In more pleasant news

After dealing with snow, bruised trees, and crumpled cars yesterday (see below) I went back to the Web, and eventually looked at my blog stats during lunch. I had a cascade of hits -- "cascade" being many more than my usual handful of daily visits, most from family and friends, plus the usual odd visit from people looking for the First Hawaiian Bank, which shares my initials.

Almost all the hits were originating from Mark Evaniers' site, so I went to see why and found to my delight that Mark had "cribbed" (his word), my story about the Rose Marie segment on Carson, linking back to me in the process. As could be expected, not only did Mark remember the segment, he remembered it much better than I did (a little scary for me as Mark and I are the same age and I, or at least used to, pride myself on my memory), even to the point of naming the other guests that night (John Byner???). There's a bit of recursion for you. You can go to Mark's blog, back to my story, and then back to Mark's posting about my story if you follow those links.

Mark pegs the show airing circa 1969 or `70, which would have made us both between 17 and 18 and, if he's right, means I was living in a different city (L.A.) than I thought, and it was a different summer. But I was pretty much the nightbird from age 15 to around 25, when I was out of the Army, went back to college, and started keeping more regular hours, so it's possible. Anyway, as I suspected, as I've never seen that segment again, and it would have been a natural for any "Best of" special (certainly equal to the overused Ed Ames tomahawk segment), Mark thinks the show was probably one of the many that were lost, taped over, by NBC, who apparently had no sense of history at the time.

However, there still may be copies in existence. Stay tuned.