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Rev Bill Shook
Rev. Bill Shook has been with Prairie Homestead Retirement Center for 27 years. 26 of those years he has acted as the Administrator. He retired in March 2006 but is still involved with the organization in a consultant role. Over the 27 years of service he developed the retirement community into a continuing care facility. As a continuing care facility retirees can come in at any level of independence and live out their lives on the campus. Rev. Shook holds many degrees, has served in numerous advisory positions and is licensed as a Nursing Home Administrator. He helped start and acted as the Administrator of Homestead Health Center nursing facility for a number of years along with being the Administrator of Prairie Homestead. Rev. Shook can be reached at the Prairie Homestead office, 316-263-8264 or by email at abei@websurf.net
Senior Living
2007-08-01 11:27:00
Remembering Danny Kaye
Answer: Great idea. For many of us, the time when we were kids and growing up hold some of our fondest memories. Sometimes, just a reminder of dates and things that happened on these dates can be a wonderful stimulus for memories. Do you remember a man named David Daniel Kaminski? Okay, how about the name he was better known as, Danny Kaye? This month, let’s remember him. David Daniel Kaminski, also known as Danny Kaye, was born January 18, 1913. He was a garment center tailor’s son. He dropped out of school at age 13 to become a clowning busboy in the “Borscht Circuit” in New York’s Catskill Mountains. He later worked intermittently as a soda jerk and insurance agent while slowly getting ahead in vaudeville and nightclubs as a singer-dancer-entertainer. During the 30’s, he appeared in several two-reel film shorts for educational pictures. He made his Broadway debut in “The Straw Hat Revue,” with Imogene Coca In 1939. Early in 1941, appearing in Broadway’s “Lady in the Dark,” he stopped the show nightly with a song called “Tchaikovsky” in which he reeled off the names of 54 Russian composers, real and imagined, in 38 seconds. This type of staccato delivery of tongue-twisting lyrics would be his trademark in many subsequent stage, film, and TV appearances. In 1943, he was signed by producer Samuel Goldwyn. The following year, he starred in “Up in Arms,” the first of a highly successful string of lavish technicolor Goldwyn comedies that were tailor-made as showcases for the display of Kaye’s versatile talents. Easygoing and personable, Kaye enjoyed enormous popularity in the late 40’s, thanks to his sunny personality, broad pantomime, clever impersonations and vocal virtuosity. He combined these talents most admirably in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1947), a film that gave him the opportunity to caricature several different personalities. Kaye’s popularity was even greater in Britain, where he enjoyed huge success with record-breaking engagements at the Palladium in 1948 and 1949 and made personal appearances at the royal palace. In the late 50’s, however, his popularity on either side of the Atlantic decreased when he began devoting more and more of his time entertaining children in developing countries on behalf of UNICEF. In 1954 he was awarded a special Oscar for his unique talents, his service to the Academy, the motion picture industry, and the American people. During the Oscar ceremonies of 1981 he was the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Kaye made only sporadic film appearances after 1960. From 1963 to 1967 he starred in his own hour-long TV variety program, “The Danny Kaye Show,” for which he won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award. In 1970 he returned to Broadway in the musical “Two by Two.” A talented musician, he appeared from time to time as a mock guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic and other symphony orchestras. He was a co-owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball club. Many of his songs and much of his comedy material was written by his wife since 1940, Sylvia Fine. Danny Kaye died in 1987 at the age of 74 of hepatitis and internal bleeding, the consequence of a transfusion of contaminated blood during quadruple bypass heart surgery in 1983.
 
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