Tag Archives: Sheridan College

Sally Kellerman and Me ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

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People ask, “But what about that Sally Kellerman story you keep promising?” Grab your favourite beverage and sit back kiddies. It’s finally arrived. 

Back in 1973 I was a starving Media Arts student at Sheridan College of Applied Arts and Technology in Oakville, Ontario Canada. Despite being a naive 21-year old, I already had a failed marriage behind me.

When my marriage broke up, I threw myself into college activities, helping run the Radio Sheridan, which a bunch of us tricked the Student Activity Council into financing and editing “A Student Magazine,” an alternative publication that we tricked the Student Activity Council into financing. In fact, that’s where and when I started my writing career.

My first regular column — in a lifetime filled with banging words together — was called “Octoroon Expressway; Next Left,” a title that would probably generate outrage today, but these were much simpler times. At first I was just attracted to the word “octoroon” because of all those Os. It’s just a great looking word. However, when I learned the definition, I knew that’s what I wanted to call it. It’s hard to imagine that people once kept track of that sort of thing, but I digress.

The Media Arts course was somewhat of a free-wheeling mess, no offense to my instructor Jim Cox, whom I’ve only just recently reconnected with on Facebook. It was just so loosey-goosey. The course had only recently been created and this was the very first year a 2-year Media Arts course was offered. Everyone was looking at this period as a shakedown cruise. We were all — faculty and students alike — feeling our way. Consequently, the students got a way with a lot. It was like Hogan’s Heroes in that regard.

I remember arriving one day to see boxes stacked 6 feet high lined up along both walls of the entrance hallway. I started moving them into the center of the hallway. People arriving and leaving started to help. Within a few minutes we had created a maze which people had to navigate to get in or out of the building.

Today I know better than to create a maze at the entrance to a building. Of course, I wasn’t thinking about fire regulations. I was just having fun. But, it wasn’t fun sitting in the Dean of Student Affairs’s office getting chewed out by Dean John Bromley and the Chief of the Oakville Fire Department.

I digress. This was supposed to be about me and Sally Kellerman.

But first, A Dollar’s Worth Of Trouble, a comedic episode of Bonanza guest starring Sally Kellerman:

Still with me? Good.

Once a week, for Film Appreciation (or whatever it was called), Jim Cox would show us a movie or two. These were not limited to your typical Hollywood fare. We saw movies from the entire world; from every era; and every genre, from experimental, to documentary, to animation. From Metropolis to The Lady From Shanghai. From El Topo to Point Of Order. From Norman McLaren to Don’t Look Back.

It was this class, more than any other, that opened my eyes to what film could accomplish and this is as good a place as any to thank Jim Cox for instilling in me a lifelong love of the medium.

One week Film Appreciation was your typical Hollywood fare, but even that was atypical. I don’t know how Cox managed it, but he got a hold of the movie Slither to screen for us, and it had not been released to theaters yet. If that weren’t enough, when the movie finished in walked Sally Kellerman, who did an hour’s Q&A with everyone who stayed through the movie. Not everyone did.

Naturally, I knew who Sally Kellerman was. M*A*S*H, the movie on which the tee vee show was based, was a huge hit when it was released. She was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her role as Hot Lips Houlihan, and deservedly so. The movie is far darker, and a much greater condemnation of the insanity of war, than the Alan Alda series of the same name. And, of course I also knew her as Elizabeth Dehner in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the Star Trek episode famous for being the second pilot, although it was the third episode aired.

We had a real live Hollywood star in class. To be honest, I can’t remember if I even asked Sally Kellerman a question.

And that’s my story about me and Sally Kellerman.

Just kidding. If that were all, there’d be no reason to write about it. However, as far as I knew at the time, that was the end of it. Until later that night . . .

It was already after dark and I was already settled in for the night when my phone rang. One of my classmates was inviting me over to the townhouse she shared with several other gals. I declined. She got more forceful. I declined again.

“Get your ass over here or you’ll be sorry. And, that’s all I can tell you.”

