Appalachian Figures
Most people who grew up with the Blondie movies or the Blondie radio show remember the sound first. A crash, a yelp, and then Dagwood Bumstead tumbling into the mailman again, arms and legs everywhere. For mid twentieth century audiences he was the most famous flustered husband in America, sprinting for the streetcar with his towering sandwich, forever late for work and forever forgiven at home.
The man underneath the cowlick was Arthur Lake. Before Hollywood publicists smoothed his story into a generic studio biography, he was Arthur William Silverlake, born in 1905 in Corbin, Kentucky, a rail town on the Cumberland Plateau that straddles Whitley, Knox, and Laurel counties in the Appalachian borderlands.
His life began at a crossroads in more than one sense. Corbin was already developing into a junction where the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and the coal trade met the rising automobile traffic of U.S. 25, a place where traveling shows and tent circuses could easily roll in on the rails. When the aerial troupe known as the Flying Silverlakes came through, they left with a son who would carry their Kentucky birthplace into the bright lights of Hollywood.
Circus birth in a railroad town
Genealogical and archival records agree on the basics. Arthur William Silverlake Jr. was born on 17 April 1905 in Corbin, Whitley County, Kentucky, to Arthur Adolph Silverlake and Edith Blanche Foutch Goodwin. His father and uncle were acrobats who had remade themselves from the surname Timberlake into the flashier Silverlake to headline a circus aerial act called the Flying Silverlakes. His mother was an actress who would soon pivot with her husband into a vaudeville sketch simply called “Family Affair.”
According to later biographical summaries that draw on census returns and early Hollywood trade coverage, Arthur first appeared on stage not as a trained child actor but as a prop. The baby Silverlake was carried on in productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the sort of road show that crisscrossed the South and lower Midwest in the years before the First World War. By about 1910 he and his older sister Florence had become part of the family act, traveling through the South and Southwest to keep audiences laughing from town to town.
This mix of circus grit and itinerant theater is important for how we think about him as an Appalachian figure. His birth in Corbin was not an isolated detail in an otherwise California story. It was the product of the same rail corridors, coal money, and traveling amusements that bound southeastern Kentucky into a wider regional culture. When the Silverlakes moved on, the boy they carried out of Whitley County was already learning how to live out of a suitcase and make a crowd respond.
From tent show to silent film
Sometime in the 1910s, Arthur’s mother took him and Florence west to try their luck in the movies. By 1917 he had his first credited screen appearance in a feature length version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Universal Pictures signed him to a contract, and through the late silent era he became a familiar juvenile presence in shorts and features, often cycling through Westerns and light comedies.
He was, in other words, a working Hollywood actor long before he ever bumbled into Dagwood. In the late twenties he moved into bigger studio work. He played Harold Astor in the early all talking musical On with the Show, remembered by film historians as Warner Bros.’ first full length feature using both synchronized dialogue and the two color Technicolor process. He turned up beside Gloria Swanson in Indiscreet and had a prominent bit as a bellhop in the supernatural comedy Topper, where filmgoers of 1937 would have recognized his rubbery, anxious energy.
More than a decade before Blondie, Lake had already embodied one comic strip hero on screen. In 1928 he starred in Harold Teen, a silent feature adaptation of Carl Ed’s popular newspaper strip about a lovestruck high school boy. The film survives in archives at the Library of Congress and UCLA, and its cast lists and trade coverage preserve his screen credit at the time.
Contemporary radio and film trade items confirm that the man who would become Dagwood entered films under his birth name. A Radio Vision trade “weekly guide” from June 1947, looking back on his career, notes that the actor who played Dagwood on radio and screen had “broken into pictures under his real name, Arthur Silverlake.” That small line ties the Hollywood professional cleanly back to the Corbin born baby in the circus troupe.
