On the Waterfront

It was a good while ago when I read it, but I never forgot Anthony DePalma's valentine to his father about his working as a longshoreman on the Hoboken Docks.

It was in the New York Times Sunday Magazine section that I used to read religiously. Not so much anymore. Never mind why. The reason I'm thinking of it again is because I saw a book review in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, "On This Ground," by Anthony DePalma, reviewed by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Even since the Sunday magazine story, which was in 1988, I always looked for Mr. DePalma's byline in the NYT. Generally his stories were about the waterfront, its changes, its organized crime side, the latest corruption cases against organized crime. He wrote what he knew best.

I always wondered by I was no longer reading Mr. DePalma's byline. Simple. He left the Times in 2008 and devoted his time to teaching and writing several books. On the lively Google page his name takes you to  you see a wiry man of 73, who looks hale and hearty. He's only a few years younger than myself, so we've been alive for the same presidents.

His current book is about a Newark Catholic prep school that came back from the abyss of the riots and is thriving quite nicely under Father Edwin Leahy. Mr. DePalma is himself a product of New Jersey Catholic school education, graduating Seton Hall University. 

His current book tells of the year he spent at St. Benedict's Prep interviewing students, faculty and administrators. The reviewer is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute who is the author of "No Way to Treat a Child." Mr. DePalma's book gets a resounding thumbs up.

It was nice to learn that Mr. DePalma is still with us. In his Sunday magazine piece titled, "From Fathers to Sons on the Waterfront," Mr. DePalma writes of growing up in Hoboken with 5 siblings, with a mother who controlled the house and a father who worked as a longshoreman on the Hoboken docks, until one day in 1971 he went to work and the gates were closed. Locked. For good. Basically, containerization changed everything.

His father was 60 when the gates were locked. He had been on the docks for 32 years. Eventually, his father is an A-Man, the most senior of the longshoremen which guarantees him work, or pay even if there is no work.

When they were making the movie "On the Waterfront" Anthony's father tells of the time the movie people wanted to use "his legs" on camera for the scene when Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, staggers back to the shack after his fight with Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J. Cobb. His father declined. He wanted to work. (As to whose legs might have been used, if anyone's, it is left to those who research movies.)

Mr. DePalma never worked on the docks. His grandfather and uncles did. His father enjoyed his work and took pride in the accomplishment of unloading a ship and neatly stacking sacks of cargo for their next journey. His son, Anthony. works with palettes of words.

But here's the sentence in Mr. DePalma's article that I've dined on. so to speak.

"Legend has it that in the old days, an Italian shoe manufacturer used to send his goods to New York in two shipments in insure they weren't stolen: first the left shoes, then the right. Containers effectively ended that kind of pilferage."

I love anecdotes. All my life I seem to insert them into a conversation with someone. I'm always telling a story. I have a cousin who told me that when he and his family visited us in Flushing, coming in from Illinois to see my mother, I kept him laughing so hard with stories. I have no memory of this, but I do know I could have only been maybe 7 when the family visited.

I once had a cluster of salesmen at Saks in the men's department in hysterics when I told them the left/right shoe tale. I of course inserted a bit of imaginary  dialog about the guys opening up the crates and finding only shoes for one foot.

There was once a New Yorker cartoon of hippies holding up a Fink bread truck. One of the hippies tells his accomplices, "Hey man, it really is bread."

I see a cartoon of wise guys opening a crate of Italian designer shoes and seeing that there are only shoes for the left foot: "Hey, where we gonna find de people wid two left feet?"

My work life eventually morphed into the detection of fraud in health insurance. I once closed a meeting with the tale of the left and right shoes being separately shipped. People who commit fraud are clever, and I love it when there is a clever way to thwart it.

Here's to the Italian shoe manufacturer.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

I Dropped Something

Ever drop something on the floor? Sure you have. Have you quickly found it? Not very likely. Where did it go?

