first appeared uncredited as a night club patron in Wonder Man in 1945. Including that role, she acted in only 18 films in her career, but several were significant. 

The following year she played the high school sweetheart of a double amputee in The Best Years of Our Lives. That film, which told the story of U.S.. servicemen adjusting to civilian life, won seven Oscars and was a major box office success.

Over the rest of her career O'Donnell starred with Farley Granger in two crime dramas, the aforementioned They Live By Night and Side Street. She also appeared opposite Kirk Douglas in Detective Story [1951] and James Stewart in The Man From Laramie [1955]. In her final film she had a sizable role in the 1959 epic Ben-Hur. 

In the 1960's she guest-starred on such TV shows as Perry Mason, Bonanza, The Rebel and Zane Gray Theater. 

In April 1948 O'Donnell married Robert Wyler, a film producer and older brother of director William Wyler. O'Donnell died from cancer complications in April 1970. The couple had no children. She is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. I have yet to determine what happened to her mother and younger brother. 

This article gives more details about the Steely family in Alabama, based on research by Bobby Joe Seales:

Bryant, Joseph D. Long-ago Hollywood actress came from Shelby mill town. Birmingham News 8 June 2005

Source: TCM.com





Cathy O'Donnell & Farley Granger are on the run in "They Live by Night" (1949)
Source: TCM.com

Another scene from They Live By Night

Source: Tumblr

O'Donnell and Granger starred together in another film, Side Street [1950]

Cathy O'Donnell in 1959, the year she made her final film, Ben-Hur

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Tumblr

A Quick Visit to Bug Tussle

This post is yet another entry in the series I'm doing on various places my brother Richard and I visited in July on our annual trip to explore Alabama and family history. I've written about Bessemer and Jasper visits here and here. On Saturday morning after we left Jasper we headed toward our next stop, Colony, a town founded by African Americans just after the Civil War. I'll do a future post on Colony, but now it's Bug Tussle's turn. 

Bug Tussle is in Cullman County at the intersection of state highways 69 and 91. We didn't find much there. The sign below announcing the Bugtussle Steak House was inviting, but the place was closed, as in permanently. We did stop at the Bug Tussle Marketplace, which has a couple of reviews and photographs on Yelp. Google Earth also shows a Dollar General and a few dwellings near the intersection. 

State highway maps list the location as Wilburn (Bug Tussle). Virginia Foscue's Place Names in Alabama indicates Wilburn was the original name of the area, given to it by Charles Sandlin, the first postmaster. A post office operated there from 1903 to 1906. Foscue cites the "general assumption" that Bug Tussle indicates the presence of bugs in the area. However, that pretty much describes all of Alabama.

Note that the address given on the sales receipt below for the marketplace is "Bremen, AL", which is an unincorporated town further north on highway 69 toward Dodge City. Bremen is the location of Cold Springs Elementary and High Schools. According to Foscue, Bremen was originally called Empire when founded in 1860. After his appointment in 1879 the first postmaster James Macentepe changed it to avoid confusion with another town of that name and to honor the German city.  

A 1990 Tuscaloosa News article discussing strange town names in Alabama can be found here. That article gives the origin of Bug Tussle this way: an old man climbed a nearby mountain [perhaps Cold Springs Mountain] and thought the movement of people below looked like bugs tussling. 

Alabama's town is not the only U.S. Bug Tussle. The one in Texas is also spelled as two words, the ones in Kentucky and Oklahoma are one word. On January 4, 1967, a season 5 episode of the Beverly Hillbillies entitled "Mayor of Bug Tussle" was first broadcast. The Clampett's home state was never specified in that series, but in this episode Bug Tussle is identified as their home town.

A Quick Visit to Posey's Hardware in Jasper

Each year my brother Richard and I take a trip together, usually through some part of Alabama exploring family and state history. This year's trip was short, but we still managed to get in a few places. This post is the second in a series about the trip; the first one is here. 

As we were leaving Jasper on Saturday morning, we stopped at Andrew Posey and Son, Hardware Plumbing and Gifts at the corner of Elliott Blvd. [Alabama 69] and 20th Street West. Cleaning out some files recently, I had found a 1985 newspaper article about the store, and we decided to check it out. 

The place needs its own historical marker. G.R. Posey constructed the building in 1919 and rented it to a grocer until 1924 when he bought that business. At some point I guess the groceries were phased out and hardware moved in. Son Andrew later took it over and then passed it to his son Hershel. At the time of the 1985 article, Hershel's son Randy had returned to Jasper to help with the business. 

