I've had the luck to run into a lot of famous people. Mostly this was because of my job but there were also random chance meetings. Some of these encounters were barely a glance, some were short casual chats and some were pretty long term work situations. These are in no particular order of importance. I've kept a list forever and will just start working my way through them with little stories for context. This is the order I wrote them.
Genevive Pool Schlagheck Patty Kazmaier-Sandt John Alexander Governor James Rhodes Grace Slick Michael Jackson
Genevive Pool Schlagheck
This is my paternal grandmother in a photograph taken in 1909 when she was 20 years old. I never met her as she died long before I was born when she was 31 of something that would be easily cured today. I have only come across a few photos of her and my Dad was just 7 when she died so he didn't have many memories to pass along to me.
Even more sadly I have no photos of my maternal grandmother Dorothea Granat Murciak. She was just 36 in 1921 when she died, also of something easily cured today. My Mom was just 4 and had no memories she could pass along.
They weren't really famous but I wanted to give them this place on my list because I'm sure they would have been famous if they had lived long enough. At least famous for the sympathy they would have received for having to deal with me as one of their grandsons.
Patty Kazmaier-Sandt
Patty is the first celebrity I ever met although she wasn’t a celebrity at the time,
Thanks to the US Woman’s Hockey team, girls playing hockey is no longer out of the norm but it certainly isn’t a universal thing. When I was in grade school I met a girl who was about the same age as me and she went on to be come an iconic hockey player and so the first celebrity I ever met.
When I was growing up there was an older couple that lived down the street. Every summer their son would visit bringing his wife and 6 daughters (yes 6) for a couple weeks. This was before Title 9 passed so girls playing sports wasn’t fully supported in schools. Folks then wouldn’t have expected much but boy could these girls play sports. This was back in my grade school days and the neighborhood boys were all in puppy love with the Kazmaier girls because, in general, they were better at everything than we were. Their Dad had found them proper coaches in all sorts of sports including boxing. The boxing thing blew all our little boy minds. To be honest and put it into proper perspective their Dad wasn’t just a doting father, he was Dick Kazmaier who is the only Ivy League football player to have won the Heisman Trophy (Given to the best NCAA Division 1 football player each year) so it kind of figured he could track down good coaches. A few of the girls also played hockey but we never got to do that with them because they only came during the summer. Two went on to play D1 college ice hockey. Patty played at Princeton and had a stellar career. Sadly she died at 28 of a rare blood disorder. Her Dad worked with the USA Hockey Foundation and created the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award which is awarded to the top player in NCAA Division 1 women’s hockey every year. That is the trophy in the picture above.
I’m sure Patty is smiling down from heaven at all the girls playing hockey especially the ones on teams that win tournaments . . . that being said I would guess that if Patty was playing them at an equal age she would check them into a wall which technically isn’t allowed in most woman’s hockey but Patty did know how to box.
John Alexander
The black and white photo is John Alexander the tennis player. I'm on the right pointing to his world ranking at the time of my college days.
It is a bit of a stretch to say I met John Alexander (70-80’s pro tennis player and later member of Parliement in Australia), more of a passing nod or handing him some tennis balls or serving him some food at the local tennis tournament party, but he ended up having a huge influence in my life so I’m including him here.
Back in my college days in the 70’s I was really into tennis. I got moderately good but the best I could do was getting into qualifying tournaments for proper tournaments on the circuit hoping to qualify to get into the early rounds of the main draws. My ultimate goal was to get a round or two into a local tournament and play against John Alexander. In particular because of the proper way the officials would announce the serves. I always wondered how they would get around announcing our match as “Mr. Alexander is serving Mr. Alexander”. Perhaps “Mr John Alexander serving Mr. Jon “no h” Alexander.” (My Dad said if I ever got to play him he would have beaten the “h” out of me anyway.)
At the time the circuit had a stop in Columbus and I would volunteer to help since it was a way to see some of the matches and “mingle” with the players. This was back in the time the pros didn’t travel with their own support groups so you could volunteer to help them warm up as well as help out at the party were local celebrities and big wigs got to mingle with pro tennis players for an evening. If nothing else I got to hear all sorts of great stories.
The Aussies had a reputation as the biggest partiers. Now this was my college days and I worked in a bar to help pay my way so fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) had great access to lower priced beer. One of the things we did to impress the girls was to chug a pint or pitcher of beer in one gulp. Looking back I’m sure the girls were just tolerating us but that was the game we played. We heard through the tennis party grapevine that John Alexander could not only chug a pitcher of beer but could do it without using his hands. This put him into god-like status for us and we tried to sort out how he did this having never been in a situation where we could see him do it for ourselves. I could never sort out how to do it with a glass pitcher but did get to the point where perhaps only half of what was in a lighter plastic pitcher ended up drenching my shirt. All that was just to set up the story I wanted to pass along about the huge influence he was in my life.