Blondie goes from strip to screen
Chic Young’s Blondie comic strip debuted in 1930 and gradually evolved from a flapper comedy into a domestic farce about a working class couple fighting their way through small mishaps and big bills. By the late thirties Columbia Pictures saw an opportunity to turn that popularity into a series of modestly budgeted features. Film historian Carol Lynn Scherling’s study Blonde Goes to Hollywood traces how the studio, writer teams, and casting choices shaped what became a long running franchise that moved between film, radio, and later television.
Lake’s path into the role of Dagwood Bumstead was not just a matter of anonymous casting. The Los Angeles Times “Hollywood Star Walk” biography, rooted in the reporting of Jack Jones and other entertainment writers, recounts how Lake became a favorite guest at the parties of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and his partner Marion Davies. At San Simeon and the Davies beach house, he played the clown willingly, making himself useful as a kind of resident comic in a world of powerful hosts. When Columbia set out to cast Dagwood, Davies championed him for the part, and Hearst in turn leaned on the studio to take a chance on the lively young comedian.
The gamble paid off. Beginning with Blondie in 1938, Lake and co star Penny Singleton as Blondie fronted a cycle of twenty eight features produced by Columbia between 1938 and 1950, with Larry Simms as their son Baby Dumpling, later Alexander. At the same time, they headlined the Blondie radio series, which premiered in 1939 and ran until 1950. John Dunning’s reference work On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio identifies Lake and Singleton as the anchors of the program and notes how it walked a line between slapstick and the homelier comforts of the family situation comedy that would soon dominate American broadcasting.
Far from resenting typecasting, Lake seems to have leaned into Dagwood. Biographical sketches based on interviews and later recollections describe how he happily made Rotary club appearances, posed beside oversized “Dagwood sandwiches,” and even reprised the role in a short lived Blondie television series in 1957. What began as one more comic strip adaptation became the defining work of his life, a set of rhythms and tics that audiences associated with him as a person.
For Appalachian audiences, there was another level of connection. The harried office worker scrambling for streetcars and the modest home full of small crises looked very much like the lives of families in coal and railroad towns that had radios in the front room and local theaters downtown. The fact that the actor had been born in a town like theirs, even if he left as an infant, only deepened the sense that Hollywood was not as distant as it seemed.
Corbin claims a Hollywood son
Because the Silverlakes left Kentucky early and publicity departments often flattened biographical details, there has been occasional confusion among casual sources about Arthur Lake’s origins. Corbin’s own historians and genealogists, however, have been steady in their claim that Dagwood’s first portrayer was a local boy.
When Lake died in 1987, the major obituaries lined up on Corbin, Kentucky as his birthplace. Jack Jones’s Los Angeles Times obituary introduced him as an actor who portrayed Dagwood in more than two dozen Blondie films and went on to state that he had been born in Corbin and died of a heart attack at his home in Indian Wells, California. The New York Times notice, published the next day, likewise described him as a veteran of the Blondie series and gave his birth date as 17 April 1905, born Arthur Silverlake in Corbin, Kentucky.
The Washington Post’s “Deaths Elsewhere” column, a shorter news item, called him “Arthur Silverlake” originally and placed his birth in Corbin while summarizing his circus and vaudeville beginnings. United Press International also circulated a wire story that weekend describing him as “Arthur Silverlake” born in Corbin, Kentucky, who grew up in a circus family before making his way to Hollywood. These are near primary sources, written while memories were fresh and often drawing on studio files and family statements.
Genealogical compilers and family history platforms, working from federal census returns, World War II draft registration cards, and Social Security indexes, reinforce the picture. FamilySearch’s profile for Arthur Lake gives his birth as 17 April 1905 in Corbin, Whitley County, Kentucky, noting his parents Arthur Adolph Silverlake and Edith Blanche Foutch. Geneastar and related trees repeat the same Corbin birthplace, emphasizing that he was born while his father and uncle were on tour with the Flying Silverlakes aerial act. The Find A Grave memorial for “Arthur William Silverlake” lists his birth as Corbin, Whitley County, Kentucky, on that same date and shows his interment in the Douras mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Local remembrance ties those strands back into place. The City of Corbin’s own reference materials and derivative encyclopedias list Arthur Lake among the town’s notable people, right alongside Colonel Harland Sanders and other native sons and daughters. Kentucky historian Sam Terry has marked the anniversary of his first screen appearance as Dagwood with posts that describe him explicitly as a “Corbin, Kentucky native” whose screen name was shortened from Arthur Silverlake.
