Biography
Born Joan Cavill in London, England, she moved to New Orleans at the age of four. By age 11, she was singing on New Orleans radio station WWL, the start of a musical career that included filming movie shorts, singing with orchestras, recording with Clyde McCoy and his Kentucky Band, and performing in New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago.
While singing at Pittsburgh's William Penn Hotel, she met James F. Edwards, owner and CEO of National Mattress Company (Namaco), whom she married in 1937. She moved to Huntington, West Virginia, native home of her husband.
Joan and James Edwards donated more than $65 million to Marshall University and the Huntington community. She was the largest single donor to Marshall University in the modern era. Joan C. Edwards died on May 7, 2006 from liver cancer. She spent the last few days of her life receiving treatment and care in the cancer center she helped to create, which is located in Huntington, West Virginia at Cabell Huntington Hospital.
Upon her death, the Joan C. Edwards Charitable Foundation was created in her name to help fund scholarships for medical school.
Read more about this topic: Joan C. Edwards
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)