User:LyndaHester

Over the past six years, discoveries of family films from as early as the 1920's coupled with photo albums and postcard albums long thought to have been lost have provided a rare glimpse into the lives of a motion picture entrepreneur who made his mark in the world in a time before there were vehicles like Wikipedia to record his accomplishments. Newspapers.com and hours and hours of research have opened windows into the charmed life of America's first model who was wildly famous, yet now is almost completely forgotten.

As the self-appointed chronicler of their lives and to help their accomplishments last long after no one else remembers, my goal is to record the facts of their lives on Wikipedia so that others may find them and learn from their trials, travails, and joys.

Dorothy James Smart was the most famous girl in the world in the early to mid-1920s. As the first true American 'model', she was lauded as "the most photographed girl in the world". Yet in January 2020, one hundred years after she was earning through her contracts with five major American publications like Vogue, Sears & Roebuck, etc. approximately ten times what the normal American male made each year, almost no one knows her name or what she accomplished.

Ernest Paris Clay was born on a farm in southern Illinois, the oldest son of William S and Ethel Walker Clay. Ernest's early fascination with photography led him off the farm and into his own photography studio in Sullivan, Illinois when he was only 18. When he was 25, although too old for the draft, he voluntarily joined the brand new 'Army Air Corps' and used his skills as a photographer to document the war efforts. His stories of photographing from a balloon were fascinating. After the end of the war, Ernest became even more of an entrepreneur when he purchased a large tent and a motion picture projector. With the tent, a copy of 'Birth of A Nation', numerous road workers and his family to help set up the show, cook for the workers and sell tickets, Clay's Traveling Comedy Show took off across the Southern states and was the venue where many rural Southerners first glimpsed a motion picture.

Both of these folks deserve to be remembered and researchers should be able to learn about their accomplishments by looking for them on Wikipedia.

LyndaHester (talk) 22:17, 26 January 2020 (UTC)