Creative History

  On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor. He rises out of his bed to investigate but instantly becomes nauseous and weak in the knees.  He drops to the floor of his bedroom and starts to retch and vomit.  His wife, fearing that she may have accidentally left the stove on after cooking dinner only a few hours before, attempts to get up out of bed to go to the kitchen, but she finds that she is paralyzed from the neck down and unable to get up out of the bed at all.  While her husband vomits on the floor Mrs. Reef feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on her chest and she is forced to lay there inert and completely immobile. Only a few hours later in the early morning of September 1, 1944, and only a few blocks away from where Mr. and Mrs Reef suffered their...

  It is a movie that is aptly titled Roundhay Garden Scene because that is exactly what it is.  That is exactly ALL that it is--simply a movie of people walking in a garden that lasts for a whopping three seconds.  But what makes this mundane few seconds of grainy black and white footage of an English garden so remarkable is that Roundhay Garden Scene is believed to be the very first motion picture--the very first recorded moving images of human beings ever captured on film--in the history of the world. Roundhay Garden Scene was produced, filmed and directed by French born inventor and artist Louis Le Prince nearly one-hundred and forty years ago, at the height of the Victorian Era, on October 14, 1888 in Leeds, Yorkshire England at about the exact same time in history that the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the slums and working class neighborhoods of London. This three second film of formally dressed Victorian Era folk frolicking in an arist...

  Sometime in the 1780’s, just after America had won its hard fought independence from Great Britain, a young Irishman returned home after several years abroad fighting with George Washington’s Continental Army. He had gone to the rebellious colonies several years before as little more than a boy, seeking to escape grinding poverty and an overbearing and mentally unstable mother back home in County Roscommon, Ireland.  While in America he had fought bravely; saved all of his money and grown into a man. Elizabeth Sugrue, the returning soldier’s estranged mother, was destitute and desperate.  Her husband, a hard-scrabble, abusive alcoholic and subsistence farmer had died unexpectedly several years before; her son had left home as a runaway for parts unknown and she had taken to drinking, petty theft and prostitution to survive.  She ran a boarding house in Roscommon city, which as all local residents knew, was in actuality little more than a thinly disguised brothel....