25 Oct 2019
Radio Permalink

Billy Graham

October 25, 2019

In memory of televangelist and Walk of Famer Reverend Billy Graham, flowers were placed on the Center Island at Hollywood and La Brea on the Hollywood Walk of Fame due to Oscar® production on Wednesday, February 21, 2018 at 2:00 p.m. The star in the category of Television is located at 6925 Hollywood Blvd.

“Rest in peace among the stars Rev. Graham!” Ana Martinez, Producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign are registered trademarks of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. 

William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. KBE is an American evangelical Christian evangelist. As of April 25, 2010, when he met with Barack Obama, he has been a spiritual adviser to twelve United States presidents going back to Harry S. Truman, and is number seven on Gallup's list of admired people for the 20th century. He is a Southern Baptist. He rose to celebrity status as his sermons were broadcast on radio and television.

It is said that Graham has preached in person to more people around the world than any other preacher in history. According to his staff, as of 1993 more than 2.5 million people had "stepped forward at his crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior". As of 2008, Graham's lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, topped 2.2 billion.

He was born November 7, 1918 to William Franklin Graham I and Morrow Coffey, on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. Graham was raised in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church by his parents. In 1933, when Prohibition in the United States ended, Graham's father forced Graham and his sister Katherine to drink beer until they vomited, which created an aversion, in both of them, to alcohol and drugs. According to the Billy Graham Center, Graham was converted in 1934 at age 16 during a series of revival meetings in Charlotte which were led by evangelist Mordecai Ham. However, he was turned down for membership in a local youth group because he was "too worldly". He was persuaded to go see Ham at the urging of one of the employees, Albert McMakin, on the Graham farm.

After graduating from Sharon High School in May 1936, Graham attended Bob Jones College, then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, for one semester but found it too legalistic in both coursework and rules. At this time, he was influenced and inspired by Pastor Charley Young from Eastport Bible Church. He was almost expelled, but Bob Jones, Sr. warned him not to throw his life away: "At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks. You have a voice that pulls. God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily." In 1937, Graham transferred to the Florida Bible Institute on the site of today's Florida College in Temple Terrace, Florida. In his autobiography he writes that he "received calling on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club," which is immediately in front of today's Sutton Hall at Florida College in Temple Terrace. Reverend Billy Graham Memorial Park is today located on the Hillsborough River directly east of the 18th green and across from where Graham often paddled a canoe to a small island in the river, where he would preach to the birds, alligators, and cypress stumps. Graham eventually graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois with a degree in anthropology, in 1943. It was during his time at Wheaton that Graham decided to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God. Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood was instrumental in helping Graham wrestle with the issue, which was settled at Forest Home Christian camp southeast of the Big Bear area in Southern California. A memorial there marks the site of Graham's decision.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Billy Joel

October 25, 2019

William Martin “Billy” Joel is an American musician and pianist, singer-songwriter, and classical composer. Since releasing his first hit song, “Piano Man”, in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.

Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; he’s piled up 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote singlehandedly. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 100 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Long Island Music Hall of Fame and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame. Joel “retired” from recording pop music in 1993 but continues to tour. In 2001, he released Fantasies & Delusions, a CD of classical compositions for piano. In 2007, he briefly returned to pop songwriting and recording with a single entitled “All My Life” ? written for his third wife Katie Lee Joel. In September 2007, Joel wrote “Christmas in Fallujah,” a tribute to soldiers and a grim depiction of war. The song was recorded by Cass Dillon and subsequently by Joel himself in a December 2008 live version that was released only in Australia. Joel returned to touring in 2006 after a three-year hiatus from the road and has toured extensively ever since, covering many major world cities. In March 2009, Joel resumed his popular Face to Face tour with fellow pianist Elton John. The tour ended in March 2010 and there are currently no more dates scheduled, although Joel, who has stated a desire to take the rest of 2010 off, told Rolling Stone magazine: “We?ll probably pick it up again. It?s always fun playing with him.”

Joel was born in The Bronx, New York and raised in the Levittown section of Hicksville, New York. His father, Howard, was born in Germany as the son of German-Jewish merchant and manufacturer Karl Amson Joel who after the advent of the Nazi regime emigrated to Switzerland and later to the United States. Billy Joel’s mother, Rosalind Nyman, was born in England to a Jewish family. His parents divorced in 1960, and his father moved to Vienna, Austria. Billy has a sister, Judith Joel, and a half-brother, Alexander Joel, who is an acclaimed classical conductor in Europe, currently chief musical director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig.

