LANNY ROSS

Lanny Ross was born Lancelot Patrick Ross, and he was both a champion track athlete and a talented glee club singer at Yale University. He was studying law at Yale, and was slated to run at the Olympics, but he withdrew from the 1928 Olympics so that he could sing full time, and he never did practice law, and instead, he became a major radio singer in 1928, and in 1931, he started singing on the Maxwell House Show Boat radio program, and by 1934, he was voted the second best singer of popular songs in the entire U.S. (second only to Bing Crosby!). Naturally, that led him to movies, and this movie was his first, with a plot that only served to allow him to sing many songs. But while he made a few more movies, his first love was radio, and he stuck with that. He enlisted in the Army in World War II, becoming a major. He passed away in 1988 at the age of 82.