Relocating Baby Hitler, and Other Stuff …

It's been a while since I've written on this blog, partly because a whole bunch of useless ideas have been ruminating in my head, blocking more productive thoughts.

So I thought I'd try to express some of those ideas in the hope that the process of writing them down will clear out some room in my head.

Please bear with me.

Relocating Baby Hitler
I have always been obsessed with the notion of time travel.

I think I've seen every movie ever made on the subject, from the Back to the Futures and the surprisingly good Time Cop to the unbelievably horrible Battlefield Earth. (That last one may not technically be a time travel movie, but it deserves mention in any discussion of very bad film experiences.)

Thoughts of time travel always wind up focusing on ways to change the world for the better.

And inevitably those thoughts turn to … killing Adolph Hitler.

That's kind of a no-brainer.

He started World War II, which resulted in about 50 million deaths. His regime set new standards in organized human depravity. He … actually, I guess I don't really need to make the case for Der Fuhrer being a bad guy, do I?

Anyway, the next step is figuring out at what point in his life you kill him.

Certainly not as a baby or child or teen. He's an innocent at those points in his life. Years later he serves the losing side honorably in World War I, but that's probably your best opportunity. Still, he hasn't done anything heinous yet.

But once the atrocities that warrant his death begin, he's too well guarded.

Another conundrum ... the average person will have trouble taking a life no matter how justified.

So here's my solution, which I recommend and freely give away here for any of you who ever get the chance to travel back in time.

There is no need to kill Hitler at all.

The way to go is to kidnap baby Hitler just days after he's born, and whisk him off to rural Canada to be raised by a nice farming couple who can't have their own child.

It would be sort of Clark Kent situation, but this time using old-fashioned homespun values to prevent pure evil instead of a means to promote truth, justice and the American way.

There in early 20th century Canada, he is almost certain to be no worse than a dirty hockey player, scurrilous curling sweeper or tainted food provider. And in the off chance that his megalomania is genetic, he's in a place where he could not possibly impact world events.

Okay, now that's off my mind.


Silly Singulars & Preposterous Plurals
Who decided, and what possible reason could there be for words in the English language being the same plural as they are in singular?

Is the word “deers” so offensive to the ear? (Particularly since “dears” seems to be just hunky dory.) Will the world suffer to hear me say that I saw three “deers” and two “mooses” during my walk in … I don't know … somewhere where deers and mooses hang out together? (“Where" isn't really my point here.)

Also, there is that one item that's always referred to as two … scissors, as in “I'd like to buy a pair of scissors.” Really?

This reminds me of the poker scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Each cigarette represents a dime, but Martini (Danny DeVito) keeps breaking them in half and betting “a nickel.” Finally, a frustrated, R.P. McMurphy screams at him, “This is a dime! See that? Cut it in half and you don't have two nickels … you have [expletive]!”

Take a pair of scissors. Cut them in half. What you have is not a scissor and a scissor … what you have is [expletive]!

Ditto for “pants.” A pant should have two legs and cover one's front and rear unlookables. You should not get just one item when you buy a “pair of pants.”

Fish, aircraft, species, you (except in East Coast urban areas, where “youse” is perfectly acceptable) … I could go on and on, but you get my drift, right?

Why are no political parties backing language reform? Is it too much of a hot potato? (Oh, and there is no good reason to add that extra “e” to pluralize “potatoes,” either.)

Do you think Mr. Quayle still has some pull to get this movement started?


Various Leftover Brain Bric-a-Brac
Why won't the Wordscraper game on Facebook take “ZEN” as a legitimate word?

Why is the least good Law & Order show (I won't say “worst” because I like them all) the only one they still make new episodes for?

Eli Manning is as good as Peyton Manning in the same way that Janet Jackson is as good as Michael Jackson.

Two liter sodas are $1.79, but only $1.59 if you buy at least six. Six Two-liter bottles. C'mon. Do I get a caddy with that?

In that Allstate commercial about living on a tight budget, I had to look up what “ramen” noodles were. Is that a new word, or are simple TV ads getting to complicated for my aging mind to comprehend?


Well, that opens up a little more space in my head for now. I hope I can fill it with more useful information in the future. (But let's not hold our breath on that.)

Fantasy Football Confessions

Let me start out by confessing that the fantasies of my younger days were certainly more interesting, and infinitely more embarrassing, than any that mere fantasy football could possibly provide.

(Although my choice of Duce Staley in the sixth round after he had already retired a few years ago continues to be a substantial source of embarrassment to me, and more fun than a barrel of Dolphins for everyone else in my league.)

If you have known me for a long time, and are female, a millionaire, or both of those, you may even have been a part of these earlier fantasies. Those I will keep to myself.

The years wear on and we take our thrills where we can get them, don't we?

And there are thrills to be had in fantasy football, I can assure you. I have won a game that I had trailed at one time by 26 points when my kicker hit a 55-yard field goal as time expired in the week's last game on Monday Night.

