After a Busy Week...

Grandson Victor with LouSeal

 

 

I guess one of the coolest things to have happened in a long time has been the rise of the Giants in the West.  San Francisco waited for a long time to get a World Series victory, but three in five years is almost dynastic.  I've been a Giants fan for a long time, but I used to watch the ballgames alone.  Now, courtesy of Comcast Sports Net - Bay Area, we get every game, not just the occasional odd game on ESPN, Fox, or NBC, and they are always on one of our TV's.  Tyffany always liked baseball, and kept score for her brother's games.  She learned the rules, and I always hoped she would marry someone who knew only a little about the game; Peter seems to be perfect.

 

See, if she'd have married some guy who "thought" he knew baseball, the marriage would have lasted one season.  He would divorce her because she would always be right.  I've always thought she could be an umpire, but she'd have to work on her temper, or guys would be leaving the game in groups.  I could see her going into the stands to eject hecklers...

 

Anyway... Since the Giants started winning, even Mary is becoming a die-hard fan.  Having the game on, every game, is kind of her thing.  For me, I can be satisfied with listening to the game on radio, Mary is more visually oriented, so in our two TV living room, one has the game on. 

 

And then, there's the grandsons... Victor (above) once told a group of Dodger fans, in Chavez Ravine, "NO!  Let's go GI-ANTS".  He gets away with it because he's cute, and only six.  Even little Ryan knows, "Go, go Giants!" and he's only 16 months old.

We're a Giants Family.  Three generations worth.  What more can an old geezer want, eh?

Some Things of Late...

Rowe's Royals - circa 1964

Vallejo Babe Ruth League (Ages 13 - 15)

I'm in there, somewhere. -- Me.

 

 

 

 

Somewhere, lost in all of the turmoil that life tends to inherit once you get into your mid-60's, is my complete love of baseball/softball/OTL or other forms of the "American Pastime".  I'll even watch Cricket, if it's on, although I really don't understand it yet, it's roughly the same -- a man throws a ball, a man tries to hit the thrown ball -- whether it can hit the ground, or not, is irrelevant.  That interest in the British game comes only late in life, and is immeasurably better than watching NBA Summer League Basketball (Yes, I will be relentless on this waste of airtime.  No one shows the MLB Winter Leagues, or televises off-season scrimmages between NFL teams.  The NBA has the longest season anyway, and then this?)

 

My apologies to my nephew Brian Gardner for a Facebook rant about flag burning.  You've heard of "Push-button" issues?  That's one of mine.  People desecrate the Flag of the USA because they can't burn freedom.  The group that took the US to court over the First Amendment Rights of people to do so, and did it with straight faces, mind you, never seeing the irony.  Only in a truly free country can you have a right to desecrate the acknowledged world-wide symbol of Freedom (the ideal).  Even when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, no one got the joke.  Of course, I didn't laugh, either...  I commend you for your choice of venues for your social commentary, but wonder how many Facebook users are capable of getting the humor... "Keep on Trucking," is what we'd say "back in the day."

 

Baseball... I guess one of the things that makes the game so important to me is the fact that it is a True American Sport; bred, born, and nurtured in the USA, and adopted by many countries in the Western Hemisphere, and a number of island nations in the Pacific, predominately Japan.  I've actually gone to a Japanese-league game in Tokyo.  I don't know why the Japanese-language channels don't broadcast the games from home on US cable, compared to MLB coverage here, it's pretty funny.  I know, and I don't mean any disrespect to the people of Japan, for one who neither speaks, nor understands the Japanese Language, the broadcast is a series of Japanese sentences, punctuated by totally American terms such as "Ball-o one," "Strike-e two," and "Hombrun," which of course is "Home Run," but I am trying to show that un-similarities aside, such as the dirt infield, and rooting sections that actually root for their teams, and even local pronunciations of American English, Baseball lives on.  To be honest, my first reaction to the game on Japanese TV in Misawa, I laughed.  I'd never heard baseball broadcast in anything but English, and occasional trips to the SAP for Spanish Language Broadcasts.  Those I didn't find as humorous, probably because I know a little about the language, and the fact that the SLB took the time to translate-out the American phraseology.

