I found newspaper articles from 1958-1959 indicating he was going on a tour of Australia, and after that. . . nothing. He quietly disappears.
Presumably he’s deceased, but I found it odd that he apparently was staying pretty busy in the Boston area, but then just quit. But maybe he just quietly retired.
An item in the New York Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper, from 23 January 1971. Written by the reporter with a dateline of Freeport Grand Bahama Island.
A 1967 article from the Los Angeles Sentinel, another Black newspaper.
Black Newspapers are a great resource to track Black entertainers. Unfortunately, their digitized versions are only available in pay newspaper databases.
I would venture a guess that Rubberneck, who lived in France but worked in Germany in the period I cited, probably died in France or the Bahamas. Good luck on finding an obit.
That’s probably true about his lived out his years overseas. I had looked in Ebony and Jet archives, which are available, but didn’t find anything. Thanks a bunch!
Ha! That’s another mystery of sorts. Various citations indicate that dancer Earl Snake-Hips Tucker died in 1937 of some kind of ‘abdominal ailment.’ Unconfirmed chatter says that the ‘abdominal ailment’ was actually either a stab wound or gunshot–from a jealous boyfriend/husband. The real Snake-Hips was quite the ladies’ man back in the day.
And you can see both Snake-Hips and Rubber Neck (and a host of others) in the aforementioned doc “It’s Black Entertainment.”