I have lost a game when my opponent's tight end (playing for the Steelers) stepped in front of my wide receiver (playing for the Steelers), and caught a touchdown. That's my six points taken from me and added to him. You can see this coming, right? I lost by ten points.

As a die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan, I am keenly interested in what takes place within the NFC East division. That has always been the case. Pre-fantasy football, I was only slightly less interested in the rest of the NFC, since those teams stand in our path to the Super Bowl (so far, except for two years, they have stood there very successfully).

Pre-fantasy football, you could measure my interest in AFC teams like the Buffalo Bills or the Cleveland Browns (oddly, both of those teams are named after people, but I digress) with a teaspoon.

That is no longer the case. This year, one of my two starting running backs is C.J. Spiller, who plays for the Buffalo Bills. I was not exactly sure just who C.J. Spiller was, but my brother Dan, who is my co-owner/co-coach/co-general manager (I prefer those titles to co-nerd or co-geek) liked him. C.J. Spiller scored a touchdown on the opening week of the season.

Go, Dan! Go, Buffalo!!

Fantasy football also allows the common fan to show a little sentiment.

As an Eagles fan, I had gotten my mind all set and my brain all washed to welcome in the Kevin Kolb Era last year. He was going to be the quarterback to take advantage of the quick reads and short passing game that had been Donovan McNabb's weaker points for the past decade.

I bought in 100 percent. I was happy to see him seem to show those qualities early on. However, in the first game of last season, Kolb got crushed by a Green Bay linebacker, and second-team quarterback Michael Vick took over.

Kevin, we hardly knew ye.

Vick turned out to be rejuvenated and too remarkable a talent not to play every week. Kolb recovered but was relegated to the bench. It was the right move for the Eagles, no doubt, but I felt bad for the guy whose only mistake was getting injured.

So this year, Dan and I drafted Kevin Kolb (who was eventually traded to the Arizona Cardinals) as our back-up quarterback.

On The Bonecrushers (our team is named after the real-life football team that our grandfather played for), he's still second-team behind Green Bay's star QB Aaron Rogers … we're sentimental, not stupid. But at least we feel like he's one of “our boys.”

So I guess I've come to the confessions part of “Fantasy Football Confessions.” Here goes …

As a guy who played some actual football a couple of generations ago, I think I almost … kind of … more or less … prefer the fantasy kind. I know that playing on the field is a lot of fun, and it provided me with some of the most thrilling moments that I have ever experienced in my life.

That's all on the good side of playing the game. But I'll leave you with the one advantage that fantasy football has over actual football, that actual football can never overcome …

No practice.

Your Godfather Glossary

As hard as it may be to believe (and it certainly is for me), 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.

Before this landmark film, almost no one had ever heard of Pacino, or Caan, and Brando was considered box office poison after his eccentricities had begun to outweigh the profitability of his films.

Just before he transformed himself into author Mario Puzo's fictional Don Vito Corleone, Brando made a movie called The Nightcomers, a prequel to the Henry James classic “Turn of the Screw.”

Ever hear of it? That's what I mean.

Besides resurrecting or sparking the careers of a generation of Italian-American actors (plus Robert Duvall as Irish/German adopted Corleone, Tom Hagen). The movie became more than a movie. It became part of our lives.

It was almost as if Clemenza's adult education course, “Basics of the Whack 101,” (“I left the gun noisy. That way it scares any pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders away.”) or Vito's last tango among the tomato plants were imbedded into our own memories.

Where women (and some men) have Gone With the Wind; men (and some women) have The Godfather.

And a major effect of a movie that weaves itself into the culture is that it can change that culture forever. That is indisputably the case with The Godfather, as evidenced by how many lines from the film became part of the American English lexicon.

So as a service to the younger readers, who may have only a vague notion of what these expressions mean or where they originated, (and to beat the 40-year anniversary rush) I offer just a few examples of terms that were either invented or changed by the film:

“I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.”
Vito's answer when family friend singer/actor Johnny Fontane tells him that getting the part in the movie that he wants is impossible, because the head of the studio hates him.

Before the Don tossed off these words (and we saw what he meant a short time later in a little incident with a horse's head), “an offer you can't refuse” was usually a good thing. It meant that something almost too good to be true was offered. Maybe free tickets to a ballgame or a sublet to a rent controlled apartment.

After, and forever since, any benign meaning was completely lost. The most common reaction to hearing this sentence these days is to pack up the loved ones, change your identity and skip town.

“Leave the gun; take the canoli.”
Pete Clemenza to Rocco, after they have killed Paulie for conspiring with Sollozzo in an unsuccessful attempt to have the Don killed.

Loyal Corleone capo Clemenza was always teaching. Here he sets priorities for a whack done in a professional manner. Even four decades later, very few of us can hear the word “canoli” without thinking of this scene. Go ahead, try it next time the word pops up.

