Misadventures on Hollywood Boulevard
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
Of the many times I have been to California and trod the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, gaping at the many stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, I seldom took any photos of the area – even during recent visits. In fact, the best I did was a lone photo of me in front of the lion statue at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (which was known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre at the time) and some shots of the stars without me in them from 1988 ! So after we finished up with our lunch with Adam Sadowsky on Monday, October 6, 2008, Jimmy drove me over to the Walk of Fame area where we parked the car and simply browsed the area. Read the rest of this entry »
After we had seen the Playboy Mansion and had our chance encounter with Brian Wilson on the morning of Monday, October 6, 2008, Jimmy, Dick, and I – while in the Beverly Hills area – decided to stop by the Will Rogers Memorial Park and check out the surroundings. Yes, this park is best known for the incident in which Wham frontman George Michael was arrested in the men’s room for acts we won’t go into here – but to me, it was more significant as being the spot where Laurel and Hardy filmed the opening scenes of their 1932 feature Pack Up Your Troubles. 
I must confess that as I look at some of the photos from the 1986 Valley Forge Sons of the Desert convention, I get a little bit annoyed at myself for not spending more time with my family. As I was fourteen years old, it might be tempting for me to say that I thought I was a little too cool to hang out with them – but the fact is that they simply weren’t geeky enough for me. Whereas Mom, Dad, and Denise were hanging out together and snapping photos of Denise mingling with the celebrities (and the great family shot at left, which I missed out on), I was off alone hob-knobbing with the stars and club ‘bigwigs.’ So while my goal at that time didn’t involve getting pictures with any of them, Denise ended up with a whole slew of great shots. Dumb kid. 
Although I had briefly met Frank “Junior” Coghlan twice during visits to California – the first at the Hollywood Collectors Show in 1995, and the second at the Way Out West Tent 30th Anniversary banquet in 1997, I had never really sat down to talk to him or gotten a photo with him. And to tell the truth, I had no intention of trying to look him up during any of my most recent visits. He had only appeared in one Our Gang film, the early silent Giants Vs. Yanks in 1923, and Bob had already gotten me a signed photo. But thankfully, Bob suggested that we stop by and pay him a visit – and as usual, I am all the better for it. 
When I first began to plan my October 2008 trip to California nearly a year before it took place, there were four goals that I had in mind which I hoped to accomplish while there – and I had no idea if any of the four would even be possible to arrange. Soon things began to really take shape and not long before I left, I had made arrangements to make three of them actually happen – and these all will be covered in this series of postings. I will go ahead and tell you the fourth since it didn’t happen: an old high school friend is employed by NBC in the publicity department and I had hoped to set up a private tour of the facility and sets. She didn’t seem to think that there was anything of interest that she could show me (or perhaps she just didn’t want to), so that prospect was quickly nixed. Turns out her job took her to New York before I even arrived in California, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.