Dante’s Info #15 and February 1996
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Using my little tacky calendar as a memory jogger helped me to reveal what was going on in my life in February of 1996. As the January purgatory of ‘96 came to an end, I was approaching completion of the Winter 1996 edition of Dante’s Info #15. In fact for the next year I signified the exact day that I first completed the first copy – that is, had it completely printed, folded, and stapled – as D.I. Day in my calendar and I highlighted that day with a yellow highlighter. This day first came on February 5, 1996. Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Benton Roberts was the only celebrity at the Hollywood ‘80 Sons of the Desert convention who signed my autograph book twice. I reckon that I had him do this because I really had no idea who he was at the time. Later on I realized that he appeared in the classic Laurel and Hardy silent film Two Tars as the hapless victim of Stan’s gushy tomato. Still later, I found out that Thomas Benton Roberts actually meant much more to the production of the L&H films. He was what was referred-to-as a ’stand-by carpenter’ – a less-than-glamourous term for a special effects artist. 
Although I did a decent job of remembering my last week as a camper at Woodland Altars in 1990, I had only a pathetic display of photos from the trip. It was obvious that I didn’t place much importance on photos like I do today. Fortunately when I met up with my friend and fellow camper Lee McAdams, I found that he had quite an impressive array of photos from this week at camp that he was willing to share with me. So enjoy these various poses of our group and some of me in various stages of mugging and tongue-wagging. And as you can see, I wasn’t kidding about wearing sunglasses 24/7. 
The name Roy Seawright probably doesn’t mean much to the average Joe. But to me in 1986, he was a super-celebrity, having worked with Laurel and Hardy at the Hal Roach Studios as a special effects man. He was responsible for aiding Stan Laurel in igniting his thumb in Way Out West, smoking his thumb in Block-Heads, and wiggling his ears in Blotto. He helped design the special effects so that Laurel and Hardy could play their own sons in the film Brats and appear to be one-third the size of their parental counterparts. Since these films meant so much in my life, this made Mr. Seawright a huge celebrity and a highly desirable autograph in my eyes. 
I met Lee McAdams during the Summer of 1988 when Shirely Yaussy, one of our fellow Beavercreek Church of the Brethren members and a close friend of our family, suggested that I might carpool with Lee to camp Woodland Altars for our week at Youth camp. Lee lived in Tipp City and immediately accepted me as a friend after I was dropped off at his place. For the next few years of camp, our names synonymous with ‘hell-raisers’ – or at least as close as you can come to that at church camp. Our counselor Mark from 1989 saw me again about a dozen years later and remembered me as ‘one of those Metallica guys.’ Obviously he had confused me with Lee.