Photo exhibit captures vaudeville era

A photo exhibit coming to the Butler museum captures a forgotten slice of Americana – the vaudeville act – on a personal level.

“The Vaudeville Team of Jesse Block and Eva Sully: A Family Photographic Album” opens Wednesday at the Butler Institute of American Art, and runs through Dec. 27.

It includes 147 photos from the collection of husband-wife vaudeville team Block (1901-1983) and Sully (1901-1990). The exhibit documents the career of the duo, which ran from 1926 to 1948. It also includes inscribed photos from their friends in the entertainment industry, including George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bert Wheeler, Eddie Cantor, Benny Goodman, Fanny Brice, James Cagney, Phil Harris and Alice Faye, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Jerry Lewis, Maurice Chevalier, Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Durante and Frank Sinatra.

How the photos made their way to the Butler is a story in itself.

The photo albums, kept by Sully, were brought to Youngstown by Rosemarie de Salle, a Youngstown native who moved to New York in 1936, where she worked for talent agency Music Corporation of America. De Salle shared an apartment with Sully after Block died. She inherited the photos when Sully passed away.

De Salle’s niece, Linda Czopur of Canfield, eventually inherited the photos.

Richard C. Mitchell, a retired professor at Youngstown State University who led the school’s art department and founded its photography program, is the curator of the Butler exhibit. He learned of the photos because his daughter, Lindsay, is married to the Czopurs’ son, Eddie.

Mitchell described the exhibit as a unique and personal collection that documents entertainment history. But it also includes photos of national leaders, including Gen. Mark Clark thanking Block and Sully for entertaining his troops in Austria in 1946; Eleanor Roosevelt and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy; and an interesting one of J. Edgar Hoover with Jesse Block and an unidentified man pointing guns at the photographer.

Mitchell hopes viewers find the exhibit a pleasant surprise. “While they may never have heard of Block and Sully, the more-seasoned viewers will recognize old friends that entertained them as they grew up, and younger viewers will be challenged to appreciate history before their time,” he said.

Mitchell will give talks on the exhibit at 2 p.m. Oct. 25 in the museum’s Mesaros Galleries, and at 2 p.m. Nov. 8 in the Beecher Center Auditorium.