Bela Lugosi played the vampire Dracula on Broadway for years before he was hired to bring the count to the silver screen by Universal Pictures. The top photo is of a young Lugosi in 1931, courtesy of Gardy D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger.

Maybe it was something in the blood that led Bill Kaffenberger to become the biographer of Bela Lugosi, the man who made Dracula famous.

After all, the grandmother of Kaffenberger, a Los Angeles author, actor and singer, grew up in the same Carpathian Mountain region as Lugosi before she emigrated to America, eventually settling in Lyndora.

“My grandmother, Mary Gajdos, came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from what is now the eastern part of Slovakia,” he said. She emigrated in 1913 to Endicott, N.Y., to work in a shoe factory.

She met and married Paul Chernick, an emigre from what is now Belarus, before the couple traveled as Chernick sought work.

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