Dreams of a Bolles Girl

The other night I had one of those dreams...I saw a Bolles girl.   She was up in the clouds, smiling down on me.  It wasn't just any Bolles girl, but the face from a painting that had been taunting me for years, always just out of reach.  The scene abruptly shifted and next I was walking down an empty street in a strange town.  Everywhere I looked I saw pictures of her. It had to be one of those feverish dreams I must endure from time to time, a hazard of my fixation. There were other variations, in one I actually meet Bolles, get to ask him all those questions that have been burning in me, see art never before shared. In another I find the veritable closet full of paintings. Always I awake with that brief moment of confused exaltation, only to be pulled down as the weight of reality sets in.  It was just a dream.  Only a dream. But this felt different, somehow more real. 

Next thing I know I'm walking down a long street and spot the living embodiment of a Bolles girl. Not just any Bolles girl but that same cowgirl I've been in the hunt for so long.  The closer I get the more real she seems.  And then I'm inside and there are more Bolles girls, a chorus line of them...and in the middle of their dance I see it.

The painting. Only it's not a dream.  I'm awake, not hallucinating, and am surrounded by Bolles cowgirls.  And there's the painting, perched on an easel, not one of the several copies that have shown up over the past few years but the original.  The long lost Whoopee girl.

A few months ago, after a  four year search (full story here) she was pulled out of a crawlspace in an old house, amazingly none the worse for wear after lying buried for decades.  All those false trails, the impostor paintings, and finally she emerges into the light. The painting, used for a 1934 issue of Film Fun, is in near perfect condition.  A month after the issue hit the newsstands, Harmon Peery, the mayor of Odgen, Utah wrote a letter to Lester Grady, editor of Film Fun to ask if he could have the original painting to use as a mascot for a rodeo he had started.  Just a week later the painting shows up in the mail and her second career as the Whoopee Girl began.   This year marks the 75th anniversary of her serving as the official mascot to the Pioneer Days Rodeo, which is being held now.   

Mayor Peery's grandson, Robert Peery King and the Egyptian Theater Foundation graciously invited me to the official unveiling of the painting to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Whoopee Girl and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.  The event was fabulous, and painting simply amazing.  If you are interested, you will be able to purchase giclée prints of the original painting directly from Mr. King. I've seen a version done on canvas board and it looks as close to the real thing as you can get.  Some of the proceeds will be used to help build the Pioneer Days museum, which once completed with become the permanent home of Bolles' Whoopee girl painting.

So remember fellow Bolles fans, never stop searching. Sometimes dreams do come true.

Whoopee Girl, Lost again!

Today was a mixed day as far as my Bolles project goes. First the bad news. I got an email from my stalwart contact, Judy, who has been on the front line in the search for the Bolles Whoopee Girl painting from day one. If you've been keeping up with this occasional story, you may recall that after two years of frustration the original painting was recently returned to Ogden city officials, albeit under mysterious circumstances. Since then I've been asking (ever so politely) for a nice photo of it to include in my ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) Enoch Bolles book project. However, in today's email Judy indicated that the painting in possession of the city was not the original, or at least not the original by Enoch Bolles. Instead it was a painting based on the Bolles girl that had been done about 20 years ago. Its since become the standard Whoopee Girl image used for the Pioneer Days. As you can see, she's cute but no Bolles girl. Ironically though, she is a redhead (the favorite hair color for Bolles cover girls). So that's where this story stands. My hope continues to be that the afterword of this story will be a post of the original painting.

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On the upside, another email I received today included a photo attachment of an original Bolles painting from a 1925 issue of Film Fun. It will be sold at auction in a week or so and once I get the links to the web site, I'll post the photo for all to see and a link to the sale.

The Final Chapter: Lassoed!

The previous chapter in our tale of stray cowgirl ended with a thud, the painting had vanished just days before I had asked about it. After this anticlimax I periodically emailed Judy who had taken up the cause, and she made careful inquiries to the local authorities, but to no avail. Over the next two years nothing changed until three weeks ago when I received an email from Judy. I had assumed it would be news of the same but was thrilled to learn that the painting had turned up, left at the office door of an Odgen city councilman with an anonymous note that the painting should go back to its rightful owner.
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I had thought our Bolles girl was lost forever but she was back in the saddle. The locals were especially thrilled because this year marks the 75th anniversary of the Pioneer Days rodeo. The are planning a special exhibit for the Whoopee Girl and I hope to provide an entry on Enoch. By the way the Whoopee Girl label (misspelled Whoopie in the article) did not originate with the rodeo. They initially called her the Odgen girl and probably got the idea from the 1929 movie, Queen of the Nightclubs, starring the incomparable Texas Guinan. Follow the link and you'll see the trailer where she was described as the Whoopee Girl. If I can dig it up I'll update this post with a photo from a W.C. Fields movie showing a chorus girl wearing the prototype of the Whoopee Girl outfit.
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So there you go. This is just one example of the lengths it can take to hunt down an original Bolles. Right now I'm on the trail after not one but two additional originals, a Film Fun cover from 1925 and another from 1938. With some luck I'll soon post an epilogue to this story that will feature a photo of the actual Whoopee Girl painting. If it's anything like other Bolles originals you'll be amazed at all the additional detail and character gets left off the magazine cover.



