Donna & Sammy in National Vaudeville Artists – 1927 Yearbook

98 Years Ago
by Don Taylor

National Vaudeville Artists – 1927

Recently, a friend came across the National Vaudeville Artists 1927 Year Book. He knows of my interest in following the vaudeville career of my grandmother, Donna Montran/Darling/Kees. He thought I’d like to review it and see if I could find her.

Sure enough, I found her and Sammy with a full page showing Donna and Sammy. It is an excellent page with photos of both Donna and Sammy. Their quote, “To Wish the N. V. A. Success is to Wish Ourselves Success For We Are All Members of the N. V. A. in Good Standing.

I also learned that Herbert Hutchinson of Ray Hodgdon’s office represented them.

I had seen the photo of Donna before in newspaper articles, but it was never as clear as this image. Likewise, the picture of Sammy is not cropped as severely as other copies of this image I have seen before. It was a great find, thanks to my friend RL.

I wondered why I hadn’t seen this bill before, so I looked at several sources, including the Internet Archive, Amazon, the NYPL Digital Collections, and the Media History Digital Library. The book was there, but none of the online copies had more than 132 pages, whereas the copy I was given access to has many more pages. All of them appear to be missing many pages. Because it is out of copyright, I will probably digitize this copy and post it to the Internet Archive. In the meantime, here is the page showing Donna and Sammy.

Conclusion

This week, I learned from the National Vaudeville Artists 1927 Yearbook that Donna and Sammy were members of the N. V. A., and Herbert Hutchinson represented them.