The Fall of 1980 – Life as a Nine Year Old
Monday, March 10th, 2008
So what was I doing as I turned nine? Well blowing out a lone “number 9” candle on a chocolate iced cake for one thing. We had a small gathering of family over at our place and one gift I received was a new red winter coat. That’s pretty much all I know about the birthday. I also know what I went out as on Halloween – well, sorta. I was the highly polictically incorrect arab oil magnate. Denise was a sickenly adorable angel. I fondly recall our days of scouring the neighborhood to achieve the heaviest pillowcase of candy treats. I don’t remember if it was this year or not that we got an apple from the Hinds, prompting Kenny Carroll to say as we exited the driveway, “so where do we ditch the apple?” Read the rest of this entry »
Inside an old Airequipt slide magazine sits a batch of slides situated between the Michigan 1972 trip and my first birthday, labelled only as Leisure At Home. A few of these photos are familiar to me as there were eventually prints made of them which ended up in our family photo albums. Others remained just as they were, little treasures nestled comfortably in their home, waiting to be discovered…and shared here on the Terrible Catsafterme. And so… 
Joan Fontaine’s career would have been less distinguished – at least in my eyes – had it not been for her back-to-back starring roles in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s finest films: the Academy Award winning Rebecca, for which Fontaine was nominated for an Oscar herself, and Suspicion, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. Back in 1988 when I was on my Hitchcock autograph collecting kick, I tried to send her two Hitchcock photos to sign, but I had the wrong address. 
Betty White is one of the most recognizable friendly faces in all of televisiondom. As a star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls, she has won the hearts of millions. Those were great roles for her and great shows, but probably the most important role to me was her turn as Bob Newhart’s boss on the short-lived TV show Bob. I have never actually written to Betty White, but I did purchase the cheap signed photo of her seen at right from a dealer in 1998.