Also, when asked by Sonny later how Paulie was, Pete uttered the immortal words, “Oh, Paulie … won't see him no more.”

“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”
Clemenza explains that Luca's bulletproof vest, delivered with a deceased fish inside, means that Vito's most loyal soldier is dead.

Note how much better this sounds than the more common “sleeps with the fish” would. Maybe that's why it's caught on so extensively. Today you can hear people use the phrase in ways that Clemenza would never have dreamed.

“Remember our Science teacher, Mr. Linden? I just heard he sleeps with the fishes.”

“That promotion I was up for? Looks like it sleeps with the fishes.”

“Who ate that pie I was saving in the fridge??!!”
“Oh, that pie sleeps with the fishes.”

… and even “We went away on vacation and now little Tommy's goldfish sleeps with the fishes.”

“Today I settled all family business.”
Michael to his brother-in-law Carlo, who he knows set up Sonny's execution for the Barzini family.

“Settling all family business” has become a colorful (and slightly ominous) way of saying that you're not taking any more crap about the subject at hand. This might be anything from:

A literal interpretation: “Today I settle all family business. I want a divorce, you take the kids and I'm moving to Marlon Brando's old island near Tahiti.”

To managing the Washington Nationals: “Today I settle all family business, Ankiel is back to pitching, Werth shaves and it's three hours of infield practice every day.”

“I hope that their first child is a masculine child.”
A nervous, tongue-tied Luca Brasi to Vito Corleone at his daughter's wedding.

It might be politically incorrect these days to hope for one gender over the other, but Luca was what you might call old school. You would think that he meant to wish the Godfather a grandson, and just mixed up “masculine” with “male” or “boy.” But even when he was rehearsing he said “masculine” … so it seems like he was wishing the Don a Sonny-like grandson as opposed to a Fredo-like one.

This quote is guaranteed to get you a laugh and a pat on the back when spoken to any fan of the movie who is expecting a child or grandchild.

“Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.”
Vito Corleone to Bonasera the undertaker, who wants revenge for his daughter's brutal beating.

Did anybody really think that day would never come? But how the undertaker evened the score is one of the most touching scenes in the film. Not by stashing a body. Not by switching corpses, as Bonasera must surely have expected.

Instead, Don Corleone tearfully asks him to use his skills on Sonny's body after he's been shot about a hundred times, so his mother doesn't have to see him like that.

“You've gotta get up close like this and bada-bing, you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit!”
Sonny explaining to Michael that killing Sollozzo and police Captain McCluskey won't be like killing people from far away in a war.

The strip club in The Soprano's wasn't named the “Bada-Bing” by accident. Whether that expression was an Italian thing, or a New York thing or a mob thing … now it's an all-over-the-world thing.

It translates to something like “voila!” or “there you have it”! Dictionary.com defines it as “an expression used to suggest that something can be done with no difficulty or delay.”

So today you can hear statements like:

“Sure, my brother gives dance lessons on the side. Just call him up and bada-bing, you're doing Swan Lake by Friday.”

Or …

“Vote for me for U.S. Senate, and I promise that bada-bing, you get a balanced budget ... no questions asked.”

Of course, these are just a very few of the quotes you'll recognize the next time you see the movie. There are quite a few to be found in The Godfather II, as well. But take my advice, and skip the third installment if you love the first two.

I say that for many reasons, but the easiest to explain is that when Coppola could not convince Robert Duvall to reprise his role as Tom Hagen in the third film, he brought in a new character played by … George Hamilton.

I think that's all you need to know.

Jeter Gets 3,000 Hits. What's That Mean to You?

When the New York Yankees' newest icon went 5-for-5 to become just the 28th player in over 125 years of Major League Baseball to accumulate 3,000 hits, the sports world went wild.

And why not?

That's a very high mountain to climb. To give perspective on just how high, sportswriters like to equate that feat with similar ones in other sports. So you hear that 3,000 hits in baseball is like 500 goals in NHL hockey. Or 100 touchdowns in NFL football. Or 20,000 points in NBA basketball.

And that's great, except that most of us haven't played in the NHL or NFL or NBA.

How can you measure this in terms of your life?

Well, I've attempted to explain Mr. Jeter's accomplishment in the context of careers, pastimes and hobbies to which I believe regular readers of this blog will relate. And so …

If Derek Jeter were a salesperson 3,000 hits would be like convincing the Pope that gay marriage is really cool, or like selling the NHL on the idea that Phoenix, Arizona is a hockey town.

If Derek Jeter were a mechanic 3,000 hits would be like completing an average of 10 oil changes and four state inspections every weekday for 15 years.

If Derek Jeter were a bookkeeper 3,000 hits would be like never, ever losing a single book. Wait … what is it that a bookkeeper does again?

