Christmas cards from the 1930s featuring gleeful Shirley Temple waving while riding a sleigh.

Back in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression, there wasn’t much that would make people smile…nothing, that is, except for Shirley Temple.

Shirley got her start at a very early age and her movies literally saved some Hollywood studios from succumbing to bankruptcy. At the height of her popularity her studio sent out Christmas cards bearing her image. These holiday greeting cards showed a smiling Shirley sitting on a sled in the snow. Everything about these cards from the snowy background, the large Christmas wreath tied with a large red bow down to Shirley’s red mittens portrayed everyone’s notion of an ideal Christmas. While the nation was still recovering, just looking at this picture made people feel more optimistic. You felt that good times were just around the corner. In fact, in one of his addresses to the public, FDR had been quoted as saying, “As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we’ll be alright.” What greater compliment can there be for someone?

Shirley’s career in the movies was actually quite brief but definitely memorable. While she started at the tender age of three, she filmed her last movie and hung up her tap dancing shoes by the age of 21. During that time she worked with some of the greatest actors of that time. Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, and Claudette Colbert were just a few. Besides singing in her movies, Shirley was a first class tap dancer. She learned many of her steps and appeared in several movies with the great African-American tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. One of their routines from The Little Colonel had them tap dancing up and down a staircase. They were so good they made it look effortless.

After Shirley retired from film making she went on to raise a family with her husband of over 50 years, Charles Black. She also became involved with politics, being a staunch Republican. She was made a delegate to the United Nations in 1969 by Richard Nixon and ultimately acted as U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Currently, Shirley is living quietly in California enjoying her role as grandmother and more recently as great-grandmother.