 

 

This is me before my first Babe Ruth League game.

1964 - Age 13

 

 

Cute, huh?  Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell him a few things, but then it wouldn't be fair.  The house behind me belonged to our neighbor, a Miss Mina McKnight, who worked as a Nurse in the local schools.  Notice, in the upper left corner, the top of the fence that went across the back of her yard.  She had a small flat spot for a teeny yard, and an uphill slope worthy of the talents of a mountain goat.  I mention that, because going to the left from there, that fence would have been atop a ridge that decreased in height, flattening out on the left corner of a 1/2 acre of open land that was sold to my dad when he bought the house next door to Mina's.  I always thought it was big enough to put a Little League-sized baseball diamond on, and it would have, but for one small problem... the field sloped up the side of the hill that was topped by the fence in the upper left corner.  If I'd have had access to a backhoe, or skip loader, or some such thing, there might have actually been a small baseball diamond behind our house.  We moved in when I was six, and I got the big idea that it could be dug out by hand.  That was doomed from the start.

 

To be honest, I wasn't ever that good.  I played, usually in places that I couldn't do much damage in, mostly because of the fact that I could usually get a hit, occasionally a double, rarely a triple, and two, over the fence, home runs, one in Little League, and one in Babe Ruth League.  Both were "Big Boy" homers, as the Giant's announcers would call them, both deep, and both with bases loaded.  In that regard, my timing was pretty good.  The one in Little League was a fastball, meant to impress me, and the other was a curve that hung out there like a piñata...  both were hit with the "meat" of the bat, and both were absolutely crushed.  I wrote about it at Chico State once, and I don't know what happened to it.  I tried to write it from the perspective of a 10 year-old, and the professor thought that I pretty much nailed it.  I don't know if I've tried to do it for a blog, but that's an idea.

 

I have been a baseball fan for most of my life.  I once liked the Dodgers of Walter Alston, guys like Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, John Roseborough, Maury Wills, and Duke Snyder.  We were in San Diego, then, and only got Dodger games on the radio, unless the games in San Francisco ran late, and we could pick them up due to a thing called "the Skip".  At certain times of the evening, some radio stations would reduce their output, leaving some stations more space for their broadcasts to travel.  The Skip had a weather element to it, and I can't remember how that supposedly worked, but the fact that after about 8pm, I could get stations from Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and a host of places that were normally way beyond the range of AM radio.  As FM is a line-of-sight medium that doesn't "bounce" well, most people have given up on trying to get reception from distant places.

 

In 1961, my dad took me to a Giants game at Candlestick Park, the stadium's second year of operation.  I was pretty much a Giants fan by then, mostly because of my dad's rants about "the n-----s in Frisco."  I knew then that damning a person because of his/her race was wrong back before the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King, and the whole deal.  I'm not trying to brag, or cover for any racist tendencies; my dad had enough to go around, but he didn't pass them to his only son.  I became a kind of "closet" Giants fan, afraid of how my dad would react if I told him how much I admired the abilities of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey.  Looking back, he might have had his first heart attack at age 38.  That night, in 1961, for some reason, my dad bought me a Pittsburgh Pirates pennant and cap.  I decided that I would become a Giants fan, just to spite him.  To get to be the Champs three times in the last five years is best expressed by lyrics in two songs.  The first by SF natives Grateful Dead in the song Truckin', "What a long strange trip it's been."  And a Frank Zappa song of the same name as the lyric, The Torture Never Stops.

