HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BELLA SPEWACK (March 25, 1899 - April 29, 1990)  Born Bella Cohen in bucharest, Romania, her family emigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan when she was a child.  When she was 23 she was already on her way to a successful career in writing and show business.

In her autobiography, Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (1995) she wrote: "Just about the ages of 10 and 12, and even much more before then, there burns brightly in every ghetto child's brain the desire to see what lies without the ghetto's walls."  After graduation from Washington Irving High School, she worked as a journalist for socialist and pacifist newspapers such as The New York Call.  A reporter for The World was attracted to her and in 1922 she became Mrs. Samuel Spewack. Together they worked as news correspondents in Moscow for four years.

                                    When they returned to the United States, they settled in New Hope, PA and began to collaborate on plays.  They wrote several plays and screenplays for mostly B-movies throughout the 1930s, earning an Academy Award nomination for best original story for My Favorite Wife in 1940. They also penned a remake of Grand Hotel, entitled Weekend at the Waldorf (1945) starring Ginger Rogers.

                                   Perhaps what they are best known for are some of the most memorable lyrics in musical theater history.  Two librettos, Leave It To Me (1938) and Kiss Me Kate (1948) were Cole Porter collaborations.  Their musical adaptation of Taming of the Shrew yielded them two Tony Awards, one for best musical, the other for best author of a musical.

                                   Their first play, The Solitaire Man (1927) was seen only in Boston, but Boy Meets Girl (1936) ran for 669 performances in New York.  Sam created the plot and action, while Bella wrote most of the dialogue. George Abbott, the legendary Broadway director, said that the Spewacks "know how to write lines which are not only funny to read but which crackle when spoken in the theatre." Their best known straight play was My Three Angels, which is still performed. The screen adaptation is entitled We're No Angels.

                                  Though in later years they distanced themselves from their Jewish roots, they contributed time and money to a variety of Jewish causes, mostly involving children. In 1946, as a representative for the UN, Bella covered the distribution of food in ravaged Europe, where so many jewish communities lay in ruins. In 1960, they founded the Spewack Sports Club for the Handicapped in Ramat Gan, Israel.

                                 Bella was a successful publicist for the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts of the USA, and claimed to have introduced the idea of selling cookies for the latter as a means of raising revenue for the organization.

                                 A Letter To Sam from Bella, a one-act play by Broadway director and teacher Aaron Frankel, is based on their personal papers from the Theater Arts Collection of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.