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Welcome to America between 1905 and 1940. On this website you’ll meet several members of a family with captivating stories to tell. One is the fearless Oregon housewife, Rosa Sutton, who became a national sensation in 1909 when she launched a fight for government accountability after the death of her oldest son. Her crusade for justice is the murder mystery and ghost story at the center of A Soul on Trial. Rosa’s feisty spirit inspired her granddaughter, Jane Hall; at ten years old, Jane had already decided she would be a writer like her father, Arizona’s beloved humorist Dick Wick Hall. She would publish dozens of stories, poems and articles before she was orphaned at fifteen. See the Salome to Hollywood blog and gallery for highlights of Jane’s amazing journey from the tiny hamlet of Salome, Arizona, to Virginia, Manhattan, and ultimately to the  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer “dream factory” during its Golden Age.

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AVAILABLE NOW! The Laughing Desert: Dick Wick Hall’s Salome Sun. The 1925-1926 paper is packed with stories, poems, humor, hometown philosophy and engaging illustrations that made the town of Salome famous. The book also includes 1920s photographs and Dick’s love poems to Daysie. Arizona’s Official State Historian and a popular entertainer, Marshall Trimble, provides the Foreword. Use this link to buy the book directly from CreateSpace. Stores, schools, colleges, libraries and any orders of five or more will receive a discount code. For Amazon orders click the book cover icon below.

Featured Post

From Tomboy to Glamour Girl

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Cosmopolitan Oct 1939

Jane Hall and Kate as pictured in “Beauties” by Bradshaw Crandell. Cosmopolitan Magazine, October 1939 (Copr. Hearst Publications)

WATCH FOR “NANCY GOES TO RIO” ON TCM . The film is a remake of ”It’s A Date” which Jane worked on in 1939. She kept her story and screen credit.

Here’s a bit of background for the posts and images in the  Salome to Hollywood Blog and Gallery. (Posts began on 11/16/2011.)  Who was Jane Hall and why is her journey of interest today?

“I was a candle on the President’s birthday cake!” On January 30, 1934, Jane Hall was exuberant as she whirled around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at a pageant in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. For nineteen-year-old Jane, this ball and other glamorous evenings like ...

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Recent Posts

“The Proper Progress”

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Once school started again in October 1934, Jane Hall’s Upper East Side and Lower East Side worlds competed for her attention. Now in her third-year at Cooper Union, she focused on two advanced courses. Pictorial Design with Austin Purves, Jr., still proved difficult, but Life Drawing and Painting with John Steuart Curry was much more promising. Besides, Thomas Craven, an “unsurpassed modern critic,” whose work Jane admired, held John Steuart Curry’s work in high regard. She knew she should not waste this “golden opportunity” to study with a master. By the beginning of November, despite encouragement from Mr. Curry, Jane recognized she was “not making the proper progress” in art school. How different her experience could have been if she’d had the funds to go away to college and immerse in the arts and humanities without the distractions of a hectic Manhattan social life. U.C.L.A. had been Jane’s dream when she’d been a high school sophomore ...

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  1. A New Mentor
  2. “Someday You’ll Get Somewhere”
  3. The First Annual Butler’s Ball 1934
  4. Happy Birthday FDR!
  5. More “Lowdown on the Upper Crust”
  6. Hidden Suffering at Holiday Time
  7. A Festive Weekend with Plenty of Spirits in 1933
  8. “Feted at Hunt Tea in the South”
  9. Full Circle: A Farewell to Dick Wick Hall’s Mentor, Tom Masson
  10. The Laughing Desert
  11. Summer 1933. Easy Living for a Privileged Few.
  12. Debutante Distractions in 1933
  13. An Artist or Writer or Both?
  14. A New World at Cooper Union
  15. “In Righte Gude Fellowshipe . . .”
  16. A New Style of Horsemanship
  17. Poplar Springs II- Gracious Summer Evenings
  18. Poplar Springs– “That Great Pile of Rocks”
  19. “An Aristocratic Arcadia of Gentility and Manners”– and History