Joel’s father was an accomplished classical pianist. Billy reluctantly began piano lessons at an early age, at his mother’s insistence; his teachers included the noted American pianist Morton Estrin and musician/songwriter Timothy Ford. His interest in music, rather than sports, was a source of teasing and bullying in his early years. As a teenager, Joel took up boxing so that he would be able to defend himself. He boxed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a short time, winning twenty-two bouts, but abandoned the sport shortly after having his nose broken in his twenty-fourth boxing match.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Billy Vera

October 25, 2019

See the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony announcement
 

Billy Vera is an American singer, actor, writer and music historian.

Vera was born in Riverside, California. He began his singing career in 1962 as a member of the Resolutions. He went on to write several songs throughout the early 1960s, writing for the likes of Barbara Lewis, Fats Domino, The Shirelles and Ricky Nelson. He also wrote the garage band classic, "Don't Look Back", performed by the Remains.

In 1967 Vera penned a song entitled "Storybook Children" and brought it to Atlantic Records. The decision to place former gospel singer Judy Clay with Vera in a white-black duet to record the song was a commercial and artistic success and a subsequent album by Vera and Clay remains a highpoint for soul duet partnerships. He would have a solo hit later that same year with the Bobby Goldsboro penned "With Pen In Hand" which was also the name of his next album.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s Vera focused on songwriting including "I Really Got the Feeling" which was a number 1 hit for Dolly Parton. He also participated in several archival and music preservation projects, including fronting the band at the 1972 Reunion concert of Dion & the Belmonts.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Billy Wilder

October 25, 2019

Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age. Wilder is one of only five people who have won three Academy Awards for producing, directing and writing the same film. He first became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit as a co-writer of the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity, a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.

From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, satires such as The Apartment, and the romantic comedy Sabrina. He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter.

Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha Beskidzka, Austria-Hungary to Max Wilder and Eugenia Dittler, Wilder was nicknamed Billie by his mother. His parents had a successful and well-known cake shop in Sucha Beskidzka’s train station and unsuccessfully tried to convince their son to inherit the business. Soon the family moved to Vienna, where Wilder attended school. After dropping out of the University of Vienna, Wilder became a journalist. To advance his career Wilder decided to move to Berlin, Germany. While in Berlin, before achieving success as a writer, Wilder allegedly worked as a taxi dancer.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio, Recording, Television Permalink

Bing Crosby

October 25, 2019

Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby was an American singer and actor. His career stretched more than half a century from 1926 until his death in 1977. Crosby’s unique bass-baritone voice made him the best-selling recording artist until well into the rock era, with over half a billion records in circulation.

One of the first multimedia stars, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby was very successful across record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. Crosby and his musical acts influenced male singers of the era that followed him, including Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the “most admired man alive,” ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also during 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.

Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947, he invested $50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed North America’s first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer to pre-record his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul’s invention of multitrack recording. Along with Frank Sinatra, he was one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles.

Through the aegis of recording, Crosby developed the techniques of constructing his broadcast radio programs with the same directorial tools and craftsmanship that occurred in a theatrical motion picture production. This feat directly led the way to applying the same techniques to creating all radio broadcast programming as well as later television programming. The quality of the recorded programs gave them commercial value for re-broadcast. This led the way to the syndicated market for all short feature media such as TV series episodes.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Radio Permalink

Binnie Barnes

October 25, 2019

Gittel Enoyce “Binnie” Barnes, later known as Gertrude Maude Barnes, was an English actress.

She was born in Islington to a Jewish father and an Italian mother and was raised Jewish. She worked on a farm and in hospital as a probationer. She then became a ballroom dancer and Tex McLeod’s stage partner. Later she was in cabaret and revue.

She began her acting career in films in 1923, first in Britain then later in Hollywood and continued until 1973. Her most famous film was probably The Private Life of Henry VIII, which starred Charles Laughton in the title role, with Barnes as Katherine Howard.

She was married to film producer Mike Frankovich, for whom she converted to Roman Catholicism and became an American citizen. They adopted three children.

25 Oct 2019
Motion Pictures, Television Permalink

Blanche Sweet

October 25, 2019

Sarah Blanche Sweet was an American silent film actress who began her career in the earliest days of the Hollywood motion picture film industry.

