It’s quite a search sometimes for Just The Right Person for the Honorary Unsubscribe. Sometimes I have to choose one person over another when both would be great. Sometimes it’s a struggle to find someone I think really should get the honor.
And sometimes I get a heartwarming laugh when I’m looking for someone. This week, it was Shirley Jean Rickert, who was a cute curly-blonde child actress in five “Our Gang” comedy films in 1931 (which was the pre-Alfalfa and Spanky era) and in five “Mickey McGuire” comedy films, a competing series starring Mickey Rooney as “Tomboy Taylor”.
Showbiz started at 18 months, when she won a baby beauty contest in Seattle, Wash., where she was born. Her mother figured she had a goldmine, and headed to Hollywood. Getting into the movies was her mother’s dream, “but it wasn’t mine.”
Yet, Rickert said, she had a lot of fun making movies as a child: “just kids playing together,” she said in a 1999 interview. “We had fun. The mothers on the other hand, were awful. Stage mothers are just vile women, including my own.”
Later Years
Indeed, Rickert never was successful as an actress as an adult …so she turned to burlesque.
There, too, her blonde hair was her trademark: by then, it was down to her waist. It inspired her manager to give her a stage name: Gilda and Her Crowning Glory — and it stuck! (That was my laugh. 🙂 )
She acknowledged that she was a stripper, but things were different in her day. “I see more flesh in television commercials today than I used to see in burlesque,” she said. On the other hand, she once wrote to a fan in Detroit, “Detroit was one of the towns where I would appear on a kiddie TV show on Saturday morning as Shirley Jean of the Our Gang/Little Rascals, and disrobe on stage at night for the little kiddies’ parents.”
“I prefer burlesque because it’s not so immoral and the movie business,” she said in a 1955 interview. “In the stripping profession, you get somewhere through your talent, not through somebody you’re friendly with. When you get on that runway you have to hold your audience or you’re a dead pigeon.” Rickert retired from show business in 1959.
Her longest career was apparently in hardware sales, but her showbiz ties helped. When shopkeepers gave her the brushoff, she’d pull out an Our Gang publicity shot of herself and say, “‘You grew up with me.’ Then they do a 360.”
She did marry, took her husband’s surname, Measures, and had at least one child. She died in a nursing home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on February 6, 2009, at 82.
So yeah, someone else was the official honoree this week (Willem J. Kolff), but I still got to tell you about the little gem I found too.
Her web site has more info and (itty bitty) photos.
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No one can deny she was quite a beautiful lady. The pictures of her taken later in her life, she was still quite a looker. It’s a rare thing to find someone so pretty who is (was) a witty person. Her pages give a hint. May she rest in peace.
Thank you for this particular posting. Shirley was my older brother’s mother-in-law (former). I had only met her at the wedding, but I do remember that she was indeed a nice lady.