@Answers.com : Early in his career, Oscar, the grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I, a noted New York opera impresario, worked with Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and made a name for himself with musicals such as Rose Marie and Showboat. Then he began a long collaboration with Rodgers that resulted in Carousel, South Pacific, Flower Drum Song and The King and I. His most famous song is probably “Ol’ Man River.” (He mus’know sumpin’. But don’t say nuthin’. He jes’ keeps rollin’…. like a Rollin’ Stone?)

@The Jewish Virtual Library : Precocious Oscar (numero uno, the grand-dad) learned the cigar trade quickly. In 1874 he founded and edited a tobacco trade publication, the U. S. Tobacco Journal, before inventing and patenting cigar machines. These machines, along with his trade paper, industrialized and reformed the tobacco industry and provided Oscar with a lifelong, dependable source of income for pursuing his theatrical and operatic ambitions. (And curiously Oscar II did not write “Smoke gets in your eyes“… Otto did)

@Broadway: The American Musical : : Oscar Clendenning or “Ockie” (his lifelong nickname) went to Columbia University in preparation for a career in law. It was at Columbia, that Oscar first met another Columbia alumnus: Richard Rodgers…In 1929 Oscar divorced his wife of 12 years, Myra Finn, and married Dorothy Blanchard Jacobson. When he died on August 23, 1960, a victim of stomach cancer, he left behind three children, William and Alice by Myra Finn and James by Dorothy Blanchard Jacobson.

@Wikipedia : Since Rodgers’ first partner, Lorenz Hart, was too deeply entrenched in alcoholism to be of any use, Rodgers “recruited” Hammerstein to write Oklahoma!, a show which revolutionized the American musical theatre by tightly integrating all the aspects of musical theater, with the songs and dances arising out of the plot and characters. (Oscar II, a destiny engineered by tobacco and booze!)

@Notable Biographies : Stephen Sondheim, lyricist for such shows as West Side Story, Sweeny Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George, was a close friend of the Hammerstein family from childhood and attributed his success in theater directly to Hammerstein’s influence and guidance.

@Time : Andrew Lloyd Weber remembers : “I was 13. School was Westminster. Elvis was king. No. 1 on the British charts was Floyd Cramer’s On the Rebound. A review was saying “if you are a diabetic who craves sweet things, take along some extra insulin, and you will not fail to thrill to The Sound of Music.”…. When the sign (at London’s Palace Theatre) finally came down, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s last collaboration had become the longest-running American musical in London theater history”.

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to be continued… probably