Ida Brooks Hunt

Ida Grace Brooks was born in Panama, the daughter of an American banker father and a musical mother from Barcelona. She attended a convent school there, and St. Francis Xavier school in Brooklyn.^[1] In 1908 she spent some time studying music in Paris, in the company of fellow American singer Oriska Worden.^[2]

Hunt was an actress with "an unusually high soprano" voice,^[3] who starred in the musicals Woodland (1904–1905)^[4][5] Algeria (1908),^[6][7] and The Chocolate Soldier (1909–1910).^[8][9] In 1906, she tossed the first pitch at a New York Giants baseball game.^[10] She had a musical act in vaudeville with Alfred de Manby.^[11] During and after World War I, she entertained American troops in Europe,^[12] under the auspices of the YMCA. She spent months in French hospital recovering from health issues incurred during that work.^[13] Her last New York stage appearance was in Robin Hood, just a few weeks before she died in 1929.^[14]

In 1898,^[15] Ida Brooks married George Edwin Hunt,^[16] a dental surgeon.^[17] They lived in Indianapolis,^[18] and they divorced in 1906.^[19] He remarried in 1908.^[20] She died at her cousin's home in Brooklyn in 1929, after a stroke.^[14]