I'm not talking of dropping something big, like a dollar bill. No, something small, like a screw, a nut, a pill.  Einstein said matter can disappear by converting it into energy. 

When you drop something on the floor and can't find it, the disappearing matter has been converted into the energy of your trying to find it. Good Luck. The object has disappeared into some wide abyss, probably never to be found no matter how hard you look on your hands and knees. It's gone. Your floor has made something disappear.

Right now I'm still looking at sections of the kitchen floor where I heard a pill drop. I didn't see it drop. I heard it, and as such, I know it landed somewhere. Ha! Come and find me.

I cleaned the same kitchen floor a few days ago and came across a pill I dropped from some other day. A different pill; a different size and color. I didn't notice what part of the floor it came from, but there it was, the missing pill from last week. Or two weeks ago. I threw it out. 

I scan the kitchen floor pretending I'm in a helicopter dispatched from sea and rescue unit to look for survivors. I mentally stare at the floor as if there are quadrants. I slowly sweep my vision over all parts. I make believe I'm searching for important people like Amelia Earhardt, John F. Kenedy Jr. and the Bessette sisters. I report back into my imaginary headset: "Negative."

I report back into my imaginary headset.

Anyone who might have crashed in a plane, or been in a ship wreck. I imagine it's urgent, like looking for John Kennedy Jr. It doesn't help. No matter how much I concentrate on what is really not a large kitchen floor, even after imagining I'm searching in quadrants, I come up empty. It's disappeared.

Amerlia Earhardt...The Bessette sisters...Judge Crater.

She Married Up

When you're 92 and you pass away and "Socialite" is part of your obit headline, you know you lived in a different era than one would be in today.

The above photo smacks of so much of what wealth and celebrity used to look like: someone smiling, bejeweled, furred, and looking gorgeous with their clothes on with male eye candy on their arm.

Ms. Pat Montandon didn't have to pose with her bra and panties on covered with an open coat to gain attention to wind up on a TMZ segment, or a New York Post Page 6 spread of babes with their tits and asses hanging out. This was someone who looked every part of the word elegant.  

And the NYT obituary writer, Penelope Green, who gives Ms. Montandon a 6-column, 19-gun sendoff with photos that nearly covers a full inside page, seems to be at her best when her subject has made the rounds of galas and fund raisers and sat in those distinctive chairs with the finial knot at the tops of each back that all those affairs have.

I don't know how obits get assigned at the NYT. I detect some are written by reporters who have been covering the subjects' lifetime endeavors, say classical music, or dance, but for the most part they seem to be randomly assigned. Maybe.

I once heard that in the Manhattan DA's office there is a wheel that is spun to see you will be the next prosecutor on the next incoming case.  Somehow, I just don't see a wheel being spun at the NYT.

Obits can be of the pre-written kind, obits that have been sketched out with all the salient details of the person's life, waiting to be released into the world when the subject passes away, with the few additions that might be necessary to bring it fully up-to-date.

Or, obits can be written on deadline, assigned and expected to be completed for the next edition. I have no way of knowing which kind Pat Montandon's obit is, but if it's one on deadline, then Penelope Green should be eligible for an obit Pulitzer, if one exists. (I don't think there is one, but there's always room to expand the categories.)

Ms. Green takes us on a near cradle to grave breathless account of Ms. Montandon's life that makes me  wish I had met her, or at least had my picture taken with her. That of course would mean I would have been invited to one of the many galas and fund raisers she appeared at, or chaired. That would be moving on up

The print headline for Ms. Montandon goes: Pat Montandon, Who Focused on Partying, Then Peace, Dies at 96. The online headline goes:  Pat Montandon, Socialite Who Sought Publicity, Then World Peace, Dies at 96.

Talk about a hard scrabble childhood. Ms. Montandon was the seventh of eight children of "itinerant evangelical preachers whose tent revival ministry took the family throughout West Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. During childhood she picked cotton for pennies. At 19, she survived heart surgery." Talk about material for Ms. Montandon's memoirs. And of course there's more.