This was a 13 miles drive along Lakeshore Drive, in winter, from Oakville to Burlington. However, my curiosity got the best of me and I bundled up and drove to the townhouse. When I arrived I was told that everyone was in the back room and just to head on back. There was one long corridor with rooms off to the side. As I approached, I came into view of more and more people who all said, “Hi, Headly.” “Hi, Headly.” “Hi, Headly.”

As I entered the room to this chorus of Hi Headlys, the last corner of the room came into my view. There, curled up in a beanbag chair, was Sally Kellerman, the last person to say “Hi, Headly.”

It turned out that my classmate got to talking to Sally after the Q&A and, out of the blue, invited her to spaghetti dinner back at the townhouse. To her surprise Sally accepted. They had been eating and smoking dope for hours before I got there.

During this period of my life (and for decades afterwards, on fact) I kept a journal, which I carried everywhere. I used it to put down all kinds of nonsense, not just words, but entire collages of pictures and words. [Another project I want to perform when I find the time is digitizing some of it for Not Now Silly. They are currently packed away.] Sally took my journal and thumbed through it and anointed it in 2 places. On a sexy picture she found of lips sucking a straw she wrote something to the effect of “I didn’t know you still had this picture of me.”

We all had a great time talking and laughing and one by one people drifted off. As it got very late, Sally said she had to go back to Toronto. That seemed to be the end of the night and I stood up with her. We walked out together and I walked her to her limo, where the driver sat waiting all night. We kept talking and suddenly she said, “Why don’t you come back with me to my hotel?”

Here’s how naive I was at 21: It never occurred to me that Sally Kellerman was inviting me back to her hotel room for anything other than continuing our scintillating conversation. All I could think was the logistics of “How do I get back to Burlington to get my car” and “I have a class in the morning.” So, I declined.

Later I read she liked younger men and I certainly qualified at the time.

I’ve been kicking myself ever since.

Me and Jim Kale ► Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

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More than once I’ve been called the Zelig of the innertubes, popping up to witness pivotal moments in history. A night I spent with Jim Kale, of The Guess Who and Scrubbaloe Caine, is one of those times.

Get comfortable, kiddies, because we’re taking the Wayback Machine all the way back to the early ’70s.

Back then I was the station manager of Radio Sheridan, the campus radio station at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Radio Sheridan was one of the few campus stations in the country respected by the major record companies. They knew that normally records sent to a campus station went into a black hole, never to be seen again. When the Promo Reps visited Radio Sheridan, which they did often because we were on the route between Toronto and Hamilton, they could find every record they ever sent us in the library ready for a DJ to select it.

Not only could we count on the personal touch from the Record Reps, but we were also getting interview offers for Big Deal Rock and Roll artists, concert tickets with occasional backstage passes, free records for our personal collections, and posters for our home walls. We knew these were all perks normally reserved for broadcast radio jocks and the music reviewers from the national press. We felt honoured to be included, but it was also a testament to how well organized Radio Sheridan was in the day.

Long before the night in question, Jim Kale was a member of The Guess Who. It’s easy to forget that The Guess Who was an international hit band back in the days before CanCon radio regulations mandated stations play 33% Canadian Content. Kale stayed with The Guess Who until soon after the 1972 release of release of Live at the Paramount. The reason was ascribed to undefined “health problems,” something cited more than once in biographies about more than one point in Kale’s career. However, it has always been rumoured in Canadian Show Biz, which is a very small pond, that this was a euphemism for alcoholism.

Soon after leaving The Guess Who, Kale hooked up as bass player with Scrubbaloe Caine. As manager of Radio Sheridan I listened to every record that arrived to decide what genre it fell into. There was no genre off limits and it wasn’t unusual to hear Rock and
Roll rubbing shoulders with Jazz, Blues, or Big Band Swing. Then I’d log them into the library alphabetically and let all the DJs know what was new. That’s how I became an early adopter of a lot of different music such as (for the sake of this story) Scrubbaloe Caine.

I fell in love with Scrubbaloe Caine on first listen. There weren’t many Rock and Roll bands with a lead violinist/lead singer. That was Henry Small, who went on to found Small Wonder and later sang with Prism. Also in the band was the double-lead guitar team of Paul Dean, later of Streetheart and Loverboy, and Jim Harmata. Filling out the band was Al Foreman on keys and harmonica and Bill McBeth hitting the skins.

