In my spare time, and when the thought occurs to me, I enjoy browsing the Digital Video Repository of the Moving Image Research Collections (or MIRC) at the University of South Carolina, a vast online archive of historical film footage, much of which consists of newsreels footage.  Often, I’ll just enter some different search terms and see if I can find anything interesting.  It was on one such online excursion that I stumbled across a newsreel (or rather outtakes thereof) depicting the arrival of the famed humorist, movie star, and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers in San Antonio, Texas, that caught my attention.  I am (as any red-blooded American surely must be) counted among Will Rogers’s legion of admirers, but his presence was not what attracted my interest to the video.  Rather, it was the appearance of a background character that struck me as a familiar face.

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