The store has a wide array of kitchen and household items, tools, and so forth that you won't find at Home Depot or Wal-Mart. The place is stuffed to the gills with practical things, gift items and lots of plain silly stuff. I bought something, of course--a Posey's coffee mug!

I've made comments under a couple of the photos below. Here's the citation for that 1985 article:

Crowson, Bryan. 'The Last Place on Earth' Need a washboard? A new mule collar? Posey likely has it. Birmingham News 29 September 1985 

Many years ago we bought one of those red wagons to haul our kids around in the back yard. Dianne now uses if to hold flower pots in the back of the lot. 

Since I'm an Auburn fan, some of the products were not very appealing. 

One of my uncles worked at Coca Cola bottling operations for many years and collected much memorabilia. He would have appreciated this corner. 

Here you can see some of the variety of goods available. Throughout the store many old items not for sale are on display, like the glass bottles on this shelf. The place is thus both a store and an educational look at some of the many products humans have manufactured to make life easier.

Birmingham Photo of the Day (49): Airport Terminal

This two-story building opened with great fanfare on May 31, 1931, as the new terminal for the Birmingham airport. A single runway served American Airways flights from Atlanta to Fort Worth.

The present terminal opened in 1973. A detailed history of the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport can be found at the BhamWiki site. That article has a photo of the original terminal taken in February 1947. Based on the vehicle seen in the lower left, the photo below was probably taken earlier. 

I wonder what kind of security procedures passengers had to submit to in 1931? 

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Alabama Book Covers (13): Col. Prentiss Ingraham

In October 2015 I posted an entry in this series on Joseph Holt Ingraham, who wrote numerous popular novels before the Civil War and also served as an Episcopal priest in Mobile and elsewhere. Now I'd like to cover his son Prentiss, a Confederate veteran, soldier of fortune and extremely prolific author of dime novels who also had a connection with Alabama.

The son was born near Natchez, Mississippi, on December 28, 1843. He began his formal education at St. Timothy's Military Academy in Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth was a classmate. Then Ingraham returned to Mississippi and further education at Jefferson College in Washington. Founded in 1811 in the Mississippi Territory, that school operated almost continuously in one form or another until finally closing in 1964.

After college Ingraham enrolled at the Medical College of Alabama, which had opened in November 1859, thus making his appearance in Alabama. The Civil War interrupted his education there, and he enlisted in Wither's Mississippi Regiment. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and suffered wounds at Port Hudson and the Battle of Franklin.

After the war Ingraham spent several years as a soldier of fortune in hot spots around the world. He served under Juarez in Mexico during the rebellion against Maximillian; with Austrian forces in their war with Prussia; in Crete against the Turks, in the Khedive's army in Egypt, and in both the Cuban army and navy. In Cuba he was captured by Spanish forces and sentenced to death, but managed to escape.  

Perhaps tiring of all this activity, Ingraham had settled in London around 1870. Here he began his first attempts at writing stories and satiric sketches. Finding little success, he had moved to New York City by 1875. There he met and married Rose Langley, an author, composer and artist. They would eventually have a son and two daughters.

Ingraham continued writing in New York City, but by 1881 the wanderlust apparently returned. He headed west, where he encountered Buffalo Bill Cody among others. He soon joined Cody's Wild West Show. He also met the Powell brothers Frank, George and Will. Ingraham would later write fiction based on the lives of all these men.

Ingraham's first dime novel, The Masked Spy, had appeared in 1872. After his western adventures, he and his family lived in Easton, Maryland, and Chicago until his final days at the Beauvoir Confederate Home in Biloxi, Mississippi. During this period Ingraham wrote vast amounts of fiction.

He is said to have written 600 novels and 400 short novels issued by dime novel publisher Beadle and Adams and others. Ingraham wrote under his own name as well as a number of pseudonyms. He claimed to have written a 70,000 word novel in a week. Some of his novels were leaner revisions of his father's florid novels.

E.Z.C Judson, writing as Ned Buntline, is credited with discovering Buffalo Bill and writing the first novels about him. Yet Ingraham wrote dozens of novels about Cody and is primarily responsible for creating the legendary character. 

