The Czopur Archive

It all started when...

In the summer of 2014, Linda and Ed Czopur brought me several binders full of photographs that Linda had inherited from her aunt, Rosemarie de Salle. The binders had been sitting in Linda's basement for about 14 years. Rosemarie de Salle had lived with Eva Sully in New York City after Eva's husband, Jesse Block, died in 1983. This was all news to me, and I had never heard of Block and Sully nor their career in vaudeville. But as I looked through the albums, I was astonished by the highlights of their career, and of the company they kept.

This was their "family" album, public and personal.

The photographs, several warmly inscribed to Block and Sully, were a compendium of mostly entertainers, many of whom I knew from my memories of being entertained by early radio, movies, and television. I found George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, and Jerry Lewis to name only a few. Here was Block and Sully's bread and butter, vaudeville: Fanny Brice, Benny Fields, Ted Lewis, and Sophie Tucker. Other political photographs included Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt with J.F.K., J.F.K with Lyndon Johnson, J.Edgar Hoover, and generals George M. Marshal, Omar Bradley, and Mark Clark, along with the toymaker Louis Marx. Mixed with the jumble of photographs were notes from President Ronald Reagan and New York City mayor Ed Koch to Eva about Jesse's passing in 1983.  

So I was hooked. Not only did I want to conserve, organize, and protect these photographs physically, but I also wanted to learn more about the history of this couple in order to share and preserve their contribution to early entertainment history.

While not part of our collective memory of famous early entertainers, Block and Sully were well-known in their time. They were a  significant part of the lives of many entertainers who went beyond vaudeville and became household names. Eddie Cantor perhaps expressed it best in one of the inscribed photographs in the archive when he wrote, "To Jesse and Eva, may they always remain so sweet and understanding. Affectionately, Eddie 4/15/35."

As a result, in realizing our goal of sharing this photographic collection, we have exhibited work from the Czopur Archive at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, and at the Weyers-Sampson Gallery at Thiel College in Greenville, PA. 

We are interested in exhibiting selections from the archive and/or giving presentations of the history of early entertainment, as personified by Block and Sully.

For any inquires, comments or contributions to the site, please contact me at the e-mail link below.

Richard C. Mitchell

Curator, The Czopur Archive