The McCord Theatre Museum on the SMU campus closed some 20 years back; says here that since then, the thousands of odds and sods collected by its curator, Edyth Renshaw, have been in cold storage. Five years ago, though, theater student Emily Grubbs decided to sift through the stuff -- and the result is an exhibit that opened Friday at the Mildred Hawn Gallery in SMU's Owen Arts Center: Hidden Treasures of the Mary McCord/Edyth Renshaw Collection on the Performing Arts.
Mary McCord, incidentally, was the university's first speech professor -- also, the first to direct student-starring productions on campus, says the university, beginning with As You Like It in 1916, which led to the formation of the theater group known as The Arden Club, run by McCord and then Renshaw. Among its members, over the years, were teevee-show creator Aaron Spelling and John Tower, well before he was a U.S. senator.
Photos of both men as Lil' Mustangs can be seen in a slide show SMU's made available that dates back to that 1916 production and includes shots of the Cycle Park Theatre at Fair Park (home to vaudeville productions) and other theater- and film-related odds and ends.