Rock Island

June Haver , was an American film actress. She is best remembered as a popular alternative to the musical film stars Betty Grable and Alice Faye in... several musicals in the 1940s. Haver's second husband was the actor Fred MacMurray, whom she married after she retired from show business. Born June Stovenour, Haver was born in Rock Island, Illinois. She later took the last name of her stepfather Bert Haver. After the family moved to Ohio, seven-year-old Haver entered and won a contest of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. At age 10, she moved back to Rock Island, where she began performing for Rudy Vallee. Her mother being an actress and her father being a musician, Haver often doubted who she - careerwise - wanted to follow. At age eight, she won a film test by imitating famous actresses including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes. Haver's mother, however, prohibited her daughter from becoming a child actress in the film industry, feeling she was too young. Working regularly as a band singer by her teens, she performed with the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra for $75 a week. Other bandleaders she worked for were Dick Jurgens and Freddy Martin.
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David Thomas Ackles was an American singer-songwriter. He recorded four albums between 1968 and 1973. Describing Ackles's style in 2003, critic... Colin McElligatt wrote, "An unlikely clash of anachronistic show business and modern-day lyricismdeeply informs his recorded output. Alternately calling to mind Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Robbie Robertson, Tim Hardin, and Scott Walker, Ackles forged an utterly unique sound out of stray parts that comprise a whole that is as uncompromising as it is unrivaled." Although he never gained wide commercial success, he influenced other artists, especially British singer-songwriters such as Elvis Costello, Elton John and Phil Collins, all of whom are self-declared fans of Ackles. After Ackles's death Costello said, "It's a mystery to me why his wonderful songs are not better known." Ackles said of his birthplace, Rock Island, Illinois: "Not a bad place for an incipient songwriter to get a start." His mother came from a family of English music hall performers and his father was a musician. His family moved to Southern California, and Los Angeles became his lifelong home.
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Greg Norton is an American musician, formerly of the band Hüsker Dü. After Hüsker Dü disbanded in 1988, Norton formed the band... Grey Area with Hüsker Dü engineer Colin Mansfield and Jo Jones. After Grey Area disbanded in 1991, Norton left the music business to focus on the restaurant business, opening The Norton's Restaurant in Red Wing, Minnesota with his now ex-wife Sarah. Norton returned to the recording industry in 2006, with a new band Gang Font feat. Interloper. The group is composed of Norton, Dave King , Eric Fratzke of Zebulon Pike and Happy Apple, and Craig Taborn.
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Helen Mack was an American actress. Mack started her career as a child actress in silent films, moving on to Broadway plays, and touring the... vaudeville circuit. Her greater success as an actress was as a leading lady in the 1930s. Eventually Mack transitioned into performing on radio, and then into writing, directing, and producing some of the best known radio shows during the Golden Age of Radio. Later in life, Mack billed herself as a professional writer, writing for Broadway, stage, and television. Her career spanned the infancy of the motion picture industry, the beginnings of Broadway, the final days of Vaudeville, the transition to "talking pictures", the Golden Age of Radio, and the rise of television. Helen Mack, born Helen McDougall was the daughter of William George McDougall, a barber, and Regina McDougall, who had a repressed desire to become an actress. She obtained her education as a youth at the Professional Children's School of New York City. Vera Gordon was a friend who helped her along as a child actress. She appeared on Broadway, in vaudeville and in stock, as well as in silent films.
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Tim Moore was a celebrated American vaudevillian and comic actor of the first half of the 20th century. He gained his greatest recognition in the... starring role of George "Kingfish" Stevens in the CBS television series, Amos 'n' Andy. He proudly stated, "I've made it a point never to tell a joke on stage that I couldn't tell in front of my mother." Moore was born Harry Roscoe Moore in Rock Island, Illinois, one of 13 children of Harry and Cynthia Moore. His father was a night watchman at a brewery. Tim Moore dropped out of grammar school to work at odd jobs in town and even danced for pennies in the streets with his friend, Romeo Washburn. In 1898, Moore and Washburn went into vaudeville in an act called "Cora Miskel and Her Gold Dust Twins." It was booked by agents and travelled through the United States and even Great Britain. By 1904, the act had performed with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. As Moore and Washburn grew older, the act became less effective and Miss Miskel sent them back to their parents in Rock Island. Shortly after this, Moore joined the medicine show of "Doctor Mick", a charlatan who sold a quack remedy called "Puritia.
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Jeffrey Frederick Gold is an American filmmaker, film producer, playwright, and film composer educated as a physicist and mathematician at the... United States Naval Academy, the University of Utah, and the University of Cambridge, England. Jeffrey Gold attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland . He left before the end of his first year and transferred to the University of Utah where he completed his Bachelor's degree in pre-professional physics with a minor in mathematics. While an undergraduate, Jeffrey Gold published eight papers in mathematics and physics and worked as an undergraduate research assistant in thermoacoustics, magnetoencephalography, thin film sputtering and metal evaporation, and photoluminescence, and worked with mathematician Don H. Tucker on the problem of the Twin primes in Number Theory. Before graduating from the University of Utah, he attended a beginning film making class which he described as "the beginning of the end for physics".
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