Kathryn Beals papers

Kathryn Beals was born on August 1907 and raised in San Francisco, California. Between 1927 and 1928 she spent 15 months touring the United States with the Peters-Wright vaudeville dance troupe The Wright Dancers. During this time she exchanged letters and photos with her mother, father, uncle, and sister, Carol. When she was not performing or rehearsing she visited tourist sites like the Niagara Falls, Coney Island, and Washington, D.C. In the collection there are photos of these trips. The collection includes some of the theater programs on which she appears for presentations in Boston, New York, and Houston. She also attended plays, musicals, movies. She attended the opening of musicals like Funny Face with Fred and Adele Astaire to which we have the theater program. The letters were kept by her mother and later entrusted to her sister. Don Langley later wrote the book Vaudeville Days with these letters.

During her vaudeville days she suffered a knee injury that would affect her for the rest of her life. In 1929 she married Rolland Langley. Ten months later she gave birth to the first of her three children. Years later they divorced. In 1943 she contracted an illness similar to polio and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. On October 27, 1976 she passed away.