Anita Garvin at Hollywood ’80
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
Of all of the celebrites I’ve met who worked with Laurel and Hardy, none can really approach the magnitude of Anita Garvin. When celebrities were gathered for the Hollywood ’80 Sons of the Desert convention in Los Angeles, Anita Garvin was truly the last of the living members of the Laurel and Hardy Stock Company, an informal title applied to those performers who frequently starred in the boys’ films. Anita worked in a whopping eleven films with Stan and Babe, twice portraying Stan’s wife and once as Ollie’s girlfriend. This doesn’t even take into account her numerous appearances with Charley Chase and the Our Gang – and an attempt by Hal Roach to form a female comedy team along the lines of L&H, using Anita with Marion Byron. Read the rest of this entry »
My friend Bob Satterfield would tell you that he has now been exonerated from feeling any guilt about the big pie fight at the Hollywood ’80 convention. He would tell you that I had my chance to get into another pie fight at the 2006 Sons of the Desert convention in Augusta, Georgia, so I have no right to be sore about not being able to get into the pie fight due to my age – or lack of it. But he would be wrong – and I have never let him live down the fact that the convention organizers set an age limit well beyond my eight years required to enter the pie fight. 
The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by the loony John Hinckley on March 30, 1981 left quite an impression on me when it occurred. I remember Mark Staples knocking on our front door and delivering the news after school that Monday. I was a Jimmy Carter supporter in the last election (mainly because my parents were), and I was incredulous that an actor could have ascended to the highest office in the land. I later came around to having a great deal of respect for Reagan, but even then it shook me that our leader could take an would-be assassin’s bullet. The other thing that I could never get out of my mind was that Reagan’s press secretary James Brady (seen above left just before the incident in the blue suit) had been shot in the head. 
It was at the Hollywood ’80 Sons of the Desert convention when I first became acquainted with the flight of steps that Laurel and Hardy encountered in their 1932 Acadamy Award winning film The Music Box. This short film had been the first one that I had ever seen from my favorite comedy team so I was well aware of the significance of where I was standing – on the corner of Vendome and Del Monte in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles on that warm summer afternoon, Thursday, July 31, 1980. Although I was only eight years old, I can distinctly remember being at this location, walking up and down the 133 steps, milling about, oohing and aahing, and then pressing on to our next locations. 
“Butch” Bond was certainly the most memorable of the Our Gang ‘tough guys’. He and his partner