A 21-year-old ballet star died from injuries suffered in a car crash on this week in Philly history
Mardee Vosseler, the prima ballerina of the Philadelphia-La Scala Opera company, died days after the crash in South Jersey.
Philadelphia’s rising ballet star fell in South Jersey.
One of the opera company’s top dancers, Mardee Vosseler, full of performance potential and all of 21, was being driven home after a New Jersey nightclub appearance on the morning of Nov. 3, 1941.
The car was filled with friends. Samuel Matthews, a 29-year-old shipfitter at the Navy Yard, was at the wheel, and Kitty Mason, a 36-year-old entertainer, was also in the car.
On their drive home, around 3 a.m., their vehicle collided, head-on, with another in the streets of Camden.
Police had speculated that “one of the two automobiles had skidded on an asphalt-paved bridge over Newtown Creek,” The Inquirer reported. “The rest of the boulevard is of rough-surfaced concrete.”
The other vehicle, occupied by two others, rolled over. And when it came to rest, “the motor lay on the front seat,” the paper reported.
Vosseler, born to dentist P.C. Vosseler in Germantown, was the protégé of Catherine Littlefield, the rowhouse-born choreographer and founder of the Philadelphia Ballet. She had been the prima ballerina of the Philadelphia-La Scala Opera company for two seasons.
But she had been unable to resume her role that year due to all of her nightclub bookings, supplemental to her dancing work.
Her even more famous dancing sister, Broadway performer Heidi Vosseler-Draper, who had recently married the famous dancer Paul Draper, flew in from New York to give a blood transfusion.
Mardee Vosseler would die a few days later from a skull fracture, an early end to a short career. The others in the two vehicles were injured but survived.
Vosseler’s dancing feet “were stilled forever,” The Inquirer wrote.
