May Callahan & the Ketcham House

Point out the Ketcham House to any old-timer in Hollis and they will tell you the same thing: a movie star once lived there. They are right — and her story is woven into the very identity of the house HPA fights to preserve. Records indicate that the original Gibson Girl and living-picture star May Callahan — born Mary Veronica Callahan — lived at the Ketcham House with her husband, Frederick Flores, as early as 1924. May remained in the home until 1953, when she passed away there. For roughly three decades, the house was hers.

May Callahan was not merely one of many women who posed for Charles Dana Gibson. She was the original Gibson Girl — the woman who inspired Gibson to create the iconic image that defined American beauty at the turn of the twentieth century. While others later posed as Gibson Girls, May was the one and only original. That such an American icon called the Ketcham House home for nearly thirty years is a fact of extraordinary significance.

The Face of An Era: America's First Cover Girl

The Gibson Girl was one of the most recognizable female images in American popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Created and popularized through the illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson, she represented beauty, style, confidence, independence, and the aspirations of a changing age. Her image appeared in magazines, advertisements, prints, and the imagination of the public. She mirrored and shaped popular culture in much the same way that tabloids and television do today. To have been the Gibson Girl was to have been the face of an era.

To be remembered as an original Gibson Girl was to be connected to one of the first great celebrity images of modern American media. Before social media, before television, and before film stars became the center of popular culture, illustrated women like the Gibson Girl helped shape national ideals of beauty, womanhood, fashion, and self-possession.

The Bernarr MacFadden Connection

May Callahan’s life did not stop at modeling or public image. She later became connected to the physical culture movement, a major early-twentieth-century movement that promoted exercise, health, bodily discipline, fresh air, diet, and strength at a time when modern ideas of fitness were still developing.

May Callahan became chief instructor at Bernarr MacFadden's physical-culture school in Ronkonkoma, New York, around 1900. MacFadden — often dubbed the father of physical culture — spread the gospel of physical fitness across America. He owned hotels, restaurants, and health spas he called “healthatoriums,” and he fostered the emergence of the greatest icon of bodybuilding, Charles Atlas.

MacFadden worked with notable figures including Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He authored more than 100 books on a wide range of topics — with a combined readership of 7.3 million in a single year — and built a popular magazine empire that included publications such as True Romance and Sport, the precursor to Sports Illustrated. As his chief instructor, May Callahan stood at the center of one of the era's most influential health and publishing movements.

Frederick Flores — From Model to Master Builder

By the time May arrived at the Ketcham House, her husband, Frederick Flores, had also changed careers — from model to successful home builder. He had met May when he was a model for sculptors. Alongside his younger brother Charles, Frederick built his reputation on the many handsome homes the brothers constructed in elite communities across Long Island. One of those homes, in fact, added to the very view from his own bedroom window at the Ketcham House.

The Return to Public Life

May had retired to the quiet life of a Queens housewife, but she returned to the headlines in 1950 when the Museum of the City of New York opened a Charles Dana Gibson exhibit. Suddenly, the original Gibson Girl found herself in the limelight again, besieged for radio, TV, and women's club appearances. She had been ill for six months before her death on January 22, 1953.

Services were held at the funeral home at 192-07 Jamaica Avenue, and she was buried in Greenfield Cemetery, Long Island.

The Ketcham House Chapter: Why This Story Matters

The Ketcham House itself reaches back to the agricultural beginnings of Hollis. Long before the surrounding blocks filled with homes, streets, schools, churches, and rail connections, this property belonged to the older rural landscape of Queens. It is part of the story of farms becoming neighborhoods and of Hollis emerging as a community with its own identity.

May Callahan Flores’s residence gives the house an added cultural dimension. It means the Ketcham House is not only a rare architectural survivor; it is also linked to American popular culture. Its walls connect farming history, neighborhood development, home-building, celebrity image, women’s history, and the long memory of Hollis residents who never forgot that a famous woman once lived there.

That is why the phrase “a movie star once lived there” matters, even if local memory uses the language of Hollywood more broadly than strict biography. What the phrase preserves is the truth that the house was associated with glamour, recognition, and a woman whose life had touched the public imagination.