Biographical Sketches

Gravel voiced actor best known as Jack Benny's valet.

1905-1977. The son of a minstrel and circus tightrope walker, Eddie Anderson developed a gravel voice early in life which would become his trademark to fame. He joined his older brother Cornelius as members of "The Three Black Aces" during his vaudeville years, singing for pennies in the hotel lobby. He eventually moved his way up to the Roxy and Apollo theaters in New York , which led to the Los Angeles Cotton Club in the west.

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Silent film star whose career was destroyed by scandal.

1887-1933. Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle was born in Smith Center , Kansas . The Arbuckles moved to Santa Ana , California , in 1888, where his mother died the next year. His father abandoned him at a young age. Roscoe survived by doing odd jobs and broke into Vaudeville as a singer and dancer.

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Silent film star known as "The Vamp."

1885-1955. Silent film star, known as "The Vamp" for her uninhibited sexy roles. Although her studio claimed that she had been born in Egypt to an Italian artist and a French actress, she was actually born in Avondale, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, as Theodosia Goodman to Bernard Goodman, an immigrant Polish Jewish tailor, and Pauline de Coppett, a Swiss-German immigrant who became co-owner of a wig makers shop.

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African American actress.

1902-1962. Louise Beavers was born in Cincinnati , Ohio on March 8, 1902 and started her performing career as a singer in a minstrel show. She had a beautiful voice and sang in some of her films. Her family moved to California , where she attended Pasadena High School . Her entree into Hollywood was as maid to silent film star Leatrice Joy. With Ms. Joy's encouragement, Louise Beavers began accepting small film parts in 1923, and three years later became a full-time performer when she joined the Ladies Minstrel Troupe. After co-starring in the 1927 Universal remake of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Beavers worked steadily in films, usually playing maids, housekeepers and "mammies."

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Film director and choreographer of lavish Hollywood dance numbers.

1895-1976. William Berkeley Enos, better known as Busby Berkeley, was one of the greatest choreographers of the movie musical. He was born in Los Angeles to actor parents. His father died when he was a small boy and he formed a lifelong close attachment to his mother. Berkeley served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in World War I, where he directed parades, and after the cease fire staged camp shows for soldiers. Back home he became a stage actor and assistant director in small acting troops. His first big success was as dance director for Florence Ziegfeld's production of "A Connecticut Yankee on King Arthur's Court." Eddie Cantor, who starred in the long running Ziegfeld show "Whoopee!", suggested Berkeley for the dance routines in its film version, and Ziegfeld agreed.

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Founder of giant pharmaecutical company.

1854-1943. Born in Montmedy, France, in the Meuse district. Brunswig emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a druggist in Fort Worth, Texas, in the late 1870s. He moved to New Orleans, where he married Annie Mercer (1857-1892). They had a son, Lucien Mercer Brunswig, and a daughter Annie, after her mother. In 1887 Brunswig founded a pharmaceutical distributing company. Their son died just before his 10th birthday, in April 1892, and Lucien Brunswig's wife Annie died a month later.

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Prolific Los Angeles poet and novelist of the heavy-drinking, down-and-out life.

 

1920-1994. Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany. His mother, Katharina Fett, was a local seamstress. His father, Henry Charles Bukowski, was an American serviceman who stayed on after the end of World War I. Their son was christened Heinrich Karl Bukowski, a Germanization of his father's name. When the German economy collapsed in the postwar years the family moved to Los Angeles in the spring of 1923. For some time they lived in a house on Virginia Road in the Jefferson Park section of West Adams. The young Bukowski Americanized his name to Henry Charles, like his father. He attended Virginia Road Elementary School. Starting when he was in elementary school his father began to beat him and sometimes Katharina as well.

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First African American school principal in Los Angeles.

1891-1968. Her parents came from Kansas to Los Angeles by covered wagon in 1877, settling in what is now North Hollywood where Bessie was born. She graduated from Polytechnic High School in 1911 and attended college at Los Angeles State Normal School (now part of UCLA), graduating 7th in a class of 800.

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First American-born Chinese woman physician. "Adopted" 1500 American flyers and submariners during World War II.

1889-1959. The first-known American-born Chinese woman physician. Margaret Chung was born in Santa Barbara , California , the eldest of eleven children. Her parents emigrated separately from China in the 1870s. Her father worked as a merchant, then went bankrupt and became a fruit peddler, dairyman, and ranch foreman. Her mother was rescued from a brothel. Both became invalids when Margaret was very young, and Margaret took over supporting the family by the time she was ten, as well as caring for her younger siblings and nursing her mother who was slowly dying of tuberculosis. She drove a horse-drawn freight wagon alone when she was ten and later worked 12-hour days in a Chinese restaurant when she was in the seventh grade. The family moved first to Ventura , then to the East Adams section of Los Angeles near San Pedro Street .

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Once the richest man in America. A central founder of West Adams.

1856-1935. A central figure in West Adams history, Edward L. Doheny rose from years as a drifter to become the richest man in America , only to spend his last years in prolonged court battles on charges of bribery and corruption in the famous Teapot Dome scandal. He built several of the landmark buildings of West Adams , including the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic church at Figueroa and Adams, the Chester Place park that is now the campus of Mt. St. Mary's College, and the Doheny Library on the USC campus.

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