If Derek Jeter were a doctor 3,000 hits would be like having a lifetime Patient Mortality Rate (PMR) of less than 8 percent. (Although it's true that, measured over a long enough period of time, the Patient Mortality Rate for every doctor is 100 percent, I think the trick is to make sure that the patient is under the care of another physician at the time of his or her demise.)

If Derek Jeter were a bartender 3,000 hits would be like pouring 50,000 draft beers, or mixing 25,000 gins and tonics, or constructing 50 Mojitos.

If Derek Jeter were a gravedigger 3,000 hits would be like excavating a triple plot with a teaspoon.

If Derek Jeter were an attorney 3,000 hits would be like representing O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, Robert Blake – and Phil Spector (nobody bats a thousand).

If Derek Jeter were a serial killer 3,000 hits would put him in the category of New York's Joel Rifkin, who is believed to be responsible for 17 murders. [Note: The short but productive spree of Jack the Ripper equates roughly to the baseball career of Sandy Koufax; whereas Pete Rose's record number of 4256 hits would fit 19th century British serial killer Amelia Dyer, who is suspected of the highest total ever – more than 400 deaths.]

If Derek Jeter were a nurse 3,000 hits would be like giving 100,000 shots, or assisting in 1,500 surgeries, or deflecting 5,000 sexual advances.

If Derek Jeter were a flight attendant 3,000 hits would be like logging 2 million miles in the air or stifling the blood-curdling screams of 800 passengers who suddenly discover that they are terrified of flying. [Also, see above reference to sexual advances.]

If Derek Jeter were a secretary 3,000 hits would be like having his title changed to “Personal Assistant.”

If Derek Jeter were a truck driver 3,000 hits would be like driving all of the toys to the North Pole each Christmas season since the Great Elfin Emancipation Treaty of 1968 made on-site manufacturing impractical. (Oh, you didn't know? Sorry.)

If Derek Jeter were a teacher 3,000 hits would be like introducing Stephen Hawking to physics or convincing Eric Clapton to put down that French horn and pick up a guitar for goodness sake.

If Derek Jeter were a plumber 3,000 hits would be the equivalent of 15 miles of pipe installed in one-to-three foot increments in bathrooms across America … bet you thought I would go with a big pile of excrement there, didn't you?

I hope it's clearer to everyone now just how great an accomplishment reaching 3,000 hits really is. Derek Jeter is an outstanding example of determination, dependability and dedication that is rarely seen in sports. It's difficult to put a value on that kind of total commitment.

Difficult, but not impossible. It's $15 million-per-year.

Your "End of the World" Orientation

Dateline: May 22, 2011. Welcome, one and all.

Well, it looks like Christian broadcaster and Biblical calculator Harold Camping was right after all. Humanity has been wiped out and divided into the saved and the unsavory. You are understandably anxious to learn into which group you have been assigned.

More on that later.

First, to clarify: Mr. Camping's prediction was pure dumb luck. We should point out that the life span of your life form has simply expired, and is not the result of any particular atrocious behavior on the part of you or your kind.

You are now undergoing processing and orientation. Please feel free to ask questions. We are here to make your afterlife experience as seamless as possible.

To answer the most-asked question, your pets are fine. Dogs, cats and hamsters have been given souls and intelligence. Custody of the Earth now belongs to them. All remaining creatures have been bumped up one level to compensate for your absence.

Sloths and sea monkeys have been discontinued.

Your predeceased ancestors are anxious to greet you. There would normally have been a light for you to follow and a whole This Is Your Life-style production filled with friends and family to herd you into the staging area. We apologize for depriving you of that bit of theater, but the sheer volume of Armageddon has made that impractical.

Suddenly appearing in your left hand as if by magic you will find a questionnaire. Please answer each question as honestly as you can. Rest assured that your answers will not determine your fate for eternity, but will help us serve future annihilated species more efficiently.

Note that under “Things You Meant to Do But Didn't (and Why),” there will be a sort of door prize given to the most amusing ten percent of responses. Again, your eternal paradise or damnation has already been determined, so go for it!

As you wait to discover your eternal reward/punishment, we offer one of our most popular features, known informally as “What Might Have Been”:

- Chicago Cubs fans can take solace in the fact that their team would have won the 2011 World Series in a thrilling seven-game series had human life continued.

- Medical research was on the brink of a breakthrough marketed as “Brain Viagra” that would have increased human intelligence dramatically.

- Diet pizza would have become a reality in 2016.

And now, for your fate.

Most of you will be overjoyed to learn that you have been assigned what you would refer to as salvation, eternal bliss or deliverance. There are just a few exceptions. To those people who saw fit to protest the funerals of deceased men and women of the military because they presumed to know that the United States had angered god by promoting homosexuality, we can only offer an eternity of watching gay pornography and endless hours to wonder what you were thinking.

Those people will join Misters Hitler, Stalin, Caligula and just a very few others in their own personalized unspeakable damnation.