Examples of some of Ingraham's Buffalo Bill novels can be seen below, along with some on other subjects. A few novels can be found online here and here. More information about Ingraham can be found here and here. A master's thesis by Phyllis J. Gernhardt, "Prentiss Ingraham and the Dime Novel" was completed at Ball State University in 1992. He really deserves a full biography.

Ingraham died at the Confederate home on August 16, 1904, of Bright's disease. He is buried in the cemetery on the grounds of Beauvoir, formerly the home of Jefferson Davis. The home was extensively damaged by Hurricane Katrina. 

The Find-A-Grave entry for Prentiss is here [note misspelling of first name on the gravestone] and his father's is here. 

Unless otherwise noted, cover images are from Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection Archive. 

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Mississippi History Now

Source: eBay 

Source: Etsy.com 

"One of his most historically interesting protagonists appears in “Darkie Dan, the Colored Detective; or, The Mississippi Mystery” in an August 1902 edition of the The New York Dime Library. Beadle & Adams originally printed the story in 1881. Manumitted after saving his young mistress from a pack of wolves, Dan remains in faithful service to the Mississippi planter family, rescuing them from many trials involving the villainous criminal known as the “King of Diamonds.” Dan is one of the earliest African-American protagonists of the mystery genre, if not the first."

Source: University of Mississippi library exhibit

You can read the full text here. 

Source: The Commoner [Lincoln NE] 16 September 1904

Movies with Alabama Connections (8): The Big Gamble

This 1931 film actually has two Alabama connections. The female lead is Birmingham native Dorothy Sebastian. The film is based on a novel by Octavus Roy Cohen, a prolific author who spent a number of years in Birmingham and who set many short stories in the city. I've posted about Sebastian in my "Film Actresses from Alabama before 1960" series and Cohen in my "Alabama Book Covers" series. 

Sebastian's male co-star in the film was her husband at the time, Bill Boyd. Sebastian and Boyd were married in December 1930 in Las Vegas. They had met the previous year while making the film His First Command. The couple divorced in 1936. By that time Boyd was just beginning to play the character that would make him even more famous, Hopalong Cassidy.

Some other interesting actors show up in The Big Gamble. Warner Oland played the villain; he was well known for his roles in other films as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. ZaZu Pitts had a long career in both dramatic and comedic roles stretching from silent films into the early 1960's. 

Below is the New York Times original review of the film from September 1931. The story is pretty contrived and ends as you would expect, but the Alabama connections kept me watching to the end. The Big Gamble is the first film with Birmingham native Dorothy Sebastian that I've seen, and I'll have to look for more. 

The Big Gamble poster

Source: Wikipedia

Cohen's novel was published in 1925.

On the film's release in 1931, the New York Times ran this review: 

The man with a year to live is stalking heroically and a bit sadly across the Hippodrome screen this week in "The Big Gamble," which started its public career as a novel by Octavus Roy Cohen called "The Iron Chalice." The situation is a reliable standby for the amusement-hunter who likes an hour of honest suspense between the sinister beginning and the happy ending. With James Gleason and ZaSu Pitts on hand to make funny faces at the plot, after those scenes in which Warner Oland has sent out a new ultimatum to the doomed man and lured the spectators to the tense edges of their seats, "The Big Gamble" fits without a jar into the Hippodrome program between the acrobats and the newsreel.

Alan Beckwith, gambler, is at the end of his rope, but before quitting life he wants to square his debts. Mr. North, who has a proposition for every occasion, agrees to take care of the debts if Beckwith will marry a certain woman, who shall be named beneficiary in a $100,000 insurance policy. At the end of a year, the policy being ripe for payment, Beckwith will die in an "accident" and Mr. North will be richer by his death.

Naturally the inscrutable Mr. North had not counted on his pawns falling in love. A year is a short time and love is stronger than Mr. North and all his paid gunmen. Beckwith and his wife work furiously against the deadline and manage to scrape enough money together to pay back Mr. North. Then, on Dec. 31, Mr. North announces that he wants $100,000 or nothing. In the last five minutes before Beckwith and his wife pose for the happy fadeout, "The Big Gamble" offers a wild midnight automobile chase and a final dash of the gangster car down an embankment that was exciting enough to whip yesterday's spectators into scattered applause.

Bill Boyd and Dorothy Sebastian officiate as the gambler Beckwith and his wife. Warner Oland compounds his usual expert villainies in the rôle of North. As a small-time tout who aspires to a gunman's career, James Gleason is amusing, and as his bickering wife ZaSu Pitts again exhibits her talent as a comedienne.

