Chekov…Check!
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
As I continue to check off my list of meeting cast members from the original Star Trek series, Walter Koenig, who portrayed Pavel Chekov, was the most recent in my short list of encounters. Although my first two meetings (with George Takei and Leonard Nimoy) fall into the category of ‘chance encounters,’ the one with Mr. Koenig was hardly out of this world. He was appearing, along with a host of other celebs, including some from more recent incarnations of Star Trek, at the Chiller Theatre show on Saturday, April 18, 2009. Read the rest of this entry »
I am a Twilight Zone nut. Yes, I know…I am a nut about many things, but The Twilight Zone is one of my all-time favorites. I know, I have many all-time favorites. But we’re getting off the track here. Although my collection has never really advanced much along these lines, I had hoped to collect autographs from anyone I encountered who had starred in an episode of this great anthology series of the early 60’s. It is particularly nice to obtain such a signature on a photograph actually from the show. 
…And she certainly wasn’t the first. Back in the mid-nineties, I used to hear it on a weekly basis it seemed. Having high public exposure when I worked at Kroger, customers galore would often tell me of my resemblance to Kiefer, some concerned that I might actually be a vampire as he was in The Lost Boys. But the first and only celebrity to date to tell me that I looked like Kiefer Sutherland was Erin Gray when I met her at the Hollywood Collectors Show in California during my Summer visit of 1997. 
Do you have any idea what you might say if you were to meet the very last American survivor of World War 1? Well, I can tell you exactly what I said during my face-to-face encounter with him – and I can tell you that it wasn’t a heck of a lot. Mostly I just sat there and stared in wide-eyed wonderment, basking in the unparalleled honor of meeting Frank Buckles, a 108-year old veteran of the First World War. In the entire world – at this particular time – only five men who had served in this war still survived; and Frank Buckles was the only survivor who served the United States. Mr. Buckles is and will always be the last American doughboy. 
Beverly Washburn is a former child actress who is most noted for her role as Lisbeth Searcy in the 1957 Walt Disney classic Old Yeller (as seen at right). Outside of that film, she had numerous appearances in a wide array of over 50 TV shows and films over a span of nearly twenty years. Among them the initial Superman film Superman and the Mole-Men, Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, Dragnet, The Patty Duke Show, and Star Trek. Her acting work these days is limited but her face still turns up now and then.