Scrubbaloe Caine should have been HUGE. I thought they were so great that I raved about them to John Murphy, the RCA Promo Rep, the next time he came around. A short time later Murph called to say he was driving up to catch Scrubbaloe Caine live in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, a long way from Oakville. He wanted to know if I was down for a ROAD TRIP!!! I said yes immediately, but made him promise that we’d see the Giant Nickle first, because I had never seen it before.


Road trip music: As always, CRANK IT UP!!!
I lived in Canada for 35 years and this is still the most Canadian thing I did in the entire time I lived there. After a quick trip to the Giant Nickle we headed into the Sudbury Arena, where Scrubbaloe Caine was opening for Crowbar. It doesn’t get more Canadian than that.

This was one of those times I got a backstage pass, not that backstage at a hockey arena is anything to write to ‘Merka about. However, that allowed me to wander at will in all the dressing rooms. That night the Sudbury Arena was Party Central and I was INVITED.

Crowbar and Jim Kale had played on many of the same concert bills over the years and it was like old home week and — boy, oh, boy — did they catch up on old times. I didn’t know Jim Kale had a drinking problem. I was just a wide-eyed kid (in my early 20s, to be honest) amazed that I was partying with Crowbar and a former member of The Guess Who and current member of Scrubbaloe Caine, my favourite new band.

As the night wore on, Kale got drunker and drunker. By the end of the evening Kale was shitfaced and Murphy was tasked with getting him back to Toronto. It’s not all glamour for Promo Reps. Sometimes they have to clean up after the band.

Along the way we also acquired some gal (who I barely remember, other than there being one) that needed a ride back to Toronto. She got in the front and Kale and I poured ourselves into the back seat. We were still wending our way out of Sudbury when Kale made a deliberate fist, with his middle knuckle sticking out, and started punching me in the upper arm. HARD!!!


Looking for trouble? Not me. I just want to sit quietly in the back seat.
“John! He’s hitting me!!!”

“Jim! Stop hitting him!”

Jim kept hitting me. In the same place. With the knuckle. It hurt like hell. I had the bruise for weeks.

“He won’t stop hitting me!”

So John decided we had better stop at a Tim Horton’s and get some coffee into Kale before we get on the highway for the 5 hour drive home. Meanwhile, I scrunched myself into the corner of the backseat behind the driver’s seat, fending off Kale with my feet as he kept trying to land blows. Murph finds the Timmies and I scrambled out of the car as soon as it came to a stop. We all walked around the car to the passenger’s side and watched Kale get out of the car. He stood up fully erect and filled with the dignity only someone who is stinking drunk can approximate.

Then we all watch helplessly as he went down like a tree in the forest. TIMBER!!! With a loud thump his forehead hit the curb.

Now Jim Kale is out cold and bleeding like crazy from a gash on his forehead. We each grabbed a corner, tossed him back into the backseat, and raced off to the hospital. Hospital staff got him out of the car and onto a gurney. After a real quick examination they told us that he’s going to have to have stitches. That’s pretty much when Kale regained consciousness. He was still bleeding, but wouldn’t let anyone treat him. The staff tried to have us hold him down because we’re his friends, yannow. But, he was too strong for all of us as he tried to fight the entire hospital staff, landing a solid blow or two. At some point someone called the police. When they arrived they told us to go home because Kale was going to jail if they ever manage to stitch him up. We were forced to leave him there.

I am told that’s the night Scrubbaloe Caine broke up. But, still, they should have been huge!!! Listen to just one more:

Postscript: Over the years The Guess Who have participated in several reunions, which featured various line-ups and members of the band. After one of these renions Jim Kale discovered that no one had ever bothered to register the name The Guess Who, so he did. He’s owned it ever since, with drummer Garry Peterson, and they continue to perform as The Guess Who.


The Classic Line up
CRANK IT UP!!!

A Series of Tubes ► Unpacking the Writer

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He went that away!!!

Welcome back, dear readers. For the uninitiated, Unpacking the Writer is the monthly series in which I pull back the curtain, just like Toto did in the Wizard of Oz, and reveal some of the inner workings of the mind of a writer on this series of tubes.

