LaVerne Ligon discusses auditioning for the show Hallelujah Hollywood at the new MGM. She auditioned for Bob Mackie and Donn Arden, who wanted her to be topless in the show. She refused. Three weeks later, Donn Arden called her and said that she had changed his mind and he really wanted her in the show and she didn't have to go topless. In fact the entire line of Black dancers that he was putting together for the show did not have to go topless.
Civil rights leader James B. McMillan was born in 1917 in Aberdeen, Mississippi and moved to Michigan in 1931 with his family. He finished his high school education in Hamtramck, Michigan where he was the first African-American captain of the football and track teams. In 1936, he opted to enroll at the University of Detroit rather than the segregated University of Michigan. After graduation, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee to attend Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry.
Las Vegas, Nevada producer, manager, and agent Matthias Gregory Gluchowski (a.k.a. Matt Gregory) was born November 21, 1921 in Araucaria, Parana, Brazil. He was the son of an aristocratic Polish diplomat serving as Ambassador to Brazil. Matthias was raised in southern Poland on a large estate that bordered Czechoslovakia. He was educated at the Marian Fathers Lyceum in Warsaw, Poland, and later came to New York during his father's tenure as diplomat to the United States.
Roger Drummond Foley (1917-1996) was Nevada’s 23rd Attorney General and was nominated to the federal United States District Court, District of Nevada by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. A few of Foley’s famous cases during his tenure included the radiation exposure of the “Baneberry” Nuclear Test and the protection of the Ash Meadows Desert Pupfish in United States v. Francis Leo Cappaert.
Richard “Dick” J. Ronzone (1917-1989) was active in the local politics and civic affairs of Las Vegas, Nevada, serving as a Clark County Commissioner, a Nevada State Assemblyman, and a member of the University Board of Regents. He inherited and managed his family's retail store which dated back to the early 1900s. Ronzone also helped develop the Municipal Golf Course and was active in the Elks Lodge, Rotary Club, Veterans Of Foreign Wars, Reserve Officers Association, and the Boulder Dam Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America.