There were men, Numerous men that are described as being part of a chaste summer courtship with Frank Sinatra, [Frank, chaste?] a 12-year marriage with an abusive rancher, a six-month marriage to a gay man, and an improbable marriage to Melvin Belli, the lawyer who defended Jack Ruby, in a Shinto Temple in Tokyo that was voided after being declared "not legally binding." Her last husband was one who made his fortune in real estate and wineries. She was married to James Borton for 12 years.

The trail of hookups that it took to get to her divorce from Mr. Borton are a dizzying tale of musical matrimony that should be a mini-series. Ms. Green has it all down pat. (If all the names are arranged  just so, they likely adhere to the Six Degrees of Separation leading back to Kevin Bacon.)

Ms. Montandon was a west Coast person, having a radio show and a gossip column in the San Francisco Examiner.  The legendary, acerbic columnist for the Examiner, Herb Caen, constantly poked jabs at Ms. Montandon, calling her Pushy Galore, and the Dumb Bombshell. He called Ms. Montandon's short marriage to Mr. Belli, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo." You get the picture of the animosity.

To those who may not get the jab at being called Pushy Galore, you have to have seen the James Bond, 1964 movie Goldfinger, where James meets a female in airplane management who owns a fleet of small planes all piloted by young women. Honor Blackman, a British actress, plays Pussy Galore, (I kid you not.) an attractive, substantially well-figured woman who James has a wrestling match with in a barn. You haven't heard "pussy" sound the way it does until you hear it said with Sean Connery's Scottish accent.

Herb Caen was known for holding up two fingers in a symbol of V, but said it meant vodka. He lasted a long time, and I'm sure there were those who weren't unhappy about his demise in 1997.

Surely tired of men, or at least marrying them, Ms. Montandon and her son set out on a campaign for World Peace. Talk about a Sisyphean task. No matter.  She met with more heads of state than the U.N. Secretary General. Who wouldn't want to meet her and talk about World Peace?

Ms. Montandon wrote her memoirs after her son, her only child, apparently wrote a somewhat "tell-all" that attracted a lot of attention from those who follow those things, the memoir first being serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker to rave reviews.  Definite cred there.

Pat wrote her own memoir after, but remained on good terms with her son, who some might have assumed threw Mom under the bus.

Live long enough, and you get the last word over those who ridiculed you. When she was being dumped by John Borton for a much younger woman, the columnist Herb Caen "did a forensic" reporting on the divorce filing, holding up to the light the requested $57,000 a month requested in the settlement that lead the National Enquirer. to call her "The Most Expensive Wife." [More than Liz Taylor?]

But when Herb was getting a divorce, Ms. Montandon listed his assets in her column: a family home, a '69 Mercedes and a '77 Honda Civic. She wrote: "Life ain't easy honey, ask one who knows."

No word if she attended his funeral.

Note:

Other links to blog postings about obituaries Ms. Green has written lately. 

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2025/11/no-detail-escapes-obituary-writer.html

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2025/07/jane-stanton-hitchcock.html

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2025/04/reinaldo-herrera.html

http://www,onofframp.blogspot.com

In Memoriam

Judge Joseph Force Crater

Ever since the murder of my two colleagues on September 16, 2002 at work, and my placement of In Memoriam tributes to them in the New York Times on milestone anniversaries, I always look at the In Memoriams placed by others to read the sentiments If I'm still able, the next milestone to place is 25 years; I plan to place another listing. It's not closure. It's remembrance.

Last week there were two rather unusual In Memoriams, one for Vilmos Langfelder and the other for Raoul Wallenberg. They each got the same narrative "Disappeared in Soviet Captivity January 17, 1945. Gone but not forgotten" 

The 80th anniversary of that disappearance was being acknowledged. That set these In Memoriams far apart from others. Also unusual, the same pair of In Memoriams appeared the next day, almost as if someone was allowing for a time zone difference.

