Monty O’Grady
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Monty O’Grady certainly isn’t the most recognized among the names of the Our Gang child actors, but he certainly held one of the most unique roles in the history of the series. He was in five of the very earliest of the comedies, beginning in 1922 with the first entry in the series, simply entitled Our Gang. It was pure dumb luck – or possibly fate – that I was able to acquire a good address for Mr. O’Grady just a few years before he passed away. Read the rest of this entry »
Joan Fontaine’s career would have been less distinguished – at least in my eyes – had it not been for her back-to-back starring roles in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s finest films: the Academy Award winning Rebecca, for which Fontaine was nominated for an Oscar herself, and Suspicion, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. Back in 1988 when I was on my Hitchcock autograph collecting kick, I tried to send her two Hitchcock photos to sign, but I had the wrong address. 
Almost immediately following my California vacation with Bob in the Summer of 1997, I began the single largest autograph collecting drive in the history of Brad – no doubt inspired by my admiration for the Bob’s massive collection. It would go on for well over a year and nearly double my existing collection at that point. The philosophy behind the initiative was simple: to make some effort every single day to obtain a new autograph. I had tried something along these lines a couple of years prior, but in that case it was to send MAD Magazine a letter every day in hopes of getting one published. That lasted all of three days, but this one did not falter.
Armed with absolutely nothing, I decided to send Ellen Corby a request for an autographed photo. Although she was best known for her role as Grandma Esther Walton in the popular series The Waltons, the photo I was after was the same one that my friend Bob had received from her. Before her days as an actress, Ellen Hansen (as she was then known), was a script girl working at the Hal Roach Studios. In fact it was there that she met her future husband Francis Corby who was working as a cameraman for Roach. 
As I mentioned in my previous posting about the trip that Lisa and I took to Minneapolis for the Block-Heads Tent 30th Anniversary gathering, one of the major drawing points to get me there was the good chance that Gordon “Porky” Lee from the Our Gang series would be attending as a special guest. Living in Minneapolis at the time, he rarely made any appearances at collector shows or meetings in California – and he had yet to be invited to any Sons of the Desert conventions. I thought that this might be my only chance to get to meet one of my all-time favorite Little Rascals.