Finally, I will need to see a suspected alien called Donald Trump in my office regarding verification of the details of his birth.

The Great Characters: Allen Jenkins

If you have seen at least 20 movies from the 30s and 40s you have seen Allen Jenkins.

You probably just didn't know it.

Born in Staten Island, he became the world's idea of what a regular mug from New York City should look like, sound like and act like. On screen he was the perfect not-so-smart street thug, but like most things in Hollywood, Allen Jenkins was not necessarily what he appeared to be -- he developed that rough-edged character at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Jenkins' parents were musical comedy performers, and he entered the theater as a stage mechanic after World War I. In his first on-stage appearance, he danced next to James Cagney in a chorus line for an off-Broadway musical. Soon the two chorus boys would epitomize the tough, big city gangster that movie audiences could not get enough of.

As a lover of movies from his heyday, I have always been drawn to Jenkins' characters. There's something so natural and entertaining about him in every role, small or large. And apparently I'm not alone, because the New York Times once called him the “greatest scene-stealer of the 1930s.”

And he worked a lot.

He was the icing on the cake that Warner Brothers could count on to add depth to Hollywood classics like 42nd Street, Dead End and Destry Rides Again, or to play more prominent roles in studio assembly-line productions like Jimmy the Gent and The Case of the Howling Dog.

And to Baby Boomers who may not be as partial as I am to the old, black-and-white movies that made Jenkins semi-famous – you probably know him, too.

He showed up all over TV in the 60s … The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, Bewitched, Ben Casey, Marcus Welby, Adam-12 and more!

(I told you he worked a lot.)

And I only recently discovered where I first ran into one of my favorite character actors ever, without ever realizing it.

He was the voice of authority in a cartoon classic as “Officer Dibble” on Top Cat!

I'm imagining everyone around my age thinking “Oh, yeah” to themselves just about now.

The Great Characters: Eve Arden

If you have ever found yourself wishing you had thought of just the right comeback at just the right time, in a way you have wished that you were Eve Arden.

She was the master of the witty retort, and although it's true that she didn't write her own lines (at least as far as I know), she delivered them as no one else ever could -- with an acid tongue alongside a tiny bit of honey.

Just as I had found Walter Brennan on that faithful companion of my youth, television, so Ms. Arden was one of my weekly visitors in Our Miss Brooks. There she was the ever-harried school teacher dealing with hipster students and a demanding principal, all while trying to maneuver a marriage proposal from Mr. Boynton, the shy, clueless biology teacher. (It was the 50s, after all.)

To me, she was funnier than Lucy. (I know that's blasphemy, but what can I say?) And again, as I found with Mr. Brennan, the best was yet to come as I discovered the Eve Arden who had entertained audiences on the big screen from as early as the 1930s.

In over 60 movies and for 50 years, she was the wise-cracking best friend to some of Hollywood's greatest actresses. Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her performance in Mildred Pierce, and Eve was nominated as best supporting actress in the same film. “Supporting actress” was the perfect job description for her. Among her dozens of outstanding performances there was her role as secretary to defense lawyer James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder. She added a slightly lighter touch to this ground-breaking film that focused on murder and rape, without compromising the seriousness of the subjects.

She never seemed to get the guy, though, which always puzzled me because as far as I was concerned, Eve Arden had it all. Beauty, wit, sophistication (but never too much sophistication) and an amazing ability to put blowhards in their place (a valuable skill in any era).

Commenting on the Soviet Union's press policy in Comrade X: “Probably the government has decided that from now on all foreign correspondents must be blindfolded and led around by seeing-eye dogs.”

In response to Jack Carson's line “I hate all women, thank goodness you're not one of them,” in Mildred Pierce: “Laughing Boy seems slightly burned at the edges. What's eating him?”

In waiting room at police station from the same movie: “Well, what is this, a class reunion?”

In real life she was nothing like her acerbic characters. Except that she was a good friend. Long before it was true of Sarah Lee baked goods it was said that “Nobody doesn't like Eve Arden.”

She was devoted to her family, as evidenced by her decision to basically retire from acting to raise her children. But being a nice person sometimes brings good karma and at a time in her career when she might have been the subject of any number of “Whatever Happened to” articles, she re-emerged into the public consciousness as the befuddled Principal McGee in Grease and Grease 2.

Just as an aside, Eve Arden was so popular that when she appeared on What's My Line, she had to use a buzzer to answer yes or no to the blindfolded panel trying to guess her identity. Why was that? Because there was no pitch or register or accent that could disguise the voice so familiar to millions.

That's a lot of fame for one of the great "character actors" ever.

The Great Characters: Walter Brennan

I've been a big fan of movies ever since I can remember.

Especially the old movies. Cagney, Bogart, Stanwyck, Garfield, Hepburn, Gable, Cooper, Tracy … they have been the headliners in some of the great entertainment experiences of my life. But as much as I love the old stars, there was an even larger group of men and women who added the texture and depth to some of the greatest movies from the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

They were the character actors.

