Texarkana

Corinne Mae Griffith was an American actress. Dubbed "The Orchid Lady of the Screen", she was one of the most popular film actresses of the 1920s... and widely considered the most beautiful actress of the silent screen. Shortly after the advent of sound film, Griffith retired from acting and became a successful author. Griffith was born in Texarkana, Texas to John Lewis Griffin and Ambolina Ghio. She attended Sacred Heart Convent school in New Orleans and worked as a dancer before she began her acting career. Griffith began her screen career at the Vitagraph Studios in 1916. She later moved to First National, where she became one of their most popular stars. In 1928, she had the starring role in The Garden of Eden. The next year, in 1929, Griffith received an Academy Award nomination for her role in The Divine Lady. Griffith's first sound film, Lilies of the Field, was released in 1930. Griffith's voice did not record well , and the film was a box office flop. After appearing in one more motion picture, the British film Lily Christine in 1932, she retired from acting.
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Dan Blocker was an American actor best remembered for his role as Eric "Hoss" Cartwright in the NBC western television series Bonanza. Blocker was... born Bobby Dan Blocker in De Kalb, Texas, son of Ora Shack Blocker and his wife Mary Blocker . Soon after Dan's birth, the family moved to O'Donnell, south of Lubbock in West Texas, where they operated a store. He attended Texas Military Institute and in 1946 played football at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He graduated from Sul Ross State Teacher's College in Alpine, where he earned a master's degree in the dramatic arts. Blocker was a high school English and drama teacher in Sonora, Texas, a sixth grade teacher and coach at Eddy Elementary School in Carlsbad, New Mexico and a finally a teacher in California. He had worked as a rodeo performer and as a bouncer in a beer bar while a student.
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Julie Meadows is a former American pornographic actress who became a writer, web designer and documentarian after retiring from performing. She was... active in the industry from 1998–2004 and is sometimes said to resemble the actress Julia Stiles. Born in Texarkana, Texas, Meadows has three sisters. She married at the age of 17 and gave birth to a son just after their one-year anniversary. She met the film director Michael Raven while dancing in Dallas. She moved to Los Angeles, California six months later where she began working in adult films in 1998. Her first film was Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes 94. Meadows was a contract performer for VCA for two years, before leaving in January 2003. She retired from the adult industry in 2004; she later stated her reason for retiring was that she was no longer interested in making movies. In March 2010, Meadows appeared in a Public Service Announcement for the Free Speech Coalition on the topic of internet piracy of adult content, directed by Michael Whiteacre.
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Kathy Westmoreland is an American singer. After growing up in Abilene, Texas, the daughter of a professional singer and a professional dancer , she... moved to California in 1962 with her sisters and brother Brent . She teamed up with friend and Garden Grove High School classmate Steve Martin in a musical comedy act, working together at the Birdcage Theater at Knott's Berry Farm and playing local coffee houses. A soprano, Westmoreland sang musical comedies and opera, performing oratorios and traveling with the Metropolitan Opera National Company by the age of eighteen. Returning to California, she joined the singing group The Sandpipers, who had a major hit with the song "Guantanamera." She became a studio session singer, appearing on numerous television shows such as those of Red Skelton, Tim Conway and Bobby Darin. She was one of Jimmy Joyce's singers, Ray Conniff's singers, Johnny Mann and many others, including vocals on recording sessions with hundreds of major artists.
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Jonathan Patrick Lamas is an American author, writer, and producer. In addition to his contributions as an automotive journalist for various... automotive publications, he is known for such books as Out On My Own and Sanctuary of Expression. He is also known for his musical contributions as vocalist and guitarist of several Los Angeles bands. In 2005, Lamas played a bit part in the independent film Mute, directed by Melissa Joan Hart.
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Carl Finch is a guitarist, keyboardist, accordionist, vocalist, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Grammy-winning polka/dance band... Brave Combo in 1979 in Denton, Texas. He co-produced the albums Equal Scary People for singer-songwriter Sara Hickman and El Gato Negro for conjunto musician Santiago Jimenez, Jr. He composed music for and appears as an extra in David Byrne's 1986 movie True Stories. His instrumental "Mall Music" appears on the associated album Sounds from True Stories. He co-wrote the music for the play Evelyn and the Polka King. He produced the opening for YuYu Hakusho and both the opening and ending themes for the Funimation dub of Dragon Ball and Case Closed. He appeared in animated form, along with the rest of Brave Combo, on an episode of The Simpsons in 2004. He produced and, along with Brave Combo, performed all of the music for the 2008 animated PBS television series Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns. Finch is a vegetarian.
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Conlon Nancarrow was a United States-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.... Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation, not becoming widely known until the 1980s. Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth, before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio and later in Boston, Massachusetts with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. He met Arnold Schoenberg during that composer's brief stay in Boston in 1933. In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. He was interned by the French at the Gurs internment camp in 1939. Upon his return to the United States in 1939, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were having trouble getting their U.S. passports renewed.
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Jeffery Lynn Keith is an American musician, best known as the lead singer of the band Tesla. He was also the lead singer for the band Bar 7. Before... he became part of Tesla, Keith lived in Idabel, Oklahoma with his mother Anita and sister Joey. He attended Idabel High School and eventually moved to Sacramento, California to live with his father. Keith started out singing in the band Troubleshooter with his brother BK, before joining City Kidd in 1983. He now lives with his wife and son in Granite Bay, CA.
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Buster Benton was an American blues guitarist and singer, who played guitar in Willie Dixon's Blues All-Stars, and is best known for his solo... rendition of the Dixon-penned song "Spider in My Stew." He was tenacious and in the latter part of his lengthy career, despite the amputation of parts of both his legs, Benton never stopped playing his own version of Chicago blues. Arley Benton was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. Whilst residing in Toledo, Ohio, during the mid 1950s, and having been influenced by Sam Cooke and B.B. King, Benton began playing blues music. By 1959, he was leading his own band in Chicago. During the 1960s, local record labels, such as Melloway, Alteen, Sonic, and Twinight Records released several Benton singles, before in 1971 he joined Willie Dixon. Indeed, a lack of opportunity in the early 1960s meant that Benton gave up playing professionally for several years, and he worked as an auto mechanic. Benton's earlier work was an amalgam of blues and soul, which he confusingly dubbed 'disco blues'.
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