Audio video plus schulenburg tx1/7/2023 One bigwig was so impressed that he sent a telegram to Warner Bros. While performing at a Lions Club banquet in Schulenburg, she caught the attention of a clutch of Texas dignitaries including Beauford Jester, then the Texas Railroad commissioner - soon to be the state’s governor. Soon, Lora Lee was lighting up the stage in local pageants. Lorraine taught the girl how to recite nursery rhymes, she said, and Lora Lee did so with a “sparkling charm.” Lora Lee was a bright and charismatic child, with warm brown eyes and a smile that could light up a room. But with Otto and Lorraine, Lora Lee found herself catapulted into a world where childhood make-believe came to equal money. The home Barbara found herself in was perfectly ordinary and strict. They eventually adopted Barbara and sent Penny to a friend, who adopted her. Otto’s brother Henry Michel and his wife, Lillie, who lived in San Antonio, took in Lora Lee’s younger sisters, Barbara Ann and Penny. We loved her too,” Otto Michel was quoted in one press account. We took her in and gave her a home, and she loved us like she was our own child. “We were lonesome, and when I saw Lora in the store that day I fell in love with her,” she told the New York Daily News in 1950. The childless Michels had raised a great-nephew from the time he was 6, but he was serving with the U.S. The two struck up a conversation and she learned of the family’s difficulties. The account that Lora Lee’s adoptive mother, Lorraine Michel, gave to the press was that she first noticed Lora Lee in a Schulenburg store. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life. ![]() Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Though much of Lora Lee’s early years were well documented, once she left Hollywood there were major gaps in her life story. Then maybe I can find myself resting in peace about her.” “I would very much like to know if she’s gone. “I would like to not worry about where is or what happened to her or why she never tried to find me,” she said. In recent years, Wright Isaacs, 78, simply wanted closure Lora Lee would be 81. The publicity photo signed, “Greetings from Hollywood to Barbara from Lora Lee,” sits in a frame. She still had the baby doll her sister gave her in 1950. Wright Isaacs’ memories of her sister were bittersweet and fragmented. ![]() “I think everybody in her life just wanted to get whatever they could out of her,” Wallace said. What they did know of Lora Lee was by turns anguished and dramatic.
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