\"Stork Club\" Sherman Billingsley Signed FDC Dated 1948 For Sale

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\"Stork Club\" Sherman Billingsley Signed FDC Dated 1948:
$599.99

Up for sale a RARE! "Stork Club" Sherman Billingsley Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1948.  

ES-7953

 John

Sherman Billingsley (March

10, 1896 – October 4, 1966) was an American nightclub owner and former bootlegger who

was the founder and owner of New York's Stork Club. John Sherman Billingsley was the youngest child of

Robert Billingsley and Emily Collingsworth. He was born in Enid, Oklahoma, on March 10, 1896. (In later years, Billingsley said he was born

in 1900, but this is refuted by both the 1930 census and the Social Security

Death Index.) His parents had settled in Enid following the

1893 land run. The Billingsley children attended school in a one-room

schoolhouse, riding a horse to get to school. When an older brother committed a

homicide and was sent to prison, the family relocated to Anadarko to be near

him. Upon the brother's release, he enlisted Sherman as an assistant in his

bootlegging business. The

family moved again, this time to Oklahoma City, where Sherman was again drawn into the

bootlegging business by another of his older brothers. This business extended

into Omaha, Toledo, and Detroit. In

Detroit at age 18, Billingsley was arrested and convicted on federal charges.

He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and spent time in Leavenworth before

his conviction was reversed. When his brother ran out on his Detroit mob

partners, he left for New York, with Sherman joining him within a short time.

Billingsley began buying drug stores in New York City and even started his own

real estate office to help him acquire drug stores. He

created and owned the Stork Club. From the time of the speakeasy until the

1960s, he held court on East 53rd Street. According to Ralph Blumenthal in his

2000 book, Stork Club, another New York nightclub owner named Mary

Louise Cecilia Guinan, widely known as Texas Guinan, introduced Billingsley to her friend,

commentator Walter Winchell, in 1930.

In his column in the New York Daily Mirror,

Winchell called the Stork Club "New York's New Yorkiest place on W.

58th".[ Billingsley offered a $25,000 reward for

information leading to the return of his son-in-law, Alexander I. Rorke Jr., in

1963, when his plane disappeared over the Caribbean. One

of Billingsley's mistresses in the late 1930s was actress Ethel Merman. His nephew, Glenn Billingsley, was married

to Leave It to Beaver actress Barbara Billingsley. (The

actress should not be confused with Sherman Billingsley's daughter Barbara, who

like his other children, sometimes figured in publicity about the nightclub.) 

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