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| Shane Rumpza © 2014 |
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William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey : A Memoir of a Life and the Times (Vol 1). Boston: Little Brown, 1976, p. 193—
We stage-struck youngsters (sometimes I would work as an extra stagehand, moving scenery and props between acts [at Green's Opera House in Cedar Rapids IA], when a great star I wanted to see at close hand came to town) grew up in Cedar Rapids on a strange legend about Sarah Bernhardt. It was that she had been born Sarah King in the village of Rochester [IA], twenty-five miles down the Cedar River from us, that her mother had died when she was five, that she had run away soon afterward, entered a French convent at St Paul [MN], and, having learned the new language, set off to Paris, where she began her fabulous career in the theater. The legend grew when in 1905 it was reported that a veiled but elegantly dressed woman had stopped off briefly at Rochester to lay a bouquet of roses on the grave of the elder Mrs. King. When reporters noted that Sarah Bernhardt had played an engagement at nearby Iowa City the previous evening, they put two and two together, as reporters sometimes are tempted to do, and concluded that it was the great Parisian actress who had made the mysterious visit to the grave of one who must have been her mother. Ergo! The great Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of our time, was an Iowa girl!
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William L. Shirer, ibid, p. 18—
[The American novelist] Sinclair Lewis had worked as a telegraph editor and editorial writer on the [Waterloo IA] Daily Courier in 1908, the year after he graduated from Yale. He was fired after ten weeks, the editor informing him, Lewis told me once, "Young man, you'll never make it as a newspaperman. You can't write."
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| Shane Rumpza © 2014 |