 

I am blessed, however, to a woman who has learned (sometimes the hard way) to understand and appreciate some of the complexities of the game.  Blessed... OK, to be truthful, I've created a monster.  We have two TV's in our living room, ostensibly because of our differing tastes in programming, but mostly so she can watch (keep track of the score of) the games.  She hasn't gotten to the point of knowing batting averages, or even how they compute batting averages, or how to answer questions like "Who played Short Stop for Cleveland in 1946?" (the correct answer is, "Who gives a %$#@?").  I love baseball, but I look like some kind of piker next to my Mary.

 

As always, thanks for letting me ramble.

 

 









 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 







A Last Shot for Friday July 3

For the Fourth of July weekend, we will be in a house in South Lake Tahoe that has a view of the fireworks.  An odd assortment of family, my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons Victor and Ryan will be there, as will Peter's aunt and her husband, Peter's parents, and Mary and I.  Mary tells me I've met this aunt before, and if it's the one I'm thinking of, this could be a great weekend.  I'm not so hot on going out for a weekend, particularly the Fourth.  My daughter dug up an article that dubbed Tahoe's fireworks show the 5th most popular destination in the Country.  I expect people to be "wall-to-wall," and traffic to be of nightmarish proportions, so we take our calm and smiling faces, as well as a good classical music CD, and we take what we get on Friday.

Most people will leave today (Thursday), to get as much weekend as they can.  We don't have such conflicts, so we will start out tomorrow (Friday), and hope that we won't have a lot of traffic going up US-50.  It's mostly two lane blacktop, with a few passing zones, getting out of Placerville, all the way to SLT.  If the big trucks are out, it can be a long day.  Worse are the gawkers who don't realize that the purpose of the extra left lane was to allow for PASSING!!!  [OK, must get calm.  I'm starting to project again, and I need to stop.]  I don't think I've ever had road rage, I've seen some guys really get into it, but I'm not a violent person, per se.  I found it much easier, driving in city traffic (both in Sacramento and San Francisco) if I'm listening to classical concertos, or something of that nature.  Particularly Mozart.  Of all of the classical Masters, he is my favorite.

I have a friend coming over to take care of Taz.  He'll have slightly non-traditional feeding for two days, so I don't think he'll starve to death.  I'm going to take my little Venue, and its remote keyboard, so I should be able to take plenty of notes, and have all of the gossip next week.

About Pain

For much of the past ten years, I have been in pain.  It started out as pain that could be medicated with OTC remedies, or a hot Jacuzzi bath.  In 2005/06, I reinjured the disks in my back.  I tried to work through it, but it became agonizing to get through a day's work, and I quit a physically demanding job to go back to teaching.  I won't suggest that teaching is a physically demanding job, although good teachers try to entertain, as well as teach, so big gestures can get tiring.  I was beginning to look like a 90 year-old, all bent over and such.  One day, at Church, a guy named Dave Gover came up and asked what was wrong with my back.  I told him that I had bulging disks at L5-S1, and was having some of the worst sciatic pain I had ever experienced.

The question caught me unprepared, I knew a little about Dave, like that he was a doctor, and worked at David Grant, but I had no idea what his specialty was, so it came out of right field.  "How would you like to be pain-free for up to 90 days?"  The look on my face should have told him that I was beyond shocked.  I said something to the effect of kissing something in public, and allowing him a half hour to draw a crowd...

From that point on, Dr. Gover helped guide me to get the referrals I needed to get into the Interventional Radiology Clinic, and I was introduced to a procedure known as an Epidural Steroid Injection, or ESI.  Using fluoroscopic imaging, the doctor inserts a small needle up next to the spine near the bulging disk, and bathes it in a solution that contains a steroid that actually shrinks the disk, taking pressure off the sciatic nerve.  In my case, they do it bilaterally, meaning they do both sides of the spine.

