Ads, articles, and filler from old Toronto newspapers
I’ve decided to take a break – possibly of indefinite length – from this blog, as I am busy with other stuff and am starting to get interested in other projects.
I’ve done over 2000 posts and have learned a lot about famous celebrities of the past and random people who have appeared in the newspaper. I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks for reading.
–Dave
Here’s a photo from the November 4 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a young couple who were about to get married.
Bartle Bull (1902-1950) became a British Conservative Member of Parliament from 1935 to 1945. He died of a heart attack at the age of 48. The couple had two children. When not serving in Parliament or the Second World War or practicing law, he helped manage the family cattle and sugar ranch located in Bartle, Cuba.
A search turned up a page on Rosemary Baur Bull. She passed away in 2006 at the age of about 95, thus outliving her husband by over 55 years.
Here’s a photo from the November 4 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of an elderly man who was about to get married.
My first internet search turned up Oscar Griswold (1886-1959), a U.S. Army general during the Second World War. But this Griswold would only have been 45 ar the time of this photo.
Another search turned up an ancestry page for Oscar Trout Griswold (1842-1935). He passed away in Hanford, California, but he would have been 88, not 80, at the time of the photo if this was him. The ancestry page lists him as having married in 1867, becoming the father of nine children, and then becoming a widower in 1928. His second wife, if any, is not listed. There’s always the possibility that there were two Oscar Griswolds living in Hanford who were eight years apart in age, but I’ll never know for sure.
I found a historical page that provided some details on this Mr. Griswold’s early life. He had been a farmer in Iowa before moving to Hanford in 1888. This page also mentions his first wife but not any subsequent marriage.
Besides the photo that appeared in yesterday’s blog, the November 4 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained another photo of a woman who was accused of associating with a criminal:
Internet searches turned up nothing about Jack Martin, escaped Georgia lifer, or Mary Lou Miller, his bride of five weeks. It doesn’t help that they both have common names. Martin was not notorious enough to appear on Wikipedia’s list of escaped prisoners.
Here’s a photograph from the November 4 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a young woman accused of being an accomplice to a crime.
An internet search turned up nothing on Tessie Zebrowski (or her two boy friends). The closest match I could find was an obituary for a man who was born in 1933 whose mother was formerly Tessie Zebrowski. But it might have been a different person.
Here’s a photo from the October 30 1933 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of an experimental car that had overturned.
William Forbes-Sempill (1893-1965) was a Scottish air pioneer who became the 19th Lord Sempill in 1954. He served with distinction as a pilot during the First World War. Starting in the 1920s, he became a Japanese spy, for reasons that never became clear. He was asked to resign his military posts in 1941, six days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was never prosecuted for his spying activities.
Charles Dollfus (1893-1981) was a respected French aviator, eventually becoming curator of an aeronautics museum in Le Bourget.
Here’s a photo from the October 30 1933 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a French politician.
Albert Sarrault (1872-1962) was the French governor of Indochina from 1911 to 1913 and again from 1917 to 1919. He was the Prime Minister of France from October to November 1933 and from January to June 1936. He retired from politics in 1940 after voting in favour of the establishment of the Vichy France government.
Here’s a photograph from the October 30 1933 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a woman whose hairstyle matched that of her dog.
A search for Claire Ray turned up only one item: a New York Times article from July 1933 with the headline “Actress Is Cleared – Claire Ray freed after turning car over to police”. The article is behind a paywall and I could find no other references, so I have no idea why Claire Ray was arrested nor why the police wanted her car.
Ms. Ray did not have a successful career as an actress: there is no record of her in either the Internet Movie Database or the Internet Broadway Database. I hope she took good care of her puppy.
Here’s a photo from the November 1 1928 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a man jumping on a mountain.
Luis Trenker (1892-1990) was a film director, actor, mountain climber, and bobsledder. In World War I, he fought in the Austro-Hungarian army against Italy, eventually writing a total of 23 books on the experience. After the war, he became an architect and competed for Italy in the 1924 Olympic Games as a bobsledder. (He lived in South Tyrol, which became a part of Italy.)
Originally serving as an assistant on a mountain film in 1921, he graduated to leading actor when it was discovered that he could perform the necessary stunts. He eventually abandoned architecture to concentrate on film. His films featured idealization of connections to the homeland as opposed to the decadence of city life.
He stopped filming during World War II, but resumed making documentaries about the Tyrol region in the 1950s. He lived to be 97 years old, passing away more than 60 years after leaping across the mountain shown in the caption above.
Here’s a photo from the October 30 1933 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of an actress who planned to fly from Hollywood to her home.
Jane Barnes (1915-1998) appeared in a number of movies between 1934 and 1941, mostly uncredited. She married actor Carlyle Moore Jr. in 1937; he also was a licensed private pilot, so the two obviously had common interests.
A Boston Globe edition in 1937 had an article on the couple’s marriage that provided biographical details on both of them. His movie career ended at about the same time as hers; I have no idea what happened to them after the early 1940s, other than that they had three children and were still married when he passed away in 1977.
Toronto Old News 