Thomas Benton Roberts 1980 and 1986
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Thomas Benton Roberts was the only celebrity at the Hollywood ’80 Sons of the Desert convention who signed my autograph book twice. I reckon that I had him do this because I really had no idea who he was at the time. Later on I realized that he appeared in the classic Laurel and Hardy silent film Two Tars as the hapless victim of Stan’s gushy tomato. Still later, I found out that Thomas Benton Roberts actually meant much more to the production of the L&H films. He was what was referred-to-as a ‘stand-by carpenter’ – a less-than-glamourous term for a special effects artist. Read the rest of this entry »
The name Roy Seawright probably doesn’t mean much to the average Joe. But to me in 1986, he was a super-celebrity, having worked with Laurel and Hardy at the Hal Roach Studios as a special effects man. He was responsible for aiding Stan Laurel in igniting his thumb in Way Out West, smoking his thumb in Block-Heads, and wiggling his ears in Blotto. He helped design the special effects so that Laurel and Hardy could play their own sons in the film Brats and appear to be one-third the size of their parental counterparts. Since these films meant so much in my life, this made Mr. Seawright a huge celebrity and a highly desirable autograph in my eyes. 
I met Lee McAdams during the Summer of 1988 when Shirely Yaussy, one of our fellow Beavercreek Church of the Brethren members and a close friend of our family, suggested that I might carpool with Lee to camp Woodland Altars for our week at Youth camp. Lee lived in Tipp City and immediately accepted me as a friend after I was dropped off at his place. For the next few years of camp, our names synonymous with ‘hell-raisers’ – or at least as close as you can come to that at church camp. Our counselor Mark from 1989 saw me again about a dozen years later and remembered me as ‘one of those Metallica guys.’ Obviously he had confused me with Lee. 
I wasn’t particularly busy with autograph collecting in March of 1986, but I did manage to send out three requests on March 10. One (of several) to