Scalawags: Emma Hamilton
Consider the young hooker leaning against a lamppost in London’s Soho district in 1778. The girl, Amy Lyon, had somehow managed to survive all odds to reach the age of 13. Her father, a blacksmith,...
View ArticleScalawags: “The Hipster” Harry
It was my good fortune to have known some of the last of the old breed of swinging jazz musicians. This was before jazz put on shorts and a ball cap and made nice. Many of these individuals are now...
View ArticleScalawags: Suzanne Valadon
Suzanne Valadon has been associated with the streets of Montmartre— from the days of the Paris Commune in 1871, far beyond her death in 1938, to the present day. She was born in Bessines in 1865, as...
View ArticleScalawags: Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola
Finding these scalawags along the back pages of history is quite an adventure, and during this pursuit I have come across some exceedingly strange individuals, as you will know should you have...
View ArticleScalawags: Edward James
It was early one morning, on the terrace of Hotel San Ignacio in Xilitla, Mexico, and I asked the manager where the structures were. He pointed toward distant mountains. “That way,” he said, shaking...
View ArticleScalawags: Hugh D. McIntosh
Hugh D. McIntosh. His nickname summed up the man perfectly: Huge Deal. He made and lost fortunes time after time in his whirlwind of a life. Near the end of it, and not knowing he was near the end of...
View ArticleScalawags: Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel
She lived a long, well publicized life (1879-1964). She knew and loved, was married to or had affairs with, some of the most famous men of her time. Now, decades after her death, she is still, if not...
View ArticleScalawags: Adah Menken Made The West Wilder
She did not rouge but played some deviltry with her glorious eyes. —Charles Reade She came into Virginia City, Nevada on the Wells Fargo stagecoach in the early 1860’s sitting up top with the luggage...
View ArticleScalawags: Lord Buckley Takes the Stage
In her terrific autobiography High Times, Hard Times, Anita O’Day, the jazz singer without vibrato, describes standing in the wings at a nightclub in Chicago and watching the act that she was to...
View ArticleScalawags: The Cult Of Eliza Lynch
Eliza Lynch was born in County Cork in 1835. Everything she ever said about her childhood or, at least, whatever was recorded, was a fabrication. It is true, however, that her family was lucky enough...
View ArticleThe Canadian Boy Who Became the Great Farini
In 1859, at the foot of Walton Street in Port Hope, Ontario, a local boy named William Hunt walked a tightrope over the Ganaraska River. Just a few months later, he was calling himself Farini, after an...
View ArticleThe Most Notorious Female Spy: Mata Hari
The most notorious of all female spies, the personification of the femme fatale, the mysterious exotic and erotic dancer from the East, Mata Hari was really Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, who broke away...
View ArticleWilliam Seabrook, Author, Adventurer, and Fine Young Cannibal
I thought it might be interesting to find one anecdote to best encapsulate the strange life of William Seabrook. But, then, his life was so full of incident and he knew so many of the kind of people...
View ArticleBefore the Tiger King, There Was the Rat King: Charles Waterton’s Bizarre...
Charles Waterton only spent a few days in Canada, in 1824, visiting Quebec City, Montreal, and Niagara Falls; although there are lakes and a national park in southern Alberta named after him, he never...
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