Gale Storm

 Gale Storm, born Josephine Owaissa Cottle (April 5, 1922 – June 27, 2009)

Storm was an actress and singer who starred in two popular television programs of the 1950s, My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show. When she was seventeen years old, two of her teachers urged her to enter a contest on Gateway to Hollywood, broadcast from the CBS Radio studios in Hollywood, California. First prize was a one-year contract with a movie studio. She won and was immediately given the stage name Gale Storm. Her performing partner (and future husband), Lee Bonnell from South Bend, Indiana, became known as Terry Belmont. After winning the contest in 1940, Storm made several films for the studio, RKO Radio Pictures. Her first was Tom Brown's School Days, playing opposite Jimmy Lydon and Freddie Bartholomew. She worked steadily in low-budget films released during this period. In 1941, she sang in several Soundies, three-minute musicals produced for "movie jukeboxes". Storm proceeded to star in a number of films, including the romantic comedies G.I. Honeymoon (1945) and It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947), the western Stampede and the 1950 film-noir dramas The Underworld Story and Between Midnight and Dawn. She became a television icon of the 1950s, starring in two highly successful series. It was also in this decade that her singing career took shape. She appeared on such variety programs as The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom.

From 1952 to 1955, she starred in My Little Margie, with former silent film actor Charles Farrell as her father. in the 1960's, she began to launch her own Las Vegas nightclub and pop recording careers. Always looking much younger than she was, she produced a number of Billboard chart makers including "I Hear You Knocking" (her first hit), "Memories Are Made of This", "Ivory Tower" and her own cover of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love". Her most successful song of the decade was "Dark Moon", which peaked at #4. Storm made occasional television appearances in later years, such as Love Boat, Burke's Law, and Murder, She Wrote. Storm lived alone in Monarch Beach, California, near two of her sons and their families, until failing health forced her into a convalescent home in Danville, California. She died there on June 27, 2009, aged 87.