Over the years, the term has come to be known as a sort of actor's actor. You hear the multi-million dollar faces on the big screen claim to be more like character actors than stars. Sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. But these handful (and many, many more) were the real deal.

They were the best friends, the flunkies, the befuddled policemen, the judges, the clerks, the henchmen, the drunks, the mobsters – and one time the Wizard of Oz.

I've always wanted to find out more about these familiar faces, so I thought, “Why not do a some some simple Internet research on them?” Since no good reason not to occurred to me, I'll begin with probably the best one ever.

Walter Brennan was one of my grandmother Reilly's favorites. Not quite in her Grand Trio of Red Skelton, Ed (“The Perfect Fool”) Wynn and Lawrence Welk, he was still must-see TV for her before that term even existed. The show was The Real McCoys, and she never missed it.

I could not quite understand how such a sweet woman could be so attached to a character like Amos McCoy, who I saw as loud, cranky, mean, intolerant and almost always wrong. Of course, this is a good example of why people seldom ask the advice of 9-year-olds.

What I discovered in later years is that Walter Brennan was the King of Character Actors. I'm not alone in that opinion. He won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar three times. (But maybe that wasn't such a great percentage when you think about it, since he was in over 130 movies total – including at least four silent ones.)

He was comical as Humphrey Bogart's drunken partner in To Have and Have Not, and comical AND scary (no easy feat) as Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner. He teamed up with Cooper to play his down-and-out, harmonica-playing traveling companion in Frank Capra's classic Meet John Doe, a part that inspired a song just a few decades later by a group called Floyd's Big Gun.

And he added a touch of quality to dozens of lesser-known movies that sorely lacked it.

The irony about my discovering Brennan playing a crotchety old man on television is that he had been playing old men on stage and in films since he was in his 20s. I recently saw him playing a bit part as a limousine driver in a fairly forgettable movie from the early 1930s (one of my great pleasures in life is Turner Classic Movies). I calculate that he would have been around 35 at the time, but he looked every day of 50.

It was a glimpse of what was to come.

Thanks to Google and Wikipedia I have discovered that he was pretty much the opposite of me politically. They characterize him (no pun intended) as ultra conservative in his personal life, supporting Barry Goldwater and eventually George Wallace in their presidential runs.

But that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of his work at all. I will look in on any movie that shows him in the credits, and prepare myself for the next little jewel of a performance, no matter what the quality of the rest of the film.

Yes, Grandmom Reilly was definitely onto something.

My Criminal Past

There is something about being 7 years old that makes you feel like you can get away with anything.

Logic, evidence, eye witnesses … none of these matter in the case against you. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little here.

In my Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, I was one of the good little boys. There was that one time I jumped out of the bushes to attack the kid who had beaten me up the day before, but that was considered just part of the mean streets in the world of the urban single-digit-age set.

I had gotten noticed in the neighborhood a year or two earlier when I had taken to standing on our street corner in my new Superman costume – hands on hips, with bright red cape flowing in the wind. I can still remember that as a feeling of total joy that no drug or personal accomplishment could ever come close to matching.

But it seemed to make the adults a little nervous. More than one approached my parents saying that they just knew I was going to run into traffic one day, confident that I could stop anything from a two-ton Edsel to an 18-wheeler as long as I was wearing the suit. When mom and dad brought this to my attention, I really only could think of one response:

“I'm not a complete idiot.”

But it turns out that maybe I was.

In 1961 our main source of amusement on Reedland Street was flipping baseball cards. One boy (it was a completely gender exclusive activity) would flip his card, and the other boy could call “match” or “unmatch” and flip his own. It was a face up/face down situation, and if you called it right you got both cards.

It was pretty intense and, as much as 7-year-olds can, we focused on the rhythms of the game. You could get on a “match” roll and call that five times in a row, then toss in an “unmatch” given your vague knowledge of the laws of averages, then back to your lucky “match” run. It went along fast, and cards could be won or lost before either player knew for sure who was winning.

And that's where my plan came in.

I could sense that every opponent concentrated on the game at hand, rather than his stash of cards. It occurred to me that I could very easily take three-to-five cards from the top of his pile, all the while pretending to hone in on the flipping. So I did just that.

It was an enormous success, too.

In almost no time my collection of cards had nearly doubled, although no one could remember me having a great run of luck. The secret was to spread out the crime. No one person lost so many cards that he questioned how his pile had dwindled to such an extent.

You're probably thinking that I may well be a criminal genius, having concocted such a sophisticated ruse at such an early age. If you were to label me “The Mozart of Misdeeds” or a “Prodigy of Pilferage” I couldn't really argue with you.

But like the criminal enterprises of my predecessors Al Capone and John Dillinger, it all came crashing down.

