Postcard of the Day

[fflo]

I've got a little more than a week's worth of cards to feature in a Message Week, so let's get that going here!  It'll be a Long Message Week, like lit students and their Long 18th Century kinda thing, or a baker's dozen (but slightly more, proportionally).  :D

 

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Wow. Just for fun, I googled George W. Day Actor, and aside from the hits on George W. Bush, I found a mention of him on google books--A few pages from Actors Organize: A History of Union Formation Efforts in America, 1880-1919 by Kerry Segrave. Apparently George W. Day was one of a group of vaudeville performers who organized the White Rats, an actors' trade union of sorts.

Some archive's collection of playbills says he acted in "Miss Ambition"

OK, I just hit gold! There is a book on Google Books called Continuous Vaudeville by Will Martin Cressy, published in 1914. It seems to be a collection of odd stories about vaudeville, and it seems to have a chapter about George W. Day. It begins with him getting married:

"When George W. Day got married, he took awful chances....for he married into a Scotch Presbyterian family, and anybody knows that actors and Scotch Presbyterians were not originally created for Affinities." The book tells a story of George's in-laws visiting in New York, and I can only imagine that this photograph would be from that visit.

Here is the link

OK, IMBD has a plot summary for the movie version of "Miss Ambition" from 1918, (which didn't feature Mr. Day):

Very content with her sweetheart, Larry Doyle, and her work as a seamstress until society woman Edith Webster offers Marta a position as her maid. In the luxurious surroundings of Edith's estate, Marta becomes consumed by a desire for wealth and completely forgets Larry. Attracted by Marta's beauty, Nowland Wells, Edith's fiancé, asks her to pose for his statue of "Miss Ambition," and upon its completion, he passionately embraces her. Just then Edith enters, and Marta soon finds herself a social outcast. Still craving wealth, she marries millionaire Dudley Kelland, but he, in a drunken rage over her poor reputation, knocks into the statue and is crushed to death. Larry, now a prominent contractor, refuses to speak to Marta, but after she secretly gives him her entire fortune to ease his financial difficulties, he discovers the identity of his benefactress, and the two lovers are reunited.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

This is TOO GOOD, your research! All I did was look up the address and see the Google street view, which does look like it's the same place Mrs. Day lived, 4 years after sitting down at the cross bridge & getting her picture took.

Such an adventure this postcard took you on. And then us too. Or at least me. :D

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wasn't really expecting to find anything, let alone an honest-to-goodness amusing period anectdote. Sometimes the Internet is amazing.

I didn't think to Google Map it. Yeah, it does look like just the right sort of place.

The world is full of stories, isn't it?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

P.S. You are a Corking Good Fellow, as the vaudeville book said of George!