The Wallenberg name was familiar. A Swedish diplomat who helped Jews escape the Nazis was the extent of my knowledge without going to the usual Google/Wikipedia source to find out more. 

The disappearance of the two, Vilmos was Raoul's driver, became the stuff of legend and conspiracy theories.

Why did the Soviets detain and likely murder the two when at the time Sweden and Russia were part of the Allies fighting the Germans? Why didn't the Swedes get angrier at the affair? Many unanswered questions still remain.

Seeing an In Memoriam for some people who likely died in 1945 got me thinking. What if there was someone out there who was missing Judge Joseph Force Crater so much that they were willing to spend some bucks and alert the world to an anniversary of his disappearance? And who would that person be?

Most In Memoriams are either signed by someone not giving their full name, or there is nothing at all. In my case, I choose not to use an attribution.

Judge Crater might be the oldest missing person case on the New York Police Department's books. He was a municipal judge who was likely ethically compromised, and who was thought to be a stain on the Democratic party when FDR was New York State governor. Crater was due to give testimony in a corruption trial. 

On August 6, 1930 Crater had come back from a vacation home in Maine, and attended a show and had dinner with friends in a restaurant on West  45th Street in the theater district, and supposedly got into a cab and was never seen again.

The investigation didn't result in any explanation for the Judge's disappearance. The coroner's report came down on the side of every possibility, including that the judge might still be alive. Judge Crater was declared legally dead in August 1939.

As the case disappeared from the front pages, the memory of  his disappearance didn't. He was joked about by Johnny Carson, and others, on The Tonight Show. Numerous books were written and theories advanced.

In 2005 when Stella Ferruci-Good died, the authorities received notes she had written that alluded that her husband,  Robert Good, a NYPD detective, had learned that Crater was killed by another NYPD officer, Frank Burns, who did freelance killings for Murder Inc., Lucky Luciano's mob family. Frank Burns drove the cab that Crater is said to have gotten into leaving dinner.

The truthfulness of the notes was challenged by those who long studied Crater's disappearance. But then again, they might be true.

All theories aside, wouldn't it be a hoot if there was someone left who put an In Memoriam piece to acknowledge the centennial disappearance of Judge Crater in 2030? 

After all, someone is always missed.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Original Smiley Face

I don't know if the smiley face was the first emoji. It certainly hasn't been the last. There is some authoritative body that approves new emojis. I kid you not. We're back to Egyptian caves and hieroglyphics. I don't know what the last emoji count was. It's several hundred.

Unicode Consortium

A nonprofit organization based in Silicon Valley, is the official body that reviews, approves, and sets standards for new emojis. Founded in 1991, they ensure that emojis are consistent across all digital devices. They work with tech companies like Apple and Google to integrate these symbols into the Unicode Standard.

There is a probability thought problem that claims there is a chance (it's not a big one) of a team of monkeys writing the complete works of Shakespeare. Yeh, so? I bet they can't write a sentence using all emojis. Can AI?

The above creation, thought to be the first smiley face, is a creation of my good friend Lady M., a woman who joined the next to last company I worked for around 2007. Like any new person, she "came aboard." New people are always "coming aboard" and the rest of us are happy to have them "on board."

Lady M. likes to leave her version of a smiley face on things. She drew it on my white board and I left it there when I left in 2010. My guess is its been erased by now.

In one of her many employment incarnations, Lady M. once found herself delivering U.S. mail in New Jersey. She drove one of those funny looking trucks, and became quite adept at maneuvering it and backing up it up into tight spaces. There isn't any open parking space Lady M. can't back into and still leave room for the doors to open. You're in good hands.

I commented on the appearance of the smiley face in this year's Christmas card, and Lady M. revealed the back story. If Lady M. were into graffiti, we would be treated to the image all over the place. Sort  of like a caricature Kilroy Was Here. However, Lady M. is more law-abiding. In a recent email she revealed the genesis on the smiley face.

