Nedra!

McNeil, as you know, has access to the mysterious search engines of academia. He always uses them for good rather than evil, such as when he found a copy of the Jerry Lewis book THE TOTAL FILM-MAKER in Nigeria, or a Pravda review of a Bob Hope special. But today McNeil has exercised his talents to their greatest purpose yet: finding out more about phantomatic "Blog" Icon Nedra Harrison. Some of what he found (from an obituary in a San Francisco newspaper) may explain why there is so little about Nedra Harrison on the "internet" - she didn't like to talk about herself. I'll quote now from the part of the obituary containing some information new to the "blog": "Graced with a kind of exotic beauty, she grew up in the rural South and graduated from high school, in Tifton, Ga., where she was 'Miss Tifton High School.' From 1934 to 1936, she studied at Emerson College in Boston and then moved to Florida and acted at the Sarasota Playhouse. That was followed by a move to New York, where she became a model." (There follow some things we have already told you about Ms. Harrison's cinema-ready career as supermodel, fighter pilot, and scientist. Wasn't that enough? The obit goes on: "She became a certified scuba diver... For many years she lived in a historical landmark-registered 1871 Victorian house in the 2500 block of Clay Street, and she worked at the lab until her retirement in 1988. Despite her adventures in modeling and her worldwide image as the Dragon Lady in Caniff's famed comic strip, Ms. Anargyros [one of her married names - ed.] was not much given to brag about herself or aggrandize her various achievements. 'I was her friend and her attorney for many years,' Holsman said, 'and she wasn't given to talking about her personal history.'"