My only claim is on my first weekend at college, I tried to dial the number of a chick in the dorm and ended up talking to the president of the university for a half hour. He was a nice guy and somehow I impressed him. He invited me to drop by his office. I don't know if you'd recognize the name-- Warren Bennis. He ended up becoming part of Al Gore's entourage.
My father, however, was really big on that sort of thing. Growing up, I was always amazed by the number of people he'd had a drink with at one time or the other. Some of them sounded impossible, but if you went back and fact-checked him, the stories stood up.
For instance, he used to talk about running into the Prince of Lichtenstein while he was in Austria. The prince invited him back to the house. Yeppers! Sure enough, Prince Franz Joseph II was a hearty partier. I looked him up. He was the first of the line to actually live in Lichtenstein.
Dad had all kinds of stories like that. A good part of it was due to the fact that he owned apartment buildings and he had gotten in with the local broadcast crowd. Everyone knew they could get a good cheap 1 bedroom from Ralph. As a result, he ended up with folks like Rod Serling, Gene Shepard, and Kenny Price as tenants. A lot of these guys I met as well when I was a little kid. I distinctly remember bumping into Rod Serling in a pale yellow golf sweater, smoking a cigarette in front of 5928 Belmont. Looking back on it, he was probably back in town, looking up a friend from WLWT.
"Hi Ralph."
"Hi Rod."
One night, Dad was in his 70's, I was over at the house watching TV with him. The PBS affiliate had Cab Calloway special on.
"I used to drink with him." Dad said. Mom rolled her eyes.
"I gotta call BS on that Dad." I replied.
"It's true!" he said. "He was playing at the Lookout House, and I was at the bar when he came off a set. He walked up and asked for a drink and the bartender said he didn't serve spooks."
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"'Whatcha drinking?' I asked Cab. Cab said scotch and soda. I turned to the bartender and asked, 'You'll serve me, right? Two scotch and sodas'. After that Cab would call me up whenever he was in town and we'd go out drinking together."
Knowing Dad, he was probably right.
He even ran into the Beatles once. He'd gone down to Miami to help his mom open up her place on North Bay Island for the winter. He stopped into the Fountain Bleu for a drink and saw 4 mopheads sitting in the back looking strung out. He asked the bartender who the bums were. The bartender told him it was the Beatles.
Dad had all kinds of stories like that.
" So Jack Lescoulie and I went over to Toots Shore's. Jackie Gleason isn't there, but he's left word for us to come by the apartment. We go over and bump into Kitty Carlisle. Jackie's there with a bunch of guys on a 3 day bender playing poker. I woke up on the boat on the way to Germany with no idea how I got there."
