Sheldon Blutarsky (1892-1935)
Born on a mountain top in northern Illinois, Sheldon Blutarsky is best known for his performance as the hotel clerk overcome by blood lust in the L'Hotel du Mort, the Lumiere film from 1912. For a brief time, he was the toast of Parisian society, but that ended after the event known even now only as "Le Scandale." He moved back to his native United States, not settling down until after his disastrous role in the Seattle General Strike of 1919.
Shortly thereafter, he settled in Greenwich Village at 293 Bleecker Street (one of the final residences of Thomas Paine). In the Village, Blutarsky was widely known as "The Singing Laborer", because he was a worker on construction projects like Madison Square Garden and, most nights, still dressed in his overalls and dirt-encrusted workman's boots, he would play his guitar and sing union songs in Sheridan Square.
Supposedly, Blutarsky was the inspiration for Bluto, the famous Popeye antagonist. While it is known that he was friends with the Fleischer Brothers, whose animation studio created the original Popeye cartoons, the Bluto character had appeared in the Elsie Seegar cartoon strip long before. In any case, it is known that Blutarsky was sometimes a live-action model for the Fleischers, which may have given rise to the confusion.
Sheldon Blutarsky died under mysterious circumstances. Early one morning in December, 1935, police received a report of a man dangling from the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. Upon investigation, the body of Blutarsky was found, entangled in mountaineering gear. It appeared that Blutarsky had welded a strange metallic apparatus to the bottom of the bridge superstructure. His gear had gotten entangled in the machine, and during a freak electrical storm, Blutarsky had apparently been electrocuted, then battered against the bridge by high winds. A police detective suspected that the mechanism belonged to the technological innovator Nicola Tesla, but when questioned, Tesla claimed ignorance of the entire matter. Blutarsky's body later disappeared from the morgue and was never found.
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