One Year to Live.
THE BIG GAMBLE, based on Octavus Roy Cohen's story, "The Iron Chalice"; directed by Fred Niblo; an RKO Pathe production. At the Hippodrome.
Alan Beckwith . . . . . Bill Boyd
Beverly . . . . . Dorothy Sebastian
Mr. North . . . . . Warner Oland
Johnny . . . . . William Collier Jr.
Squint . . . . . James Gleason
Nora . . . . . ZaSu Pitts
May . . . . . June MacCloy
Trixie . . . . . Geneva Mitchell
Webb . . . . . Ralph Ince
Butler . . . . . Fred Walton

SOURCE: This review appeared in the New York Times on 21 September 1931.

Quick Visits to Bessemer & Jasper

Recently my brother Richard and I took one of our annual trips together seeking Alabama and family history. Last year's July trip took us to several places that I've written about: Aberfoil, Brundidge, Camp Hill, Tallassee and Union Springs. Once I scan some photos I have earlier years to discuss as well.

We've decided we're probably going to stop taking these trips in July. We're thinking more along the lines of January or February next time. 

As is usually the case, we started our trip this year on Friday with the Alabama Numismatic Society's annual show at the Bessemer Civic Center. Richard is the coin and currency collector in the family, an interest he picked up from dad. I've always been curious about coins and currency, though, and learn a few things each time we go. 

I have fond memories of dad's collecting in the days before he became interested in archaeology. He would often come home from work on Fridays with large bags of coins he'd gotten at the bank, and the three of us would go through them looking for goodies. 

The show also has dealers selling other items, and I've picked up old maps of Birmingham and Alabama there in the past. This year I spent some time going through numerous old Alabama postcards.

We left the coin show around 4 pm and headed on surface roads through Bessemer, Midfield, and Birmingham toward Jasper. We were looking for Green Top Bar-B-Q in Dora, where Richard remembered eating back in the 1970's. We had wonderful bar-b-q plates there; we always manage to enjoy such places on our trips. The restaurant has some history of its own, having opened when "Truman was President" as their web site proclaims.

Then we left for Oak Hill Cemetery in Jasper. My comments about that portion of the trip are below. The city of Jasper is not named after the semi-precious gemstone, by the way, but after a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina named William Jasper. 

In the weeks to come I'll be posting more on places we visited on this trip. 

We have some ancestors buried in the cemetery, but we found a few other interesting markers first. Near the cemetery entrance is the gravestone above that marks the final resting place of William Haynes Bankhead Perry. Born in South Carolina, he died in Jasper in November 1915. His wife was Louise Bankhead; as we'll see Perry married into a prominent family in Jasper and Alabama.

His stone was carved by Giuseppe Moretti, the Italian sculpture responsible for promoting Sylacauga marble in many works and the iron Vulcan on Red Mountain. Moretti created only 14 cemetery memorials. 

The graves above and below mark various members of the Bankhead family, prominent in Jasper, Alabama, and beyond. A number of them are buried in Oak Hill.

 Below is the impressive stone for John Hollis Bankhead and his wife Tallulah. A Civil War veteran, Bankhead was variously a farmer, warden of the state penitentiary at Wetumpka, businessman, and a U.S. Representative for 20 years. His son John became a U.S. Senator, son William Speaker of the U.S. House, and daughter Marie director of the state archives for many years. Granddaughter and actress Tallulah was named after his wife. 

Some of our Shores and Samford ancestors can be found in a more modest section of the cemetery. The other side of this stone reads "Samford".

This area brother Richard is walking has a number of our Shores and Samford ancestors. 

My maternal grandparents Tempe and John Miller Shores are both buried in this family plot. My grandmother died two months after I was born; mom says she got to see me before her death. 

My grandfather served many years as a minister in the North Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church. 

Another Shores ancestor practiced medicine in Alabama for many years. 

Lydia Ann Edwards [1833-1879] was the first wife of James Wilson Shores [1828-1918], another long-serving Methodist minister in the family. In the early part of his career he was a circuit rider, and the state archives has his journal for the 1850's. An excerpt can be read here. He and his second wife are buried in Montgomery.

Lydia was originally buried in a Dallas County cemetery that in recent years had been abandoned and become overgrown. Eventually several members of the family and an archaeologist disinterred her remains and moved them to this location in Jasper. Very little actually survived, but the broken gravestone came with them. That's another story I may tell one day.