It started when I started working at the post office in 1999. When a customer put their mail on hold. The carrier would take a bucket and attach a slip of paper with the address on it. Anytime I had a street name with two Os in it I made the smiley face. It’s going on 26 years now.

Would Bansky tell us this much?

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All Things Lead to Dilbert

 

Any alert reader who reads enough of my postings has come to know that something always reminds me of something else. We're all connected. We live on a Möbius strip. There is some giant doling out probability and sometimes I feel it's aimed at me.

What are the chances that talking about a John Prine lyric to my daughter Susan would lead to wondering about whatever happened to the comic strip Dilbert, to just a few days after that reading that Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, has passed away? Any takers? The answer:100%

And so it goes in the world I live in. I'm not sure exactly what lead me to buy another John Prince CD .I'm glad I did. It was before there was a piece on him being honored posthumously by a group of musicians. I already had one of his CDs, but I had just bought another, Fair and Square, released in 2005.

I always read the liner note lyrics with the first playing of any new CD. This hardly guarantees I'll  remember the lyrics, no matter how many times I'll play the CD, but it is a read.

But lines from one of the tracks, titled "Other Side of Town," brought recognition. The poetry put to guitar music is John's love song to his wife. He loves her. Love being defined in the song as his ability to put up with her: "you might think I'm listening to your grocery list...but..." The list for what love is is long. Listening to grocery lists is on it.

And there it is! My wife giving anyone within earshot of her at the table what she's going to buy at the grocery store on her next  trip, which knowing how often she goes to the store, could be any moment.

It's like a book. You can get the printed version, which is her written version of the grocery list written in the tiniest cursive writing that defies being able to be read, to the audio Kindle version which she will tell you even if you haven't asked what she's buying this week.

My daughters and I know this trait of hers very well. It doesn't just include what she's going to buy, but the order of her stops that will bring her to one of three stores she buys edible things at.

I purposely left the liner notes out for my daughter Susan to read and ask her who does this remind you of? I said, "see, Mom's not the only one who recites her grocery list to an audience."

My daughter, being related, said she was talking with someone about office personalities and found that person had the same experience as she was having with people in her office. (John Paul Sartre: ""Hell is other people.")

I said something that Dilbert fully captured what it was like to be to be a cubicle dweller faced with obtuse management. "Whatever happened to the comic strip? Is Scott Adams still alive." Turns out a few days later we're reading Scott Adam's obituary. My thought had nothing to do with. Mr. Adams had to have been diagnosed with prostate cancer long before I wondered about his whereabouts.

I first saw the news of Scott Adams passing in the New York Post, which doesn't usually write a tribute obit for anyone. "'Dilbert' maker logs out."

I didn't understand the "logs out" bit of the headline until I read the obit. Apparently, Mr. Adams had embarked on a podcast called "Coffee with Scott Adams." He was a Trump supporter and in 2015 predicted Trump would win when no one else even considered the possibility. Mr. Adams had a strong following. After all, who can't have a podcast these days?

As anyone who embarks on a opinion show, you can get yourself in trouble with those who want to take you on, or down. Mr. Adams met that fate apparently over some comments which out of context might have been skating near the edge, but when just prominently out-quoted spelled doom. I hadn't heard of any of this. Comics are in so few papers that I really didn't know Dilbert was gone. 

His syndicators dropped him and Dilbert was gone from the funny pages. Such as there are funny pages. Few newspapers print comics, and they never restored the complete width of the panel cartoons. Once shrunken they have stayed shrunken.

The New York Post at least provided a sample of a Dilbert strip in their January 14, 2026 print edition, where the pudding-headed boss has trouble distinguishing Unix, a programming language, from eunuchs, male castration, when he tells Dilbert that more eunuch programmers are needed.

