Born: 1869
Died: 1926
"Smiling Joe" Conoly was a New York city theatrical agent who died in Saranac Lake of tuberculosis. He is buried in Pine Ridge Cemetery, under a stone marked "Smiling Joe."
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, April 24, 2015
Smiling Time
By Bob Seidenstein
. . . According to his death notice in the New York Times, he started as a circus acrobat, and later became a singer and dancer. After that, he was a theatrical agent and manager who later in his career “worked with motion pictures and produced a number of shows,” though what kind of shows it didn’t say.
He died in 1926 in the Northwoods Sanitarium in Saranac Lake. . . .
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, May 1, 2015
Matters of grave importance
By Bob Seidenstein
. . . [A researcher found] 30 articles on Smiling Joe, including an obituary in Variety. Apparently, Smiling Joe was not just an agent -- he also had controlling interest in theaters and outside of New York City was involved in show business in Pittsburgh, Chicago and other big cities. He was, in short, a big shot. . . .
. . . Smiling Joe came here in 1925 to recover from TB, and he died in 1926. According to his obit, he had no family. So I always assumed there's no one in town who ever heard of him, much less actually remembered him. Nonetheless, someone keeps putting pebbles on his gravestone. . . .