My slight of hand had gotten so routine that I failed to pay attention to the dangers of parental supervision. One of my victim's dads caught me in the act. He didn't confront me, but he told my mom. She told dad. They couldn't believe that I would do anything like that.

So I denied it.

That resulted in a huge neighborhood summit, where despite adult witness testimony I continued to deny it. Even under the pressure of an entire block of grown-ups and their children scowling at me day and night, I still managed to create what I imagined to be reasonable doubt through the power of denial. Just the same, my cards were confiscated and I was banned from baseball cards for one full year.

I'm not really sure if I ever came clean on the Great Card Caper – until now, I guess.

The whole episode did cure me of my wayward ways. It takes a lot of energy to engage in nefarious activities. And so I come to you today an upstanding citizen. Partly due to morality lessons learned over the decades, partly due to a sense of fairness that comes with maturity and partly due to a third consideration:

A life of crime is just too much trouble.

My Celebrity Encounters

Oh, I have had my brushes with the famous.

It began when I was around 8, and one of my best friends got to go on the Gene London kiddie show in Philadelphia. Granted, that wasn't me on the television, but it started my fascination with seeing those TV people in “real life.” I asked my friend to tell me the story of his day over and over. I couldn't get enough.

I think I was ahead of my time. It seems that infatuation with celebrity is the one overriding description that will define our era. There was the Paleolithic Age, the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age and now -- the Celebrity Age.

There have always been special people. The Greeks had their gods and the early Christians had their saints. Today we're crawling with them. In fact, between reality TV and politically slanted, opinionated blowhards … we may all be celebrities one day!

But before that happens, please bear with me as I attempt to inflate my own importance by bringing you the reflected glory of my celebrity encounters, shown here in chronological order:

Jack Dempsey
My father took my brother Dan and me to New York City in the summer of 1969, and it was a trip filled with memorable events. First, Phillies star Richie Allen failed to show up for a double-header we attended at Shea Stadium, and was suspended. But the main thrill was dinner at Jack Dempsey's Restaurant on Broadway.

He was the heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926 and, along with Babe Ruth, one of the most famous men in America at that time. And now … he was sitting at the dinner table with us! My dad had written a term paper on Dempsey's life years earlier and the champ was fascinated by that. He sat with us for about 15 minutes telling stories and even asked us what sports we liked best. I'm sure I didn't eat much with my mouth wide open the whole time. It's still hard for me to believe that dinner really happened.

Tom Poston
I think it was that same trip to New York where I saw this star of The Steve Allen Show (and years later handyman George on Newhart) crossing the street. I didn't say anything to him.

Harry Chapin
Dan, my cousin Michael and I went to The Main Point in Bryn Mawr to see Harry in 1972. That was an intimate, coffeehouse venue holding (I'm guessing) about 250-300 people with general seating – no assigned seats. Naturally we were late and when we arrived there were almost no seats left. Dan and Michael scrambled and found singles, far apart but just fine. I was the last man standing in a real-life game of musical chairs. There was a large speaker on a seat in the front row, however, which I moved to the stage and replaced with my derriere. There was a minor complaint from management, but seeing no other option they let me stay there.

Harry was an hour late, but his band put on a great show while we waited. When he arrived he was amazing. The show lasted about three hours, but the most amazing thing was that Harry spent each of his three breaks sitting next to me! Now, I had just seen him with Johnny Carson a week or so before, so when he asked me if the traffic was always this bad in Bryn Mawr, I responded “I don't know, heh-heh,” avoiding eye contact as much as I could. I was completely star-struck.

But Harry would have none of that. He kept talking to me, asked me what my favorite of his songs was (it was Taxi) then dedicated it to me on stage. Each break he was back in the seat next to me, telling a story or asking my opinion … generally treating me like an old friend. By the third break I was slapping him on the back and suggesting names for his next album. What an incredible man he was, and gone way too soon.

Vincent Price
In 1973 I was a freshman at Susquehanna University and one of my student jobs was to help set up the stage for guest speakers and various visiting dignitaries. We never got any dignitaries, but I suppose Vincent Price came fairly close. He certainly was the most dignified man I had ever met. Still is.
He chose me for the vital task of holding his coat while he gave his speech. His routine was to start out in his spooky voice with a spooky quote from Edgar Allan Poe while the auditorium was dark as night. Once the audience's spines were sufficiently chilled, he ever so slowly walked on stage in a spotlight in a long, black coat. At one point during his reminiscing about his career, he would say a predetermined word (which I now forget) and I would walk on and take his coat. When he was done (about 45 minutes later) I was to take (exactly) two steps on stage and hand him back his coat, folded over my left arm. He and I went over this procedure four times before the speech. I don't think he trusted me as a fellow performer. In spite of his lack of confidence, I performed flawlessly. As he passed me off stage, without looking at me even from the corner of his eye he said, "Well done, young man." Maybe it's just Mr. Price's eerie voice, but I have always wondered if he really meant that.

