So What About Those Music Box Steps? – Part 1
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I didn’t get the chance to actually meet Our Gang member Jean Darling until the Nashville convention in 2002, but I was thrilled that she actually knew my name as soon as she heard it. We had exchanged some letters and such over the years, the first being her response to the letter and $9.00 I sent her on December 17, 1985. Jean was offering a package deal of six autographed 5.5″ x 8.5″ photos, nine signed notecards, and her book and cassette tape that she had created as her radio personality Aunty Poppy. The photos can be seen at right, below, and in the posting 
Every once in a while, I came up with a swell idea. Here’s one of them: I had purchased a half-dozen Three Stooges comic books that were distributed by Gold Key in the mid-to-late 1960’s. I’m not sure where exactly I picked them up, but if I had to guess, I’d say I found them at a memorabilia show at the Dayton Mall. So I decided to marry my comic book fascination with my autograph collecting habit and thereby shipped off four of these colorful Three Stooges comic books to Curly-Joe DeRita, one of only two of the then-surviving members of the classic comedy team. 
It was clear that I had begun to get a bit cocky with my autograph collecting habits as 1985 drew to a close. I had had some great success stories during my first year of solid ‘by-mail-request’ autograph collecting. I was being led down the primrose path that most stars, no matter how big, would respond to autograph requests. But as the results of my final Christmas break push of eight autographs requests would prove, it wasn’t always so easy.