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Cooper, Merian Coldwell (1893-1973), filmmaker and adventurer  

Paul M. Jensen

Cooper, Merian Coldwell (24 October 1893–21 April 1973), filmmaker and adventurer, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of John C. Cooper, a lawyer, and Mary Coldwell. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, but resigned in his last year. After a failed attempt to become an aviator early in World War I, he worked for short periods on newspapers and then enlisted in the Georgia National Guard, seeing service in Mexico....

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Johnson, Osa (1894-1953), author, lecturer, and film producer  

Dennis Wepman

Johnson, Osa (14 March 1894–07 January 1953), author, lecturer, and film producer, was born Osa Helen Leighty in Chanute, Kansas, the daughter of William Sherman Leighty, a railroad engineer, and Ruby Isabel Holman. In 1910 she left high school to marry Martin Johnson, whom she had met eleven years earlier when he visited Chanute as an eighteen-year-old itinerant photographer. In the meantime he had visited Europe alone and traveled with ...

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Thomas, Lowell (1892-1981), broadcaster, author, and world traveler  

John Maxwell Hamilton and Carolyn Pione

Thomas, Lowell (06 April 1892–29 August 1981), broadcaster, author, and world traveler, was born Lowell Jackson Thomas in Woodington, Ohio, the son of Harriet Wagner, a teacher, and Harry Thomas, a physician. When Thomas was eight years old, his family moved to the rough gold-mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. Thomas delivered newspapers to the red-light district, smoked by the age of ten, explored the surrounding mountains, and yearned “to find out what lay beyond their farther slopes,” he recalled in his autobiography. At home he was expected to excel in traditional learning. A schoolteacher before he became a physician, Thomas’s father had one of the largest libraries in the West. In addition to encouraging his son to read, he providently drilled into the boy the importance of perfecting his speaking abilities. “Your voice is the expression of your personality,” the father insisted....

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Cover Thomas, Lowell (1892-1981)
Lowell Thomas Photograph by Pirie MacDonald, 1933. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-89799).