Down at Our Rendezvous…
Friday, August 31st, 2007
An ode to Three’s Company…It was December 10, 1985 when my flirtation with collecting autographs from the cast members of Three’s Company first began. When sending requests through the mail, I generally steered clear of most ‘high-caliber’ stars of the current day. They were generally met with one form of rejection or another. However, John Ritter did not disappoint me. He signed both the photo that I sent him along with two notecards, even adding a humorous inscription on one. These were returned in an extremely timely fashion as well: on December 23, just two days before Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »
I hadn’t done much autograph requesting through the mail once Summer of 1985 ended and I rolled into the Fall and another school year. But as usual, something triggered a renewal in my interest as Christmas began to approach. It was most likely another visit to one of Sons of the Desert meetings in Springfield and the most recent gander at Carl Ahlm’s collection. I had him order me a new batch of photos from his source and was primed to do some serious requestage over Christmas break. I had the wild idea that celebrities were more ‘generous’ with their requestors around the holidays. 
It appears that we had two Thanksgiving celebrations in 1985. This particular year, Thanksgiving fell on Thursday, November 28 in 1985. This was less than two weeks after Grandpa Murphy’s 62nd birthday which is November 15. Not long before, he had undergone open-heart surgery. This is one of those holidays that would have surely been assigned to memory oblivion had we not had these nice family photos of the event. I speculate that we had an early Thanksgiving celebration combined with Grandpa’s birthday so that Darlene could celebrate with us. I’m betting that she and Bob were able to make it home from Denver during the early part of November, but not Thanksgiving, so we had an additional celebration for her benefit. This makes sense because Bob was released from the army on November 30 and likely had to be back in Colorado in order to complete his service exit paperwork.