Stanley Woolf scrapbooks

1912-1950

Stanley Woolf was born in New York City and moved to Milwaukee as an older child. He returned to New York as an adolescent and became an avid theatre-goer. By the mid-1920s he was performing with the Keith-Albee Vaudeville circuit with his own comedy and dance act called "The Vest Pocket Revue," and later in an act titled "Clowning's Quite Clever." In 1932 he began working as an indedendent booking agent for the vaudeville circuit and later with the Columbia Entertainment Bureau. In 1933, Woolf was arrested and then paroled on federal charges of passing counterfeit money. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1942 and worked as an actor-director during his service. He also directed the Orpheum Players of the Orpheum Theatre in Reading, Penn., in the early 1940s. After World War II, Woolf directed the Civic Drama Guild, which toured plays and musicals, and later established the Stanley Woolf Players and the Stanley Woolf Circuit, which took theatrical performances to summer resorts in the Eastern United States. Woolf, named "the Belasco of the Borscht Belt," died in 1959. The two earliest scrapbooks document theatrical performances Woolf attended in New York City between 1912 and 1919. The three later scrapbooks document his performances as a vaudevillian, his service in the Army, and his work as an producer-director in the 1940s The scrapbooks contain primarily clippings, with some ticket stubs, programs, and promotional materials; there are three photographs in Volume 3.