Of All the Blogs in the World, You had to Walk into Mine

Did you ever have a dream and wake up thinking, "That's a great idea for a blog title!"  No? Maybe it's just me.  But that's how I came up with today's blog title.

I dreamt long-time reader and longer-time friend FrankO had sent me some items he had found and within lay some mystery to solve. All I can remember about the items were they were a gathering of paper; photos, newspaper clippings, etc.  And FrankO wanted me to research and solve something about them.  And so, I wrote a blog about solving the mystery of them and titled the blog as I've done here.  

As I said, I then woke up and thought, "Hey! That's a great idea for a blog title!"  Unfortunately, I didn't have a mystery garage sale find to go with it.  But as I lay there unable to fall back asleep because now my brain was in overdrive, I realized, I kind of DO have a garage sale mystery I recently found.

But first, let's talk about that title.  What does it have to do with mysteries?  At first I thought, well of course, it's a Humphrey Bogart line. I could hear him saying it.  Then I realized, it's a line from "Casablanca" where he is decidedly not a detective.  The actual quote is "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."  But I swear I can visualize a femme fatale walking into a stereotypical detective's office (feet kicked up on the desk) and him uttering a line similar to this.

So where was the detective connection to Humphrey Bogart? Ah yes, "The Maltese Falcon" in which he plays "Sam Spade".  But how did this quote get intertwined with Bogart's portrayal of Dashiell Hammett's private dick? I can only guess that some parody I've seen over the years employed it. Carol Burnett? I know Steve Lawrence played a "Sam Spade" character in "Double Calamity" on her show, but I couldn't find any scene that fit my memory.  Oh well, some mysteries aren't meant to be solved, only accepted.  Now you can see why I have trouble falling back asleep.

Anyway, back to my mystery.

I found this portrait in a box of photographs at a recent sale.

It wasn't the portrait itself that caught my eye, but the notation at the bottom.

Not to mention the cover of the portrait folder.

I knew THE Vincent Price was from St. Louis, but I'd never heard of any connection to a photo studio.  Was this some side business he had? Something his family owned and he lent his name to it as a promotion?  A relative?

Googling provided nothing.  No mention on Vincent's Wikipedia page.  I found a Reddit page where a commenter attributed the studios to the actor. I know: "solid evidence".  I also found this Flickr post where the author asks the same question.  A commenter again referenced the actor's family as being the owner of the business.  And again, not exactly reliable information.

So I posted the portrait to a St. Louis History Facebook page and asked the question.  There was much arguing, sorry,  "discussion" around the subject with camps on both sides.  Many just fondly remembered getting their high school portraits taken there in the 1950s through the '70s.  One person commented that they knew the studio portrait family, and they weren't any relation to the actor.

Ultimately, I eventually found this article on Newspapers.com:

I know, a little hard to read.  But here's the key part:

The actor's middle name was "Leonard".  He was a junior and his father's name was also "Vincent Leonard Price".  So it wasn't the actor or his father.  His father actually was a wealthy man who made his fortune in the candy business.  What could have been a fun piece of trivia once again falls to reality.

Thus my mystery is solved.  Here's looking at you, Bogey.