The first time, despite the fact that the doctor who did it (not Gover) stuck the needle into my sciatic nerve, causing me to levitate for a second or two, I felt better as soon as the lidocane shots were administered.  Lidocane takes some getting used to, after several ESI's, I no longer feel like screaming when the doctors numb the area, but it still burns.  The effect lasts as long as the lidocane does, and as it wears off, the pain level goes back up.  That scared the heck out of me, at first, because the original doctor, they called him EZ, told me that someday, these shots would no longer work.  Now days, I don't panic, because within a few days, the pain level will go way down.  After seven and a half years, I know the routine.  Using the hospital's pain scale of 1 to 10, with 1 the least pain, and 10 the worst, it goes something like this:

On the morning of the ESI, my back pain is somewhere between 8 and 10, depending upon how well I slept.  After the lidocane, it goes to 1, until the lidocane wears off, and the pain level goes back up to 6, or 7, or sometimes even 8/9.  Over the next two or three days, the steroid will begin to shrink the disk, and the pain goes down to 5.  Since I have arthritis in the same area, a 5 is about as good as it gets, even though I take Norco 325/5 every 4 to 6 hours, as needed.  I stay there, for the most part, so I have learned a little about pain management.

I'm the only person I know who can hurt himself sleeping.  Seriously, we've tried everything from Air to Waterbeds, and things that would never occur to Normal people.  We finally settled on a memory foam over coils hybrid we got at Matthew's over on Orange Dr.  Mattresses, pillows, mattress coverings of foam, memory foam, and egg crate foam, we have tried everything.  Mary, from necessity, has learned to sleep on her right side, so she can hear.  Up until the cancer surgery, I snored, pretty badly, most nights.  I don't know what happened, or even if there is any proven relationship between the removal of part of a lung and a reduction in snoring, but over the past 18 months, Mary stays in bed with me on most nights, so I know it has abated quite a bit.  No matter what we've tried, even the major makers of air and foam bedding who claim that their air/foam will reduce back pain, but give you a bunch of crap when you inform them that it didn't.

Right now, I am 2 1/2 weeks from my next procedure (ESI), and the sciatica is beginning to return to my left side, so the right can't be far behind.  My pain level has risen to about six, so this is the beginning.  By the time of my procedure, it will be at 9.  This is not a particularly good time to be me.

I don't claim to know very much about the origin of pain, but I could probably write a book about the effects of pain on the body, and the mind.  Most of the time I try to joke about it, particularly when I go to Church, and people ask how I am doing.  I could be honest:  "Just f-ing great.  I didn't have to worry about having died in my sleep, 'cause I woke up in pain.  If I ever woke up without it, I'd have a heart attack."  But I take the easy way out and say, "I'm getting on as best I can."  Which usually gets a, "We'll keep you in our prayers."

What a great sentiment, "We'll keep you in our prayers," particularly if you happen to believe in the power possessed by a single, earnest prayer.  Sometimes I wonder, though, if they're praying for me to get worse; but that's just me, getting in the way of my own redemption.   I do, by the way, believe in the power of prayer, and in the existence of a power far superior to our own, whom I choose to call God, that can intervene on our behalves, even to the point of miracles.  I have seen too many, heard (on good authority) of many more.  I have had a couple happen in my own life.  Little ones, to be sure, but I have been married for more than 41 years to a woman I still love deeply, and that is a miracle.

A 1959 Triumph TR3

After my sister Pat left home, and we moved into the house on Berryessa Drive, my dad got a "wild hair," and decided that he wanted a British-made sports car.  The summer weather, in Vacaville, was great for an open top roadster, and I knew that this would be "my car" one day, so I encouraged that part of him.  One evening, we took a trip to Sacramento, to visit car dealerships, and see what was available up there.

