Calendars keep alive memories of black entertainers

Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.

What: Historic Black Entertainment Calendar

Price: $12.99

Available: 615-8216, www.blackenterprise.com or at Borders Books

When Kimberly Bailey Tureaud was growing up in Las Vegas she never knew who she would meet when she woke up in the morning.

Sammy Davis Jr. might be sleeping on the sofa; Redd Foxx in the kitchen having breakfast.

"We just had an entertainment home," said Tureaud, daughter of noted Las Vegans Bob and Anna Bailey.

The Baileys collected hundreds of photos - almost 2,000 - of famous and not-so-famous performers who visited their home. Some of the pictures were publicity shots, some were candid photos taken on the spur of the moment.

Many of them are finding their way into calendars that have been created by Tureaud and her husband/business partner, Charles, for the past five years. Each month features a photo of a black entertainer or a group of performers.

Davis was on the cover of the first calendar in 2003. Ella Fitzgerald graces the cover of the 2007 calendar, which includes photos of Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, among others.

One photo is of Bob Bailey sitting at a table with Armstrong. Another is of Anna Bailey at the swimming pool of the Moulin Rouge, the first black-owned casino in a city that was still segregated in 1955, when the casino in West Las Vegas opened and closed.

Bob Bailey once was a vocalist with the Count Basie Band, and Anna Bailey was a dancer. They came to Las Vegas from New York City to work at the Moulin Rouge. Bob Bailey was the master of ceremonies at the venue, which closed after only six months, allegedly under pressure from a number of white-owned establishments.

Eventually Bailey, who is 80, became famous in Las Vegas for his political activism, his commitment to minority business development and his work on behalf of civil rights.

"When I was 8 years old, I used to go into my parents' garage and look at all the pictures they had accumulated when they were in show business," Tureaud said. "They chronicled their lives with the photos they kept."

Tureaud said she remembers her parents discussing their arrival in Las Vegas.

"They took a bus to the West Las Vegas area and saw how different it was from New York," she said. "They were terrified."

Her mother, who is still alive and well at 80, wanted to leave.

"She hated it initially," Tureaud said. "But my father said the town had a lot of potential."

After college Tureaud became a publicist and moved to Los Angeles, where she had such clients as Spike Lee, Paula Abdul and the Urban League.

In '89 she returned to Las Vegas with her first husband, eventually divorced, started her own business, remarried and went into business with her present husband. Together they own Culturally Diverse Advertising Media Relations.

Tureaud said that about five years ago, when she remembered the photos her parents had collected, she also remembered how much pleasure they had given her.

"Not just to look at the celebrities but to look at that time the pictures were taken," she said. "I wanted to do something to share the photos with everyone."

And so she and her husband created the Historic Black Entertainment Calendar series, which is distributed by Black Enterprise magazine in New York City.

An estimated 50,000 calendars are distributed nationally, many of them through corporations that buy the calendars in bulk and give them to clients as gifts.

"We're in the business of keeping these images alive," Tureaud said. "We need to keep the public informed of the historic entertainers. Many of the people coming up may not know Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong."