The Terrible Catsafterme

I was excited about a lot of things when I headed to Las Vegas during the Summer of 1992, but there wasn’t anything about the trip that excited me more than to get to meet Jacquie Lyn. For as many years as I had been a Laurel and Hardy fan, I had longed to find out whatever had happened to this young actress, who was featured very prominently in the 1932 Laurel and Hardy feature film Pack Up Your Troubles, and had starred in two Our Gang shorts Birthday Blues and Free Wheeling. In fact, I wasn’t the only one looking for her. Read the rest of this entry »

Denise and I were trying to come up with the time period when our cat Niki first appeared in our lives and what we decided was that she first showed up, unannounced and unsolicited during the summer of 1985. It was most likely one of the summer holidays – possibly the Fourth of July or Labor Day. Denise recalls that she was playing outside with the Tangeman kids and stumbled upon this oddly-colored tortoiseshell tabby cat. She had splotches of black, orange, brown, and one odd patch of white on her chest. Read the rest of this entry »

For week, maybe even months, before we actually departed for the 8th International Convention of the Sons of the Desert, my friend Jon Petering kept telling me, “Buddy, I can’t wait to get on that plane.” Yes, for some odd reason one of my fellow Kroger baggers was going along with us to Las Vegas to attend the convention. It was a little odd, because he had no real interest in Laurel and Hardy, but the allure of Las Vegas and the untold pleasures he could find there was too much to resist. In the end, his favorite quote was “Buddy, there’s nothing to do here”, and he spent a lot of his time sitting in the room watching baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

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I had created four issues of the newsletter titled Told in the Whole, the publication for the Springfield Towed in a Hole tent of the Sons of the Desert, between 1986 and 1987. My momentum only stopped because the tent stopped actually having any meetings. Of course, many things in my life happened that would have precluded me from putting too much emphasis on this aspect of my life anyway – namely spending lots of time with my first girlfriend Christi and the birth of my daughter Ashleigh. Nevertheless, by Fall of 1990, I was hoping to resume publication of this fine newsletter. In fact, I even wrote a tribute to my friend, actress Virginia Karns who had starred with Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland. Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps you’re wondering how a real life actress can get the credit as playing Tinkerbell in the 1953 Walt Disney animated classic Peter Pan, especially since Tinkerbell didn’t talk in the film. Well here’s how: In the early days of Disney animation, live actors were hired to pantomime the movements of their on-screen counterparts. Margaret Kerry was the actress who was tapped to be old Tink. But to solidify her presence in the actual film, she also provided the voice of one of the red-headed mermaid in the Neverland lagoon. But when I first met Margaret Kerry, I didn’t really know much about her involvement with Peter Pan. Read the rest of this entry »