By Bill Twomey
Few people are alive today who remember the stage actress and feminist, Cecil Spooner. She was both a popular and a controversial figure in her day who dared to be herself regardless of the cost. She opened her own theatre in 1910 at the age of twenty-two at 961 Southern Boulevard off 163rd Street. Aptly named the Cecil Spooner Theatre, she ran the enterprise with her husband, Charles E. Blaney, and both her mother Mary Gibbs Spooner and her sister, Edna May Spooner were cast in some of her stage productions. Another actress of the day to perform in one of her productions was Oscar Hammerstein