Taken together, the obituaries written by journalists, the government records summarized by genealogists, and the hometown pride of Corbin’s historians give us a strong foundation. Whatever stage name he eventually used and wherever his later life took him, the actor behind Dagwood Bumstead first saw the world in an Appalachian rail town in the spring of 1905.
San Simeon, the desert, and Hollywood Forever
If his beginnings were rooted in Appalachia, his later life was tied to two other iconic California spaces. The first was San Simeon. In the late thirties, while working steadily in film, Lake became a regular visitor to the circle around newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies. There he met Patricia Van Cleve, Davies’s niece, and the two were married in 1937 at Hearst’s castle overlooking the Pacific.
Rumors have long circulated that Patricia was in fact the daughter of Hearst and Davies and that the marriage provided a respectable framework for financial arrangements that would have been awkward otherwise. Biographer Eve Golden and others have treated that possibility cautiously, pointing out that Lake ultimately inherited a significant part of Davies’s estate and that Patricia herself acknowledged a different parentage late in life. Whatever the truth, the marriage linked the Kentucky born actor to one of Hollywood’s most powerful dynasties, even as he continued to play the eternally frazzled middle class Dagwood on screen and radio.
The second defining space was the California desert. By the late seventies, long after the Blondie series had ended, a Washington Post feature found Arthur “Dagwood” Lake co hosting a Sunday talk show on Palm Springs station KCBH with Patricia. The article, titled “From the Circus Circuit to the Airwaves,” presented him as a genial survivor of the studio era who had never entirely put down the Dagwood persona but now channeled it into friendly chatter with listeners and local guests.
He died there in the Coachella Valley, succumbing to a heart attack at his Indian Wells home on 9 January 1987 at the age of eighty one. His body was brought back to Los Angeles and placed in the Douras family mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, alongside Marion Davies and later his wife Patricia, who died in 1993.
Why Arthur Lake belongs in an Appalachian story
It can be tempting to treat Arthur Lake’s Kentucky birth as a bit of trivia, something for fan sites and “today in history” posts. Yet in the context of Appalachian and Kentucky history, his life opens up several useful themes.
First, his story reminds us how porous the region’s borders were in the era of railroads and traveling shows. A circus aerial act could roll into a rail town like Corbin, set up its rigging, and leave with a new generation already in tow. That child’s path out of the mountains did not run through coal camps or industrial recruitment but through big tops, cheap vaudeville houses, and finally film studios on the far side of the continent.
Second, it illustrates how Appalachian born people participated in mass culture not only as consumers but as creators. The same radio signals that bounced over Whitley County in the 1940s carrying Blondie’s theme music were broadcasting a performance shaped by someone who had first been listed in a Whitley County birth register. For listeners in Corbin or nearby London, the idea that “Dagwood” began life in the same ridges and narrow streets that they walked is a useful corrective to the notion that media history is always made somewhere else.
Third, Lake’s life offers a human connection between different corners of American history that are often studied in isolation. In one person you can trace a line from the Appalachian rail town at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, through circus and vaudeville culture in the South and Southwest, into the silent and early sound era of Hollywood, and finally into the mansions of San Simeon and the gated golf communities of the postwar desert. The baby born in Corbin grew up to share microphones with old time radio stars, to act opposite Gloria Swanson, and to chat casually on air about life among the palms.
For local historians in southeastern Kentucky, there are still sources worth chasing. Corbin’s newspapers from the late thirties and early forties may contain “local boy makes good” pieces celebrating the release of the early Blondie films or notices of relatives who remained in the region. The Whitley County Clerk’s office and the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives hold the original birth registers for 1905 that underlie the indexed entries found in online databases. And there are surely still family stories from neighbors and kin who remembered that the Silverlakes once passed briefly through town.
Remembering a Corbin born Dagwood
Today Corbin is better known for the Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum, for NIBROC festival crowds filling downtown streets each August, and for its place along the interstate corridor between Lexington and Knoxville. Yet on paper and in film credits it is also the birthplace of the actor who turned one comic strip husband into a national figure.
If you queue up one of Columbia’s Blondie pictures or listen to an episode of the old time radio series, the sound that comes tumbling out of the speaker is shaped by all the places Arthur Lake called home. The circus tents, the vaudeville stages, the studio backlots, the Hearst castle terraces, and the desert radio booths are all there. So is a rail town in southeastern Kentucky where a circus family welcomed a baby and moved on, leaving behind a line in a county ledger and, eventually, a small claim on a much bigger story of American popular culture.
For Appalachian history, that claim is worth keeping.
Sources and further reading
Los Angeles Times, Jack Jones, “Arthur Lake Dies; ‘Blondie’ Film Star,” January 10, 1987. Obituary summarizing Lake’s career, placing his birth in Corbin, Kentucky, and describing his death in Indian Wells, California. Los Angeles Times+1
New York Times, “‘Dagwood’ of Movies, Arthur Lake, Is Dead,” January 11, 1987. National obituary confirming his birth name as Arthur Silverlake, giving his birth date and Corbin, Kentucky birthplace, and outlining his work in the Blondie films. FamilySearch+1
Washington Post, “Deaths Elsewhere: Arthur Lake,” January 1987, and Joseph P. Mastrangelo, “Arthur ‘Dagwood’ Lake – From the Circus Circuit to the Airwaves,” May 20, 1978. Short death notice and earlier feature article that together trace his origins in a circus family, his Corbin birth, and his later work as a Palm Springs radio host. The Washington Post+1
FamilySearch, “Arthur Lake (1905–1987),” and related genealogical compilations at Geneastar and Geni. These assemble census entries, draft registrations, and Social Security records to document his birth on 17 April 1905 in Corbin, Whitley County, Kentucky, to Arthur Adolph Silverlake and Edith Blanche Foutch, and his later life as Arthur William Silverlake Lake. FamilySearch+2Geneanet+2
Find A Grave, memorial for “Arthur Lake (Arthur William Silverlake).” Provides a headstone photograph and biographical note confirming his full name, Corbin birth, dates of birth and death, and burial in the Douras mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Find A Grave+1
“Arthur Lake (actor),” Wikipedia, and Hollywood Walk of Fame biography. Synthesized biography and filmography that draw on primary obituaries and published scholarship to describe his early life in a circus family, his silent and sound era work, his long run as Dagwood Bumstead in the Blondie films and radio series, and his later years. Wikipedia+2Hollywood Walk of Fame+2
John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio (Oxford University Press, 1998). Reference entry on the Blondie radio series that confirms Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton as the principal stars and outlines the program’s broadcast history from 1939 to 1950. World Radio History+1
Sam Terry’s Kentucky, “Kentucky Actor Arthur Silverlake,” and associated social media posts. Local history pieces marking November 30, 1938, as the date Dagwood first appeared on film and describing “Corbin, Kentucky native Arthur Silverlake whose screen name was shortened to Arthur Lake,” reinforcing the hometown claim on his identity. Sam Terry’s Kentucky+2Instagram+2
Carol Lynn Scherling, Blonde Goes to Hollywood: The Blondie Comic Strip in Films, Radio & Television (BearManor Media, 2014). Monographic study of Blondie adaptations that provides the broader production context for the Columbia film series and later radio and television work. Amazon+1
“Blondie: From Strip to Screen,” Hometowns to Hollywood; Aurora’s Gin Joint, “Chic Young’s BLONDIE Turns 90.” Popular but well researched essays that explore the transition of Blondie from newspaper strip to film and radio, with attention to Arthur Lake’s interpretation of Dagwood and the cultural reach of the series. Hometowns to Hollywood+1