My wife pretty much laughs at my diligence in writing something as often as I do. She tells me, "who reads it?" She doesn't, and my two adult daughters only occasionally might read something I've written if I send them a link. And even then, their attention might stray elsewhere.
I tell my wife, there are people who read what I write. I don't get many comments, but I really don't expect any. If you're familiar with the application you know blogspot, offered by Google, will display a separate page count of views to the right of your recent entries.
I marvel that everything I've written since 2009 is still available online. There are search capabilities which I sometimes use myself to take me to something I'm trying to remember. Annually, I take advantage of a printing service that scans a body of the postings and creates a hardcover book, with vellum pages. I have a stack of these annual books.
It's nice to see the count go up for a few days. It at least tells me someone has viewed what I wrote. They might have even read the whole thing. Over time, the older postings recede into the background and a view count is not readily available there. That's fine.
There is a function in blogspot that tells you the Stats for recent activity. Lately I've been viewing this feature regularly, because in addition to telling me the activity of the recent posting, it will tell me surges of views for what can turn out to be older—and sometimes much older—postings.
I was struck one day to see that a posting I made about the racetrack personality, Harvey Pack, was surging. I made the posting on July 9, 2021 when Harvey passed away. I basically took exception to the NYT for ignoring his passing, thus the title, Where Have All the Characters Gone? But the famous obituary writer Robert McG. Thomas Jr. is no longer with us, so Harvey didn't get the tribute obit I thought he deserved.
In my posting, I mentioned that the New York Racing Association, NYRA, should name a race after him. Well, in 2026 they did, and that I assume is what created the spike in views. People who didn't know who Harvey was, wanted to know more about him, and my posting came up in search engines. I'm chuffed.
Right now, the view count is 567, so as an answer to my wife, there are lots of people who read my postings.
But so far, my all-time astonishment is the 3,337 views I've recorded for a posting made on October 19, 2010. That's nearly 16 years ago, and it's still getting hits. It should be a song, and I should be getting royalties. If only.
Graphs are part of the features of blogspot. The historical one for this posting, about a famous murder trial in Florida, in the 1960s, in which the defendants were acquitted, —the Candace Mossler trial—shows a steady climb after maybe 5 years in cyberspace.
The two defendants are pictured above, nephew and aunt lovers who were accused of bumping off Candace's wealthy husband, Jacques, heir to the Mossler Safe fortune. They were acquitted, seen smiling at each other in a car after the trial.
Candace Mossler passed away in 1976, and is perhaps astonishingly buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Her nephew-lover passed away in 2010, and it was his obituary that prompted the blog posting afterward.
It is possible there are other archival postings that have garnered outsized numbers, but are not getting current hits. I'm not looking for them.
One more archival posting has been getting hits, Double-D Doda, is a posting I made on December 1, 2015 on the news of Ms. Doda's passing. It has recorded 397 views. Carole Doda was a topless pole dancer who was greatly enhanced in her upper reaches. You can guess where.
This revelation made me look back at the posting. There was a comment from Stephen Miller that I completely forgot about. Mr. Miller used to be an obituary writer for the Wall Street Journal, and is featured in Marilyn Johnson's book The Dead Beat. I met Stephen at an event in perhaps 2009.
It's nagging at me and I can't seem to find where I think I once again made reference to a couple at a Christmas party whose venue was held in an old Pennsylvania Railroad car parked on a low-numbered track in Penn Station, where there would be live cantenary wires overhead for Amtrak and Jersey Transit trains. Lots of voltage going through there.
As can happen at a Christmas party that serves booze, a couple wanted to get better acquainted with each other, and rather than get a room, they climbed outside to the top of the railroad car. Two bodies, no doubt one getting on top of the other, left no room for clearance to avoid touching the live wires overhead. Both were fried.
I don't get many comments to any posting, and that hardly discourages me. But looking back at Double-D Doda I read Stephen Miller's rather long comment.
In my posting I made reference to an incident at a strip club that Carole worked that involved the club's assistant manager getting amorous after hours with one of another club's performers on top of a piano, that for some gimmick feature of the club, could be hydraulically lifted, or lowered, from the ceiling.
As with anything, there can be unintended consequences, and this one took the form of the assistant manager's foot hitting the lift switch and levitating the piano with the oblivious two love-makers on top, inching ever closer to the ceiling.
Again, two bodies in the throes of love-making did not allow for enough clearance when the piano kept going up, resulting in squashing the assistant manger who was on top, killing him. The hysterical stripper was not found until the next morning, screaming, with no memory of getting on top of the piano, but certainly being dragged into sobriety when her late-night date was crushed to death. She was basically physically unharmed, but certainly may have started to think about her choices in life. Maybe.
I gleaned the story from an obituary of Carole Doda written in a British newspaper. Stephen Miller provided more details on the "stairway to heaven" couple:
"The dead assistant manager was James 'Jimmy the Beard' Ferrozzo. Ferrozzo, a well-known figure on the North Beach nude night-spot strip, was found partly draped over his naked, screaming girlfriend, Teresa Hill, 23, when the Condor club in the North Beach area was opened at 7 a.m. Wednesday by a janitor.
"Hill, a nude dancer at another establishment, was not freed until about 10 a.m. Wednesday, police said, because the motor running the lift had apparently burned out.
"The dead man's body apparently provided 2 or 3 inches of space that kept Hill from being crushed, police said. Hill was briefly treated at Mission Emergency Hospital where attending physician Paul Auerbach said she suffered only bruises.
"'She was so intoxicated she doesn't even remember getting on the piano,' said detective Whitey Gunther. 'She just remembers waking up and being pinned on the piano.' Ferrozzo got his nickname from the bushy beard he favored. Hill said she dated him since her arrival in San Francisco from Seattle two weeks ago."
The piano was a gutted Steinway used as a prop that descended from the ceiling, allowing Carole, Double-D Doda, to make a splashy entrance.
I wonder how the ICD-10 coding went for the cause of death. Compressed by machinery? Workplace accident?
James "Jimmy the Beard" Ferrozzo died on November 23, 1983, at the age of 40 in a bizarre accident at the Condor Club in San Francisco, California. He was an assistant manager and bouncer at the famous North Beach topless bar. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- Date: November 23, 1983
- Location: The Condor Club, 560 Broadway, San Francisco, CA
- Ferrozzo and his 23-year-old girlfriend, dancer Theresa Hill, were on top of the club's signature hydraulic elevator piano after hours.
- Investigators concluded that the couple accidentally triggered the lift switch, causing the piano to rise slowly toward the ceiling.
- Ferrozzo took the brunt of the crushing force against the ceiling beams, which tragically killed him while shielding Hill, who survived with injuries.
The formal death notices and local news archives from November 1983 provide additional background on James Ferrozzo's life prior to his career in San Francisco:
- Athletic Background: Newspaper archives show Ferrozzo was originally from Minnesota, where he was a standout football star at Johnson High School in St. Paul. [1]
- NFL Ambitions: According to family members interviewed after his death, he was a talented athlete who once tried out for the Minnesota Vikings. [1]
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