He didn't want a "new" sports car, he wanted a good, used car.  We went to the MG dealer, and looked in the used car section, but nothing popped out at my dad.  We wandered a little further, and came upon an "iron lot," where Dad found a 1959 Triumph TR3.  It was painted white, had black leather interior, and had all of the great lines of an English roadster.  For example, the rear view mirrors were mounted on the side of the fenders, a total of close to five feet in front of the driver.  Dad started to drool, but managed to ask to look at the engine, and the various tops for the car.  The salesman told me the hood key was in the glove box, and asked me to get it.  It was the only thing in the compartment, so it wasn't hard to find, a chrome-plated "T" that tapered to a shape that fit the two bolts in the hood.  Remember, this was 1966, and I was all of 14 years old, so the fact that the T-wrench looked as though it had never been used didn't set off any alarms, but it felt funny.

The salesman, let's call him "Dave," popped the hood, and what greeted us was an immaculate Triumph in-line four cylinder engine, that looked like it just rolled off the assembly line.  The car had about 45,000 miles on it, but for a seven year-old car, that was pretty low.  We were still oohing and ahhing  over the engine, and I noticed that there was a paint line, showing that the car's original color had been a lavender shade of purple.  Again, to a fourteen year old, it seemed weird, but it didn't set off any alarms.  Dave showed us the twin SU-carburetors, and told us that it took some time to learn how to keep them in sync.  My dad was now drooling openly, and his hand kept reaching back for his wallet.

Dave told my dad that they were asking $1,200 for the car, but he'd do him a "solid," and drop it to $999.  Dad had a thousand dollars, in cash, on him, ten $100 bills.  Dad was quiet for a minute, appearing to "mull it over," then he looked Dave right in the eye and said, "Make it an even $900, and you've got a deal."  That's how we got the little sports car from Hell.  I call it that, because those things I didn't think much about at the time, were about to make themselves understood.

Mom drove off in the '63 Galaxy we had, and left right after Dad made his deal.  This is mid-1960's, there were no cell phones, I-80 was four lanes, and we got as far as the Milk Farm before the engine seized up.  Those of you familiar with the I-80 corridor through Vacaville, Dixon, and Davis know that although it gets into triple digits in the summer afternoons, it can drop into the '60's at night.  Couple that with the Delta Breezes coming from the Southwest at 10 - 20 mph, and it can get quite cold after a day of 100 degree heat.  I was freezing.  Dad walked back to the Milk Farm, and used a payphone to call a tow truck, and to let my mom know what was going on.  We got home around 11:00 pm, the tow driver helped us push the car up the driveway, into the garage, and it stayed in that spot for almost a year.

Work on the car went fairly slowly.  We didn't have lifts, or any pneumatic tools, so everything had to be broken down by hand.  Dad had set up boxes to hold the various systems associated with the engine, ignition, carburetion, heating/cooling, etc.  As we pulled the assemblies from the block, we would put them into their box, to soak in solvent until we got back to them.  It wasn't until we had the entire engine broken down that we would find out how hard it was to get parts for.  A lot of things had to be ordered by mail, and new parts could take forever to arrive.  As we "cracked the block," my dad started giving me more responsibility with the reassembly.  He would double, triple, quadruple check my work, and I learned how cars ran.  I was also learning to take care of a car I had a lot invested in.

I have no idea what all of the parts cost, and I had some help with the car's appearance, repainting, reupholstering, and an electrical problem that was probably created by my dad, but fixed by the Chief of  Police, who was the father of a friend, and enjoyed puzzling problems like the one that developed.  All I know is, that almost a year to the day, I put the key in the ignition, turned it on, and hovered over the starter switch while I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and pushed...

VRRRROOOOOOMMMMM.  Pop, pop, and then an uneven purr.  I was so excited, I practically wet myself.  We tweaked for a few minutes, checked the adjustments of the carburetors, and adjusted the idle, and stood back in awe of this sleek purring roadster that we had given a new life.

Extra credit for anyone who can identify the location.

Some Things Come To Mind...