Addendum: I found a couple photos of the original costume but then spotted another better shot from Greenbriar Picture Shows, a really scholarly but fun site with simply amazing photos. So I swiped it off the site. Take a look at the outfits, they are pretty much identical to the Bolles cover (yes, he did swipe from photos and I'll share more examples). I just noticed Baby Leroy is in this pic. My dad knew him (as an adult), though there were several. It was sort of like Menudo, once the kids got too old the studio replaced him with a fresh model.' But the most notable thing about this photo is that W.C. Fields is working with both animals and children.

Part III: Found!...and Lost Again!

The trail of the Whoopee girl had hit a dead end, until I contacted Judy Anderson, an expert on the history of the Pioneer Days who is writing a book entitled: A Grand Celebration! Ogden Pioneer Days and the Rodeo Queens and a past Miss Odgen Rodeo herself. Judy had an inkling the painting might still be around and made some calls to local government officials. A few days later she hit paydirt. She emailed me with the news that a city councilperson had informed her the painting was still in the possession of the mayor's office. It had been recently reframed and was displayed in an office in one of the local government buildings. I couldn't believe my luck, a small blurb in a 75 year old newspaper article had led me to one of Bolles' very best Film Fun paintings, or so I thought.


But no! As my lame depiction indicates, it was not to be. The painting had vanished! Worse, from what Judy was told it had been hanging in the office just days before she started checking into it. Curiously, there didn't seem much interest by city officials to try and locate the painting, until I informed them it was worth a lot of money. Some quiet inquiries were initiated but led nowhere, despite the concerted efforts of one of the city council members. I had gotten tantalizingly close to finding a Bolles original only to be thwarted. Over the next two years I would occasionally email Judy but there was no news about the painting, until three weeks ago.

Coming: Part IV: Lassoed!

Part II: False Leads and Dead Ends

A couple years ago I tried out a new search engine of scanned newspapers from all over the country that went back nearly 100 years. Of course I couldn't help myself so I punched in Enoch Bolles, and what comes up but the curious article to your right. In it we learned that the Mayor of Odgen, Utah wrote to Film Fun magazine expressing his admiration for the girl on the cover of the October 1934 issue, and was subsequently given the original cover painting! My heart started beating faster. Might this painting still exist? A few Google clicks later I learned that the Pioneer Days rodeo was still going strong, that our Bolles girl was adopted as the official mascot of their annual rodeo and renamed the Whoopie Girl. In fact a close copy of the original image was plastered all over anything even remotely related to the rodeo as these examples show. So that got my heart really pounding. There seemed a real chance that the painting was still around and what a huge prize it would be to get a photo of it for my Enoch Bolles book project (more about the book in another post). So I started making cold calls to various people in Odgen and a week or so later was on the phone with the grandson of the mayor who was given the painting. He said the painting was in storage and that he had made a poster of the image. A few days later I got a mailing tube and practically tore the thing apart getting it open. No dice. The painting was clearly based on the Bolles girl but it was not done by Bolles. Another phone call or two (or three) and the mayor's grandson recalled that they had hired an artist to do an updated rendition of the original painting, which he now thought could have been lost in a move years ago. My heart sank. I'd been thorugh this before, coming close to finding a long lost painting only to have the trail go cold or learn that it was missing or stolen. But a few days later I got a call from a woman who told me a curious story, that her mother, Lorene Donaldson was the original Whoopie Girl. Lorene posed for a photograph in a cowgirl outfit she made herself and at some later time the painting, which became the official image of the Whoopie Girl was done using the photo for inspiration. Lorene's daughter graciously shared photos of her mother and other archival material with me and as you can see, her mom,-all of 14 at the time-was a ringer for the Film Fun cover. This story was pretty much the official version of the Whoopie Girl story and it seemed that only I knew the Bolles image came first (actually Enoch swiped the outfit from one a girl wore in a W.C. Fields movie...I'll try and dig up that image), but that was until I got in contact with Judy Anderson, a local historian who was writing a book on rodeo mascots. And it was Judy who set me back on the trail of the painting.

Next-Part III: Lost and Found!

Part 1: The Trail Begins

Try finding a more charming Bolles painting than this, despite the fact that Bolles left a legacy of over 500 others! Imagine my feelings when I learned the original painting was given to a letter writer to Film Fun who merely expressed the fact that he really liked it (well, I think he said he wanted it too, as if that made the difference). A decade ago when I started my project on Bolles the Internet was a wild free-for-all, open for grabs. I was able to download national archives and access death notices and even social security files. My search for information on Enoch strung on for months but finally led me to a fateful phone call with his daughter, Theresa; a vibrant 88 years young and the last surviving of his seven children. Sadly, Theresa passed away two years ago but her support and friendship still sustains me in my quest to learn more about her father and publish a book on his art and life.

In the interim the Internet has grown into a very different entity. Two years ago I learned about a historical database on national newspapers and naturally, I did a search on Enoch Bolles. What I found knocked the socks off me and started me down a trail that has not quite ended.

Coming-Part 2: False Leads and Dead Ends