Mike Minges: Still Making the Difference
Monday, December 31st, 2007
I first met Mike Minges in our tenth grade gym class in 1987. He was an average, normal-looking and normal-acting guy with a good sense of humor. He was always nice to everyone around him and well-liked by all the other students. There was no hidden agenda or inherent weirdness that characterized many of my friends at the time. Just a clean-cut boy from Beavercreek, Ohio – not prone to getting into too much trouble. But he laughed at my jokes, and I liked that. Read the rest of this entry »
Rolfe Sedan had an extremely distiguished career as a character actor playing more than 250 different roles from the early 1920′s to the late 1970′s in both film and telelvision. Among his most notable roles was his role as Mr. Beasley the postman on The George Burns – Gracie Allen Show, but what really piqued my interest was his role as a hotel desk clerk in the Laurel and Hardy classic Double Whoopee in 1929. 
Following our visit with Mildred Kornman in San Diego on Tuesday, October 4, 2005, Jimmy and I hightailed it back to Hollywood to check off a few more items on my list of things to accomplish. You wouldn’t think it would take to long to go from one place to the other, both of them being hubs of Southern California, but traffic was always disastrous at any and all times of the day. It was well after 1:00pm if not later before we had reached the first of our destinations, Hollenbeck Park, the site where Laurel and Hardy filmed their two-reeler Men O’ War in 1929. This was the first time I had ever been to this great location. (More on that later). 
At left is a photo that I snapped (instead of having the good sense to actually get into) of several members of the Springfield Towed in a Hole Tent of the Sons of the Desert surrounding Laurel and Hardy co-star Virginia Karns Patterson in the Fall of 1986. Clockwise from the kneeling girl, we see Carla Degar, Ron Weber, George Willeman, Larry Smith, Virginia, and finally Jim Harwood. These guys sort of represented the new generation of tent members as literally all of them began coming to the meetings in 1986, just as I was coming out of my shell and breaking forth into the ‘world’ of Laurel and Hardy. 
Lance was one of a dozen or so guys that held the unenviable rank as being my best friend for an unspecified period of time. Our time as comrades was during the bulk of 1988. Oddly enough, we first met on bad terms when I made some wisecrack about Lance’s appearance during Miss Joyner’s math class at Beavercreek High School. He called me on it…and consequently garnered my respect. It wasn’t long before we became the best of friends and were practically inseparable for the Summer of ’88. Among the friends that I had at the time, Lance was certainly the most ‘out there’ – specifically he was a part of the alternative world which was absolutely foreign to me, hence my initial immature digs at him.