FIRST THINGS FIRST: I’ve been told, by someone in the know, that begging my readers to click on the adverts on these pages could vitiate my contract with Google Ads. Therefore, I certainly won’t do that ever again. However, I also realize I have no control over my readers. Some of them may click on the adverts without prompting. They are such mavericks that way.

WHEN I’M 62: Maybe it’s because I had a birthday earlier this month or maybe it’s just a function of getting older, but I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately. Facebook helps me rediscover the past through many of the Groups and Pages I’ve joined.

I’ve also been thinking about my past a lot lately and this series of tubes has also been helping me catch up with that. Through them, I have connected to people I knew 42 years ago. F’rinstance, I’ve reconnected with Jim Cox, one of my favourite instructors back when I was at Sheridan College. There are several stories I’ve started writing about my times at Sheridan College. Eventually, they’ll all connect up and I’ll publish it as a book, or magnum opus of some kind.

Jim is almost my oldest connection rediscovered on the Facebookery. However, that honour would go Leon Stevenson. I first met Leon back in 1971, or ’72, around the same time I met my 1st wife in what was then known as Cooksville, Ontario. [I don’t know if anybody still calls it Cooksville, but it was the first place I ever lived in Canada. I watched over the years while Cooksville was swallowed by greater Mississauga.] Leon went on to form several bands, one of which became The Extras. I’ve followed Leon’s career and we’ve run into each
other on and off at Music Biz functions over the years. The Extras had a number of hits in Canada, including this terrific Ska tune, which was more of an underground hit due to its subject matter:

However, novelty tunes are not the only thing The Extras are known for. They were also known for great tunes with silly videos, because that’s what people did back then:

Sadly, that’s as far back as I’ve been able to take the Facebook Time Machine. I can’t get past the event horizon that marks the transition between my life in Canada and growing up in Detroit.

When I first moved to Canada I tried to keep up with my Detroit friends. I’d visit my folks on Gilchrist Street some 10-20 times a year and, while I was back, would catch up with some of my Detroit friends. However, as Detroit visits became less frequent, I also noticed that my ‘Merkin friends had not really reciprocated by visiting me in Canada.

“No soup for you!!!”

Mark Levine, my band mate in Cobwebs & Strange, visited once. He rode his bicycle from Southfield, Michigan, to Oakville, Ontario, on his way to register at MIT. That’s the last time I ever saw him.

Kenneth John Wilson and his new bride visited once. In the couple of years since I had seen him Kenny had been Born Again. Most of the visit (or so it seemed at the time and in retrospect) was spent trying to convince me to accept Jesus Christ in my life. They even left me a Good News Bible, which I kept until about 10 years ago, when it became one of the few (cherished) objects left behind (no pun intended) in my last break-up (along with 3 other different versions of The Bible, which I loved showing people the contradictions. But I digress. Again.). I would love to see Kenny again and see whether he is still highly religious.

However, those were the only friends who visited me. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about and have grown quite nostalgic for the friends that preceded the Cooksville event horizon: Dean Donaldson, who drummed for Cobwebs & Strange; Craig Portman, whose family moved to California before I moved to Canada, and I lost track of him then; Jimmy Coblentz, a few years older, who had a fleet of Studebakers and — inappropriately — moved to Normal Avenue in Los Angeles; Terry Seissor, an occasional girlfriend who wasn’t happy to learn I was moving to Canada and getting married; Jeff Deeks, whose family was so convinced that he was a drug addict (he hadn’t discovered drugs yet) and I was a bad influence on him, that they shipped him down to live with his grandparents in Hernando, Florida; Kenny Wilson; and Mark Levine are all people I’d love to find again. If you have a clue where any of them absconded to, let me know, because I’m just not as good at cyber-sleuthing on this series of tubes as some people.

A moment in time in the Not Now Silly Newsroom

ALMOST QUIET ON THE CRAZY FRONT: Speaking of cyber-sleuths. It has grown relatively quiet since I published The Johnny Dollar Wars and started sharing the hell out of it. As of this writing it’s #6 on the Not Now Silly All Time Top Ten, with a bullet!