Dilbert, sitting at what is now an old computer, large monitor, has to explain that he, Dilbert, knows Unix. Of course Gilbert knows Unix. He looks like a NASA team member at Cape Kennedy with his pocket protector and spiked hair from a crew cut. He's straight out of control center casting.

The boss with the oafish ears and rotund belly, retreats and tells Dilbert, "If the company nurse drops by, tell her I said "'never mind'" Dilbert was the everyman who had a boss who had been promoted to their level of incompetence.

Then we get the New York Times obit where Scott Adams is basically treated a 6-column raspberry for being a Trump supporter. The whole obit is somewhat dour because of what the New York Times considers their enemy to be: anyone who is not them.  

The print edition does not reprint a sample boss/Dilbert encounter, but rather in the online edition prints a color one that looks likes a Sunday's strip of Dilbert trying to start a bakery. The pudding-headed boss is not to be seen; the while premise of a Dilbert strip was his frustrations with dense management. The Everyman identification. No appreciation of the humor, but rather an essay on the political views of the creator. 

In the New York Post Opinion page on January 15, 2026  there is an editorial cartoon that basically tells us Dilbert is missed by all cubicle dwellers.

The image is hard to read, but the towering boss is talking gibberish:

"Our goal is to leverage human capital and generate synergy to streamline the process and move the needle toward a paradigm shift, right? Circle back to me and we can dialogue further..."

The ambushed worker caught in a hive of management buzz words has the thought bubble: "Honestly, how much more of this can I take without Scott Adams in the world?"

Is the duel over? No.

The New York Post responds to the New York Times obit on January 16, 2026: Obituary Warfare: Left's Last Hateful Hit.

I don't have a scorecard, but I think it might be unprecedented that a paper attacks another one over an obituary.  But it's pistols at sunrise as the decidedly right-leaning New York Post takes the decidedly left-leaning New York Times to the woodshed. It's almost William F. Buckley vs. Gore Vidal.

That's it, right? Wait for the coup de grace. Down comes the blade

In Sunday's New York Times Opinion section—as depressing a read if ever there was one—we are treated to the major hit piece by Joel Stein, described as a humor writer with a Substack newsletter. The headline goes: "The Man Behind 'Dilbert' Was Always MAGA." An out-quote goes: The resentments and cynicism in Scott Adams's comic strip are now a familiar worldview."

Mr. Stein produced a book in 2019 titled: "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You Are Better than Someone Who Didn't buy this book."  How it sold I have no idea. I never heard of it, or Mr. Stein.

As research for his book, Mr. Stein once upon a time interviewed Mr. Adams in his California trophy home. Although the tone of the essay is polite, Mr. Stein can't seem to understand how someone like Mr. Adams, "who attended graduate school at Berkeley, lived in an overwhelmingly Democratic Bay area town, who put solar panels on his roof and made art for a living" left the tribe.. "Why would he suddenly turn against his class." Well, maybe he was never in your "class."

Mr. Stein, who describes himself as "a Jew from a liberal East Coast town" who apparently lacks a MAGA uncle at the Seder table, who can't seem to understand how there can be a Scott Adams.

William F. Buckley Jr. went to Yale and went in as a conservative and came out that way. As did pa and son Bush. Oh well. It's hard to understand what Mr. Stein doesn't understand.

And it's hard to understand why there is no puff piece on Dilbert himself, who surely would scoff at all that is being attached to him because his creator had a podcast.

Jesus guys. I'm a popular comic strip for a reason. Get it?.

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77 Sunset Strip

You have to be as old as I was this past Thursday to remember the 1950s TV series "77 Sunset Strip," a popular P.I.-themed show where the cars were fast, the hair was groomed, and the women with champagne, blonde color hair sitting at the bar were gorgeous, especially when they  carelessly crossed their legs and had a cigarette lit for them. (You could smoke indoors then, and believe me, everyone smoked.)  I love to look back at what things looked like then, and I'll tell you, a women who was good looking then, would be good looking now. Only the hairstyle would be different.

