A Smile and a Wink
Friday, July 11th, 2014
I never took game shows very seriously, but for one exception. They were moderately entertaining fodder in the 70’s and 80’s, but once we got into the 90’s – with the brief exception of Who Want’s to Be a Millionaire and the occasional tuning into Jeopardy, I mostly steer clear of them. The one big exception was the game show Tic Tac Dough, which for some reason appealed to me so much in the early 1980’s that there was a span of a couple of months that I watched two episodes a night and physically documented how many questions I got right on each episode. Read the rest of this entry »
A real interest in my ancestors came alive on May 17, 2014. My Dad had been researching his ancestry – particularly that of the elusive Farrell line – in recent days, and I would receive periodic updates on his findings. I had never met a single member my ancestral Farrell lineage beyond my Dad, as my grandfather Francis had died at the relatively young age of 52 on November 29, 1963. And as young as he was when he died, all of his siblings’ deaths had preceded his. Beyond that, even my Dad only knew two of his great-uncles on his Grandfather’s side. The mysteries were mounting up… 
I must admit that at the time that I met Scott Wilson, I hadn’t yet actually seen the 1967 film In Cold Blood, a disturbing picture based on the novel by Truman Capote. But based on the strength of the fact that he was in it, I decided to put him on my list of autographs to pick up at the HorrorHound event in Cincinnati on March 22, 2013. I was even more pleasantly surprised that amidst all of the overblown photos of Mr. Wilson from his current hit TV series The Walking Dead – a show which I still have never once seen – there was a very iconic photo on his table, one that I had seen time and time again included in the Robert Blake section of the Maltin-Bann book Our Gang: The Life and Times of the Little Rascals. 
There is an extremely broad age range of folks – like me – who grew up watching Sesame Street on PBS. Those who did most certainly have many memories of their group of TV friends, although those groups may vary depending on whether you started watching it when it first began in 1969 or just started watching this year. Except of course for the characters Bob Johnson (played by Bob McGrath) and Susan (Loretta Long), because they are the only two human actors who have been with the show for its incredible 45-year run.