I might have forgotten all about the feud by now had it not been for their reflexive attacks on me. Sadly — for Koldys — The Flying Monkey Squad, his sycophantic gang of ass-kissers that used to hound me on this series of tubes, is now reduced to just one: Ashley Graham, aka Grayhammy. While crossfire has diminished considerably, the war has not ended. Whenever a new skirmish breaks out I am reminded to share The Johnny Dollar Wars with more individuals. Then I set up a whole new series of timed click bait tweets, a simple process carried out with the flick of a button. All of this to push more truth about Johnny Dollar through this series of tubes.

The Johnny Dollar Depreciation Society is your place
for all the latest on The Flying Monkey Squad and
your daily adult requirement of Fox “News” snark!

Now, you’d think a smart guy like Mark Koldys — a former-Wayne County Prosecutor, fer fuck’s sake — would have figured out a way to end the war he started. Perhaps I give him too much credit. No matter, because I am content to keep this up as long as he and his Gang of One does. However, after slapping these fools down on this series of tubes for the past 3 years, would I grow nostalgic for The Johnny Dollar Wars if it were to ever end?

TWO MORE REASONS FOR MY MOTOR CITY NOSTALGIA: I’ve started making final preparations for The 2nd Annual Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research. This year there are already more stops planned and more subjects for research than last year’s very successful trip. I’ll be gathering more documents, examining more microfiche, and gathering photographs for the 2014 edition of the Road Trip.

The Purple Gang trying to remain anonymous

One of the topics I’ll be researching while up north is the history of Detroit during the 1920s through to the late ’60s for later chapters of Farce Au Pain (the long-lost book I keep promising to serialize in these pages). I’m still writing and researching parts of Farce Au Pain while I edit other parts. One never knows where research will lead. The story of Farce Au Pain is still taking unexpected turns in this series of tubes, but not everything can be found on the Information Highway, hence the The 2nd Annual Sunrise to Canton Road Trip for Research.

More specifically, I’ll be researching newspaper microfiche for articles on The Purple Gang. It surprised me that a person in Farce Au Pain, who will be introduced in Chapter Two, had a strange connection to The Purple Gang? And, who knew, that would lead to further research in Miami, a place I’ve been writing about for the last several years.

This series of tubes is an amazing place, occasionally filled with wonderful synchronicity like this, some of which make me shiver. This one had all my hairs standing on end. Get comfortable while we take a rest stop on the Information Highway:

Recently I was retweeted by the grandson of Meyer Lansky because I shared an article about his grandfather. Makes sense. No big deal, right?

This is where it gets weird. While it was accidental that the Tampa Times published an article about the daughter of the famous mobster just before Father’s Day, it was not accidental that I shared it. I shared it because Meyer Lansky has been on my mind a lot lately because that’s where the Purple connection led and I have been researching him for Farce Au Pain.

That’s why the last book I finished reading was “Mickey Cohen; The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster.” Lansky, not surprisingly, comes up 13 times in Cohen book. The next book I started reading was “The Purple Gang; Organized Crime in Detroit 1910-1945.” I’ve read it before and own it. I decided I’d read it again because it, and the Cohen book, are sources for “Farce Au Pain.” [For the record: Lansky only comes up once in the Purple book, but it was a different era.]

Without giving too much away [NO SPOILER ALERTS!] there is someone introduced in Chapter Two of “Farce Au Pain” who grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Detroit, ‘Merka’s first throwaway city. He was just in his early teens when the Purple Gang was a happening thing, but he was a cocky kid who would run errands for Harry Millman. [Incidentally, and almost besides the point, Pops was friends with Morrie (Morris) Millman, Harry’s brother. And, Morrie and Millie Millman are my sister’s Godparents, but I digress.]

As he grew up, Harry Millman paid for his education so he wouldn’t fall into a life a crime. He became a lawyer, so you’d have to argue whether Harry was successful, or not. That lawyer, almost 20 years later, connects Adrian (who you may all remember from Chapter One) tangentially to Meyer Lansky, who appears in “Face Au Pain” twice as often as he did in the book on The Purples.

It’s a series of tubes.