My father, born in 1915, and so longer with us for quite a while now, would, if he watched TV, call them dames, or dolls. It would not be pejorative. It would be endearing. The only TV I ever saw him watch was Lawrence Welk or The Honeymooners, and later Jackie Gleason's show. Well, maybe Ed Sullivan's show as well. I do remember some post-Elvis appearance comments by the adults that were not favorable. Also, when th Beatles first appeared. We were headed for the toilet.

77 Sunset strip starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr., son of a classical musician, and Roger Smith as partners in a detective agency. Then, as now, detective show were popular.

The vibe, or coolness of the '50s was enhanced by the car jockey Kookie, played by Edward Brynes. Kookie wore the same type of cloth jacket, the James Dean look, Fonzie wore on Happy Days before they figured out that he would look better in leather. 

But no leather look for parking expensive cars. The owners expected them back. Kookie always has a comb ready to sweep back his 1950s locks and secure the '50s male look. "Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb," became a song.

77. My long-tine dentist, who has now passed away, had his office in the Empire State building on the 77th floor, with a window by the chair facing south; a magnificent view of Manhattan traded for the joy of some dental work.

My daughter Susan, who was a Dr. B. patient, one day was in the city with her friend Donna and decided to do some sightseeing. Without an appointment, Susan and Donna showed up at his door to take in the view. If there was someone in the chair they waited. Dr. B. got the biggest kick out of that. He is missed.

Dr. B., being even older than myself would, answer the door, and nearly break into the song about Kookie and his hair. Dr. B. of course remembered the show.

When 911 hit and Dr. B. saw the Twin Towers engulfed in flames, he immediately closed the office, and headed for Penn Station for the ride home. It was early then, and the trains were still running.

Adding to the cast of characters in 77 Sunset Strip is Jacqueline Beer, the former Miss France of 1954, as Suzanne Fabray answering phones for Sunset Answering Service. No phone mail then. No texting either.

Louis Quinn plays a bookie named Roscoe, who hands out racetrack tips. He looks like the prototypical Hollywood version of what a 1950s bookie, and race track patron—a railbird—should look like. Even a still photo gives you the impression he talks fast, without or without a cigar in his mouth

Connie Steven plays Cricket, the curvy blonde who is attached to Kookie, who else? The name Cricket anticipates naming Angie Dickinson as Pepper in Police Woman. Short, saucy names.

I can't recall a single episode of 77 Sunset Strip. It hasn't ever been shown on one of those nostalgia TV channels.

The number 7 plays prominently in craps. "7 come 11, baby needs a new pair of shoes;" the hoped for coming out throw. The dreaded 7 before the point that gets in the way of your roll.

How about jet airplanes? Boeing seems to use a 7 in nearly everything it makes: 707, 727, 747, 767, 787.

Slot machines? Wouldn't three 7s across mean some winnings? And how about Cary Grant playing the gambler Joe Bascopolous (got to be a gambling Nick the Greek, right?) in the 1943 movie Mr. Lucky, who jumps in a New York City cab that has a fistful of 7s in its license place. He feels even luckier now. 

Note:

All AI search engines failed to reveal how many 7s there were in the license plate. I'll have to wait for an alert reader, or TCM to show the movie again. Cary Grant is a favorite of mine.

You'd think if is AI was so great it would go out and try and find the answer to my query. But it didn't. The answer was not in any retrievable piece of information AI used in its Large Language Model. Why didn't it queue up the movie and watch it for me and come back with the answer? Ha! Some intelligence. 

I'm thinking about all these 7s because I turned 77 on Thursday and have in longevity outlived the ages of my parents and my grandparents.

I got a new pair of glasses on Tuesday and I told Peter, my long-time optician, that I was going to be 77 on Thursday. I don't know Peter's age, but he said I look good. I told him what I always tell everyone who might make that comment: "You haven't seen the x-rays." 

Yet, since I'm alive to tell the tale, maybe I'm Mr. Lucky.

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