 Facebook friends know how much I use the ellipsis (...) in my Comments and Posts.  For those of you who do not understand the uses for the device, the ellipsis indicates that the thought/quote/idea continues beyond the last word given.  ...also stand for something before the ellipsis when the beginning of the thought/quote/idea is understood, or irrelevant (see, I took out the "An ellipsis can...").  As a freelance writer, I can use the ellipsis to make a quote say what I want it to say, and claim literary license.  News reporters, on the other hand, do not have that liberty, and are required by their own code of ethics not to do such things.  Personally, any news writer who uses the ellipsis freely is fairly suspect.  I use it because some of my comments could actually be longer, but...

Thus endeth the lesson on the ellipsis. 

I don't know that anyone ever reads these, there are only three people who follow my blogs, and I have no idea if they get a notification whenever I post something.  If not, my readership is me, and me alone.  I could foul this up with profanity (apparently as a former sailor, I am stereotyped as a drunken, foul-mouthed lout), but I have been working on "PG13" language, particularly at home.  And besides, as a former sailor, I was a polite drunk.  I just think there is too much profanity in the world today. 

Seriously.  When I was a teenager, being male, I used profanities to prove how tough and grown up I was.  Girls, in the company of boys, almost never swore.  Now, young ladies are hanging out windows, giving the finger, and dropping F-bombs like B-27's over Germany in 1945 (look it up, I guessed on the year, but sometime in there, the allies bombed the living doggie doo out of the German industrial cities, so it's an apt analogy).  I used to tell the girls in my English classes that if I could get one of them to stop swearing, or even to become more aware of their swearing and slow down, I would be the happiest English teacher in the school.

The way girls dress, now days, can be a problem for a male teacher.  I once, during a Summer School assignment, had a young lady come into my classroom and plop down in the front row.  Normally, it's a behavior I've seen in my own kids, and it's a challenge to the teacher, "Entertain me!"  Except this particular young lady was very attractive, and dressed in a top and miniskirt that highlighted her... well... her cleavage.  Here she was, in the front row, dressed somewhat provocatively, sitting in a rather un-ladylike position.  Did I mention the miniskirt?  I quickly wrote a note, telling her to please move to the back of the class.  She straightened up and looked at me defiantly, and said, "Why?  I like sitting in the front row."  I gave her my best fatherly look and said, "Frankly, it's because of the way you are dressed.  If you come to class dressed a little more conservatively, you can sit wherever you want."  She got up and moved to the back of the row.  The next day, she was in shorts and a blouse that buttoned up, and sat in the front row.  She stayed there for the next six weeks, and in the end, she thanked me for making her think about how she appeared to people.  There's a long story, but she would wear that particular outfit to drive her dad crazy (I could see why).  I told her she wouldn't leave my house in that outfit were she my daughter, but of course if she were my daughter, she would only leave the house under guard.  It was something, at 49, I was the oldest person she knew, her grandparents passing before her birth.  Never saw her again after that summer semester was over.

I've had a chance to look back on a horrible time in my life, the loss of my daughter Amy in 1979.  The old adage goes, "A parent should never see his children die."  I don't know who said it, under what circumstance, but I agree wholeheartedly.  I watched our second child die in my hands at Slidell Memorial Hospital in Louisiana.  She was born several months prematurely, and was not equipped to handle oxygen straight from the air.  She fought hard, but it was futile, her little lungs just couldn't do it, and then she went limp.  It was a feeling I never want to experience again, ever.  I haven't talked about this, ever, and I don't really want to get into this now.  I went to see her, the nurses were all in tears, and I asked if I could see her.  She was in an incubator, a plastic box with glove holes in the side.  They said there was nothing they could do but make her comfortable, and it was OK for me to hold her in the box.  They watched as I picked her up, and felt how little she was.  Amy was kicking, like she was fighting to stay, and then she went limp...

End of story...

