Joan Lowell

Joan Lowell (born Helen Wagner; November 23, 1902 – November 7, 1967) was a movie actress of the silent film era from Berkeley, California. Lowell published a sensational autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, in 1929, which turned out to be fictionalized. Early life According to the Cradle of the Deep, Lowell's mother was hailing from Boston's Lowell family, and her father was the son of a landowner from Montenegro and a Turkish woman. Lowell feared that her father, Captain Nicholas Wagner (Preacher Nick), had died on December 24, 1924. Newspapers reported that his ship, the Oceanic Vance, sank off the coast of Mexico. Two weeks overdue in Los Angeles, California, the schooner was sighted in January 1925, fifteen miles (24 km) northwest of San Diego. The Oceanic Vance had lost her convoy, the schooner Westerner, on Christmas Eve, 1924. Actually, Joan Lowell was born in Berkeley, California. She studied in the Garfield Junior High School in Berkeley. She attended the Munson School for Private Secretaries in San Francisco, where she obtained stenographer's skills. Her father was a ship captain who sailed on the Minnie A. Caine and reportedly took his wife and daughter, then thirteen, for a trip with him.