Larry Holmes
In 1975, I was an assistant manager at Wendy's in Phillipsburg, NJ, which is just across the Delaware River from Easton, PA, Larry's home town. Holmes was not yet a champion, but was a regular on TV fights. He loved Wendy's hamburgers and we gave him a “celebrity discount” if I remember correctly. I made it a point to shake his hand whenever he came in. (Harry had loosened me up a little.)

Henny Youngman
In 1980 I worked with a beautiful graphic artist named Lisa who moonlighted as a waitress at a swanky hotel restaurant on weekends. It was in that capacity that she waited on Mr. Youngman, who she reported was an avid flirter -- even as he approached 75 years of age. She flirted back to the extent that she got to design business cards for him and received two backstage passes to his show in Philadelphia.

And that's where I come in.

Lisa knew I was a sucker for Henny's old-style, rapid-fire act so she invited me to join her. Once backstage I was shocked at how bad he looked. He sat all alone before the show, looking very old, very pale and half asleep. He asked if I had any donuts, which I didn't. But as it happens, I always know where to get my hands on donuts ... so I got him a few.

Then stunningly, as soon as they called him to go on, he perked up, practically ran on stage and proceeded to do a good hour of material. When he came off stage he asked me if I had a car, and if so could I drive him to his hotel.

And so it came to be that I drove my Chevette piled with Henny's three violins and cases in the front passenger seat, and Lisa and Henny in the back about 10 blocks until I watched a comic legend and his violins walk off into the Center City Philadelphia night.

Lisa and I talked all the way back to her place about how we probably wouldn't see him around much longer. And sadly we were right ... he passed away 18 years later.

The Inn From the TV Show Newhart
On a trip to Vermont I visited the inn used for exterior shots on the show. The interior was completely different, and yes … a little disappointing.

Jon Stewart
In 1990, Jon was co-hosting Short Attention Span Theater on The Comedy Channel, a cable network almost no one watched … or even had, at that time. I was a big fan of the show, and I wrote a few little comedy bits that Jon actually used on air. I was thrilled, and when I saw that he was going to appear on a publicity gig at the King of Prussia Mall, I was not going to miss that.

I went there with two friends for moral support in case he blew me off, but when we got there he was all alone at a table in the middle of the mall. No one knew who he was. I walked up and introduced myself, starting with the very confident phrase, “You probably don't know me, but ...”

He shouted out (with very obvious over-enthusiasm), “Jack Huber! Jack Huber! I can't believe I'm meeting Jack Huber!” The walking traffic at the mall stopped, looked at the two of us, recognized neither and continued on their way.

Unfazed by all this non-recognition, he talked to me for about 30 minutes, encouraging me to keep writing and telling me that he really liked my work. He was about to get his first Letterman appearance and asked me to wish him luck. My level of fame has stayed about as it was then, but I hear that Jon has gotten more well known. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Joe Frazier
I was the biggest Joe Frazier fan I knew years before he ever fought Muhammad Ali. I followed each fight and even adopted as much of his training regimen as I could manage to do (significantly less that he did).

So when Smokin' Joe walked into the Erin Pub in Norwood in full tuxedo on St. Patrick's Day 1993, I was ready. He went from table to table, shaking hands and just generally interacting with the crowd. I had no idea why he was there but I didn't care. When he got to me I asked him about a fight he'd had when he was young.

Eddie Machen was a tough fighter, long past his prime, who was meant as a stepping stone to bigger fights to come. But the wily veteran managed to clip Joe, stunning him and threatening to derail the Joe Frazier Express.

Joe seemed eager to talk about a fight with someone other than Ali. “That old man hit me so hard I thought I was on the canvas! They told me later that I hadn't gone down!” The future champion came back to win that fight and I had a moment I still think about to this day.

John Gorka
If you don't know this singer/songwriter, you should check him out. I saw him at a lunch time concert at a bookstore in Bryn Mawr. I got there early and he was setting up chairs for the audience. I helped him out and wound up getting a song called Raven in the Storm dedicated to me for my troubles.

Thomas “They Blinded Me With Science” Dolby
I was working at Discovery Channel headquarters in Bethesda, MD in 1997, when one of MTV's earliest stars stopped by for a meeting. He was selling a new sound system for the Internet at the time, and gave an impressive presentation. There were about 10 of us in the meeting and we all introduced ourselves, as you do at those things. After the meeting he went to lunch with some Discovery higher-ups.

What impresses me to this day about Thomas Dolby is that about six hours later I ran into him on the elevator as we both were leaving the building … and he remembered my name, saying “It was a pleasure to meet you today, Jack.” Okay, maybe that's an old salesman's trick, but it's still working on me.

Well, if I've done my job correctly you're sitting there both dazzled by, and jealous of, all of my close relationships with these bigwigs, kahunas and VIPs. And isn't that really what it's all about these days?