Helen Traubel

Helen Francesca Traubel

• Born June 16, 1899 in St. Louis, MO USA
• Died July 28, 1972 in Santa Monica, CA USA

Biographical Information

Helen Traubel was an operatic soprano singer, famous for her roles in the operas of Richard Wagner. She was a regular at New York, NY's Metropolitan Opera starting in 1937, and in later years was a nightclub and cabaret singer and appeared in films and television programs, something which led the Met to end her contract as it felt it tainted the haughty institution's reputation.

She was born in St. Louis, MO in a prominent German-American family. She was a baseball fan and became a co-owner of the St. Louis Browns in 1950, although she did not play a role in running the team, but she did pose for publicity shots to drum up attendance. She was a lifelong baseball fan, dating from her school days when her father, who had season's tickets to both St. Louis teams, took her to games on a regular basis - schoolwork be damned. On June 28, 1951, she sold her approximately 5,000 ownership shares to Bill Veeck and urged other stockholders, namely brothers Bill DeWitt and Charles DeWitt to do the same. There were an estimated 1,400 Browns stockholders at the time and enough of them heeded her call for Veeck to be able to take control of the team by July 4th.

She has a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. She was also a writer, publishing a couple of detective novels in addition to her autobiography, St. Louis Woman, which came out in 1959.