Behind Which Apartment Door?

You learn something every day. Like, there are people in Manhattan who live with a goat in their apartment.

Today's NYT featured an obituary on Joe Goldstein, 81, a sports publicist for nearly 60 years. He had a lot to do with many things, one of which was promoting The International Trot, a top flight invitational trotting race that used to be held at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, NY. (I saw Une de Mai win the race one year.)

Well, it seems an invited horse cleared quarantine, but not its stable pet, which happened to be a goat (or a sheep) named Brigitte. (The trotter was a French mare, named Kracovie.) Joe, ever the accommodating host, wanted the invited horse to feel completely at home, so he set out to find a goat for Kracovie to replace Brigitte.

This is 1961, and Joe finds that the actress Tina Louise just happened to have a goat in her Manhattan apartment. Much apparently is made of Tina Louise wearing a low-cut dress bringing her goat to Roosevelt Raceway to calm Kracovie down and make her feel better about not having Brigitte with her. Turns out it wasn't enough, and Kravovie loses to Su Mac Lad, a champion trotter. (Now whether Su Mac Lad makes an appearance on Sullivan I don't remember. But I do remember Ed bringing Cardigan Bay, the champion pacer in full harness out on stage once for a round of applause. Ed's show was live, you should remember.)

All of this is enough, but gets better when Les Crane enters the picture. Les Crane, if anyone remembers, was a talk show host in the 1960s for a bit. Les was certainly good looking enough, and it turns out when he recently passed away we learn he had five wives, the fourth one who was Tina Louise, of goat and Gilligan's Island fame.

An excerpt from Les Crane's obituary goes:

Mr. Crane married five times. His fourth wife was the actress Tina Louise whom he met and married while she was at the height of her popularity as the glamorous sexpot [Ginger] on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.” They divorced in 1971 after a five-year marriage.

(That Les was survived by his fifth wife, Ginger, of 20 years can probably point to a few things, but one certainly of which would be: if you find a name you like, you should stick with it. )

Simple math thus puts the nuptials at 1966, five years after Tina's appearance at Roosevelt Raceway with a goat. We of course don't know who Tina enjoyed living with most. We're just going to have to wait.

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