User:Teblick/Discovery

Among the pleasures of working on articles for Wikipedia is what I think of as the "joy of discovery".

Admittedly, research can sometimes be dull and tedious; at other times, however research leads to discoveries that not only are interesting but also lead to improvements in articles. One item in a source can spark a whole new avenue of discovery. A single afternoon's research demonstrates my point.

On the afternoon of September 22, 2018, I began doing research for material to add to the article about actress Joan Shawlee. As often happens, Newspapers.com (via a subscription provided by The Wikipedia Library), provided useful nuggets of information. A story in the Boston Globe mentioned a second marriage, which I added to the Shawlee article. But there was more -- a mention of Shawlee's having become "a Powers model and a showgirl under the name of Joyce Ring." Now I had another professional name to add to the article and another dimension of her professional career. A visit to the Internet Broadway Database disclosed two Broadway shows in which Joyce Ring had performed, and I added them to article.

Another sentence in the Boston Globe story provided another fact to pursue: "Now Joan has decided to team up with Mitzi Mcall for a night club act ..." The Shawlee-McCall team became my next avenue of research, with another newspaper story telling me where the act debuted and a column by Dorothy Kilgallen reporting that the team was causing "quite a stir".

Those nuggets enhanced the Shawlee article, but I wasn't through. The Shawlee-McCall team raised a question: Who was (or is) Mitzi McCall? A quick search brought up Wikipedia's Mitzi McCall article. Wondering what might be available about her beyond the article's then-current content, I headed to Newspapers.com again.

Soon a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revealed that prior to McCall's teaming with Charlie Brill, which was the main thrust of the McCall article, she had a children's show on television station WDTV in Pittsburgh, using the name Mitzi Steiner; it also gave the name of her husband at that time. Thus, I added those facts to the article.

Searching for "Mitzi Steiner" on Newspapers.com led to information about her acting on stage in Pittsburgh and her work on a television program in San Diego. The most coverage, however, came from a story distributed by the Associated Press when a five-year-old girl in Pittsburgh who was born with a cleft palate spoke for the first time in response to watching Steiner's TV program. That constituted more material to enhance the McCall article.

Not all research sessions are so productive, but the joy of discovering nuggets of knowledge more than compensates for less fruitful times.