Born in Chicago, Illinois into a family of stock theater and vaudeville performers, Blanche Sweet entered the entertainment industry at an early age. At age 4 she toured in a play called The Battle of the Strong whose star was stage luminary Maurice Barrymore. A decade later Sweet would act with Barrymore’s son Lionel in a Griffith directed film. In 1909, she started work at Biograph Studios under contract to director D. W. Griffith. By 1910 she had become a rival to Mary Pickford, also having started for Griffith the year before, which would result in Pickford leaving the studio intermittently. Sweet is renowned for her energetic, independent roles, at variance with the ‘ideal’ Griffith type of vulnerable, often fragile, femininity. After many starring roles, her first real landmark film was the 1911 Griffith thriller The Lonedale Operator. In 1913 she starred in Griffith’s first feature-length movie, Judith of Bethulia. In 1914 Sweet was initially cast by Griffith in the part of Elsie Stoneman in his epic The Birth of a Nation but the role was eventually given to rival actress Lillian Gish, who was Sweet’s senior by three years. That same year Sweet parted ways with Griffith and joined Paramount for the much higher pay that studio was able to afford.

Throughout the 1910s, Sweet continued her career appearing in a number of highly prominent roles in films and remained a publicly popular leading lady. She often starred in vehicles by Cecil B. DeMille and Marshall Neilan, and she was recognised by leading film critics of the time to be one of the foremost actresses of the entire silent era. It was during her time working with Neilan that the two began a publicized affair, which brought on his divorce from former actress Gertrude Bambrick. Sweet and Neilan married in 1922. The union ended in 1929 with Sweet charging that Neilan was a persistent adulterer.

25 Oct 2019
Radio, Recording Permalink

Blanche Thebom

October 25, 2019

Blanche Thebom was an American mezzo-soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for almost twenty years.

She was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania and raised in Canton, Ohio.

In 1957 she came to London to sing Dido in the major production at Covent Garden of Berlioz?s Les Troyens. In this she made effective use of he spectacularly long hair, allowing it to fall down her back as she ascended the funeral pyre at the end.

Upon her retirement from the Metropolitan ca. 1960, she taught and directed opera performance in Atlanta and Little Rock until around 1980. She appeared in summer theatre revivals of Broadway musicals such as The Sound of Music in Atlanta.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Blue Barron

October 25, 2019

Blue Barron, born Harry Freidman, was an American orchestra leader in the 1940s and early 1950s during the “Big Band” era.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he studied at Ohio State University before going into show business. He adopted the stage name Blue Barron and by 1940 had created his own orchestra. His band’s more subdued tone was referred to as “Sweet” music to distinguish it from the “Swing” bands of the era. At first, Barron’s orchestra played in the New York City area but later toured the U.S. and performed at popular venues in Los Angeles where they also appeared in several motion pictures and recorded a number of LPs.

During World War II, Barron served with the United States Army and at war’s end resumed his musical career. He was able to work in the industry for another ten years until the Big Band era gave way to new musical forms. For his contribution to the recording industry, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1724 Vine Street. Barron hit #1 in 1949 with “Cruising Down The River”.

25 Oct 2019
Recording, Television Permalink

Billy Daniels

October 25, 2019

William Boone “Billy” Daniels was a singer active in the United States from the mid-1930s to 1986, two years before his passing.

He was popular in Europe after he headlined at ‘The London Palladium’ in 1952, having broken the house records. He toured the Moss Theatre circuit of the UK in the 1950s as ‘America’s most exciting singer’ He first toured the United States with the Erskine Hawkins Band in 1936 as their featured vocalist. He sang every day of 1938 on New York radio, for 12 different sponsors. ‘It was me or the horse racing’, Daniels remarked. His forte was as a nightclub entertainer and he was the biggest cabaret draw in New York throughout the 1950s alongside the comedian Jimmy Durante. In 1958 Daniels was the first entertainer to sign a long term contract to appear in Las Vegas for 3 years at The Stardust. He had performed in musicals on Broadway early in his career a minor role to the famous Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson the legendary tap dancer in a short lived musical ‘Memphis Bound’ in 1945. More notable was the long running, over 700 performances, of ‘Golden Boy’ with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1964 directed by Arthur Penn. Daniels toured the US in 1975 with Pearl Bailey in the all black Hello, Dolly!. In London’s West End he headlined a 1978 presentation of Bubbling Brown Sugar. He appeared on television in the US and UK and Australia and Canada throughout the 1950s and 1960’s. He was popular in Australia where he first toured with The Andrews Sisters in 1954.

Daniels was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a railroad mailman, his mother a school teacher and organist. Daniels had a heritage of Portuguese sailor, Native American African American and pioneer white frontiersman Daniel Boone. Daniels moved to New York Harlem from Jacksonville in 1935. He originally moved to New York to attend Columbia University to become a lawyer, but was side-tracked, during the Depression. Daniels grandmother was a seamstress in Harlem for the Ziegfeld Follies and encouraged her grandson to sing without a microphone, like the others to diners in the club where he was a busboy, a singing waiter. He served bandleader Erskine Hawkins and was hired.