During my college days in the summer I worked at Camp Starlight, a private camp for little rich kids from New York City. The kids were there for 8 weeks so there was a pretty big staff that included about 50-70 college students from England on some sort of visa exchange. There was always a good natured rivalry between the Brits and the American counselors. If one of us did 50 push ups one of them would do 51. If one of us ate 6 hotdogs one of them would eat 7 etc. The camp was divided into cabins with about 12 kids and 2 counselors in each. One counselor always had to be with the kids. We did get time off at night, roughly 8-12pm each day but that meant one counselor had to be on when the other was off. So bottom line you had to have a good working relationship with your co-counselor. My co-counselor one year was Pete Cornish, a Brit. All of us college age counselors got to camp a week before the kids arrived so there was time to try sort out if there was anyone you could have a summer fling with. Between the kids and counselors there were about 700 people at the camp so they had a full time doctor and 3 nurses. One of the nurses (Laura) caught my eye. One night before the kids arrived Pete and I drove into a local small town (Hancock, NY) where there were several pubs that counselors from all the surrounding camps would hang out at. On the way in Pete asked me if there was anyone I was interested in. I mentioned Laura. He said, “Well that is a problem. I was kind of looking at her as well. And only one of us can coordinate our nights off with her.” We debated how best to resolve this and he suggested we have some sort of contest and whomever won would get to ask her out. If she said “No” then the other would get a chance. By this time we’d made it to our pub of choice (Mike’s Modern Bar) and coincidentally Laura was there as well sitting on the other side of the room chatting up some folks. The Brits always made a bit of a deal about any competition and when we settled in with some other folks from camp Pete announced what we were up to. He suggested that we chug a pint of beer and whomever finished first would get to ask Laura out. I said Laura was worth more than a pint and suggested we chug a pitcher (because of my “training” trying to match John Alexander’s “no hands” feat”). There was a lot of posturing at this point and our group got a bit loud. The pitchers came, someone counted down to the start and although I did use my hands I invoked my inner “John Alexander” and downed the pitcher before Pete. He graciously shook my hand, admitted his defeat, and wished me well.
Across the room Laura had asked what the ruckus was all about, was told, and watched from afar. This gave her a moment to gather her response. I went over and she said “So you won. I will go out with you if you can beat me in a contest.” I said “Ooookkkaaayyy, what’s the contest?” She said “Dirty jokes. We go back and forth and whomever runs out of dirty jokes first loses.” Now as I mentioned I had worked at a bar so I had a fairly large number I could repeat but there are dirty jokes and there are dirty jokes you really shouldn’t tell a woman if you are looking for a date. She had no such restrictions and as it turns out nurses and doctors have a much bigger pool of dirty jokes to pull from and because they work with bodies all the time they tend to have way fewer inhibitions. Bottom line she won that competition but she said I put up a good showing so out of pity she would go out on a date with me.
A bit over a year later we were married and we’ve been together ever since. We have four sons who take some perverse family pride in the fact that their father won their mother in a beer drinking contest. I’m not sure I could have done it without the inspiration of trying to equal John Alexander’s amazing talent.
Governor Jame Rhodes of Ohio (1963-71 1975-1983)
Just down the street from where I lived growing up in Maumee, Ohio was an old mansion, the Wolcott-Hull house. It was built in 1827 by Judge James Wolcott. It had fallen into disrepair over the years and was being restored by the local historical society in the 1960’s. In the restoration they discovered secret doors that led to hidden rooms with old artifacts that indicated this had been one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad before and during the Civil War. Back in the 1800’s there were a series of canals for commerce connecting the Ohio River to Lake Erie. The last canal emptied out into the Maumee river just above this mansion. This was the southern most part of the bay that led to Lake Erie which was then a relatively short crossing to Canada and freedom for the escaping slaves.
Some friends and I were out playing one summer and all of a sudden all these police cars and limousines were rolling into the neighborhood headed to the Wolcutt-Hull house. We went down to see what was going on and Governor Rhodes was there for the official opening. He gave a little speech and then took pictures with some of the folks that had gathered. One of his press people thought it would be good if they got some pictures of him with kids and corralled us to do this. He chatted a little with us and then they lined us up and took the picture. I have no recollection what he said but hey he was famous and I talked to him so I included him here.
The picture is a poloraid I was given. I was about 11 in this picture. With me is my friend Les and some baby I don’t know, along with Governor Rhodes. Some years later he was the one that called out the Ohio National Guard to suppress the Vietnam war protest at Kent State where 4 students were killed. If I’d known that was coming I would have kicked him in the shin and never allowed my picture to be taken with him.
This one was some time around 2010.
I live in Marin county just north of San Francisco. It is a gorgeous area with the San Francisco Bay on one side, the Pacific Ocean on the other and giant Redwood trees all around. A pretty obvious attraction for the well to do and celebrity sorts, plus back in the day the hippies of the 60’s looking for something a bit more rural than Haight-Asbury. Not that it happens all the time but it isn’t surprising to run into a famous person here or there. Grace Slick lived in the area for a while and had certainly gotten the word out in her older age that she just wanted to be left alone. For that matter even when she was younger she had a reputation for being a bit prickly. I was always a fan of Jefferson Airplane though.
One random day I was sitting at the red light at 4th and C St in San Rafael listening to some rock station and “White Rabbit” came on. Out of the blue Grace Slick was walking through the cross walk not 10 feet in front of me. I rolled down my windows and cranked up the song so she could hear it. She did, looked straight at me and flipped me off with both hands.
Now I can’t say I really met Grace Slick but who else among you can claim to have been flipped off by her one on one.