Except it didn't end right there.  We tried, had a son 355 days later, except there was still a hole at the table where Amy should have been.  For a long time, she went without a permanent marker, and there was something that remained undone, and was keeping us from reaching some closure.  Mary sent me Polaroid pictures of the permanent marker, I was on deployment to Misawa, Japan in 1989, and I think I scared some folks in the barracks because of the loud weeping.  Some folks worried that I was losing it, but it was the relief of having done the last thing we could do on earth for my daughter.  Prior to doing that, came the second most horrible time in my life, my separation from Mary in 1981.

We said we weren't doing it, but each of us ourselves for Amy.  Me because of the drugs I took in the 1960's and early '70's.  Mary had her own reasons, but we started putting up barriers to communications, and soon we weren't talking to each other.  I always likened it to fencing ourselves off from each other.  Each thing we couldn't talk about was like a board in the fence.  Pretty soon we got to the point where we couldn't talk to each other at all without starting a argument, and our relationship deteriorated fully.  We were legally separated, waiting for the divorce to become final, and I had a bit of an epiphany, and we put our marriage back together, and things have been great ever since.  There is another adage about marriages that make it past the first seven years will make it forever.  We were married in '74, separated in '81.  We almost didn't make it past seven years.  This past year was 41 years together.  Believe me, miracles happen, I've seen it.

Memories From Pebble Beach

I was stationed at the Fleet Numerical Oceanographic Center, in Monterey, CA from 1987 to 1989.  My parents were in their 60's, and Dad still drove a 30' motor home (plus the tow bar and car they took with them, in all about 40 feet).  When he found out that there was a, pretty much, unused Family Campground at Ft. Ord, not far from our housing unit, he started calling around and got us tickets for the '88 AT&T at Pebble Beach (formerly the Bing Crosby National Pro/Am).  I took a week off, and Dad and I wandered around the different venues watching practice rounds.  We met all kinds of folks, like Jack Lemmon, Hewey Lewis, Willie McCovey, and Producer/Director George Stephens Jr.  We even had the chance to meet players like Fuzzy Zoeller and Payne Stewart, both of whom we had held very pleasant conversations.
Perhaps the coolest of all was meeting Jack Lemmon, and his son Chris.  I got a chance to tell Jack that he was, perhaps, an "old salt's" favorite Ensign, due to his role as "Ensign Pulver" in the movie version of "Mr. Roberts," starring Henry Fonda and Jimmy Cagney.  Jack actually seemed touched by that, or he is a great enough actor to improvise a scene where he can summon such emotions.  He shook my hand.  It wasn't one of those political three-pump handshakes, either.  It was a warm, friendly handshake, like between friends who hadn't seen one another in a long time.  We locked eyes, and I saw a man who really enjoyed my comment, and was glad to know that he had become such a memorable character to someone "so young" (remember, I was 36 when this happened).
Over the two tournaments that Dad and I met a bunch of other folks, Dwight Clark, Dr. J, even the toughest autograph to get, Clint Eastwood, stopped to talk for a couple of moments, but my favorite memory of all, was running into Jack Lemmon in '89.
We had gone out for the practice rounds, and found out that Jack Lemmon was playing Cypress Country Club.  A very exclusive club that has one of the most memorable holes in golf, a Par 3 that goes across a tiny bay that is home to a number of sea-otter families.  We found out that he had teed-off about a half an hour before, so we beat a path to the third tee, hoping to catch him there.  It was a great guess, because just as we came out of the woods, Jack's group was stepping up to the tee.  Dad and I were, perhaps, 50 - 60 yards down the tee-box from the tees the celebrities would play from, right up on the ropes, watching as Jack teed his ball and prepared to hit.  Suddenly, he stops, and looks right at my dad and I, and says, "Look, it's Charlie and Steve." and then strides down the tee-box to shake hands, and greet one another.  He goes up to hit his ball, and apparently hits the best tee shot of the three he'd played.  "Stick around, fellas, you might be good luck."
I don't remember a lot about my dad any more, but I cannot ever forget the look on his face when he was recognized by Jack Lemmon.