Providence College

Rhode Island

A fifteen-year-old Judy Garland sold her own autographs on a Providence sidewalk to help pay for a college dormitory.

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On the eighteenth of February, nineteen thirty-eight, a fifteen-year-old MGM film star stood outside Loew's State Theater in Providence and sold her autograph for five to ten dollars a copy. Her name was Judy Garland. She carried the money she raised to a bridge and fashion show and handed it over to Father Dillon, who was collecting for a dormitory at Providence College. The building went up the following year. It was called Aquinas Hall, and it was meant to hold the students crowding into the college's general studies program. The college had opened in nineteen seventeen with a single building, seventy-one students, and nine Dominican faculty members, all of them men, on a corner where Eaton Street meets River Avenue. Garland's autographs are one of the gifts the school still names when it talks about how the campus grew.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
One of the most notable gifts came from a young MGM film star, Judy Garland, who at just fifteen years old, sold autographs in front of the Loew's State Theater for $5-$10 per copy on February 18, 1938.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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