FIVE HUNDRED POSTS

This is my 500th posting to my blog. This all started back in June of 2006. I've received a number of nice comments and compliments. What I don't appreciate is people with business agendas who post an anonymous note that promotes their own own online business. It's been fun writing these articles and it gives a bit of background of my own life and a bit on personalities and history.For example dear old Henry VIII secretly married Anne Boleyn and In 1915, on this date Alexander Graham Bell inaugurated cross country telephone service. Imagine how much technology for telephones has grown in only ninety-five years. Today, Dean Jones turns seventy-nine years young. Dear Dean (whom I met once at Hooper's Camera and had a very pleasant conversation) starred in the NBC television sitcom Ensign O'Toole from 1962-63, produced by Four Star Television, portraying an easy-going naval officer aboard a destroyer. I loved this show. Dean was perfect for it! His co-stars included Jack Mullaney, Jack Albertson, Jay C. Flippen, Harvey Lembeck, and oh yes dear Beau Bridges. Previously, he had appeared in a number of films. Jones played disc jockey Teddy Talbot in the 1957 Elvis Presley smash hit, Jailhouse Rock. He portrayed soldiers in 1957's Imitation General with Glenn Ford and 1959's Never So Few with Frank Sinatra. He became best known for a string of Walt Disney films he made in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with That Darn Cat! (actress Hayley Mills' last film at Disney). Jones' performance was so well-received that Disney continued to utilize him for such future movies as The Ugly Dachshund, Blackbeard's Ghost and Snowball Express. Jones' signature Disney role would be that of race car driver "Jim Douglas" in the highly successful Love Bug series. Jones appeared in two feature films (The Love Bug and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo) and in a short-lived television series produced in 1982 and a made-for-TV movie in 1997. In 1991, Jones co-starred with Gregory Peck and Danny DeVito as the president of Peck's wire-and-cable company, fighting a hostile takeover from DeVito, in the film Other People's Money. He finally got to do a villain's role appearing as the evil veterinarian, "Herman Varnick," in the family film Beethoven in 1992. Later, he did the voice of "George Newton" in TV series version of Beethoven. Dean was one of the last actors to see Walt Disney alive in 1966. He was filming "Blackbeard's Ghost" when Walt (looking so pale and tired) walked onto the set at his Burbank studios. Interesting note: Walt had wanted to utilize Blackbeard's film star Peter Ustinov to star as Nikita Khruschev in a comedy called "Khruschev in Disneyland". Now that would have been funny. John and I are planning a new recording session on February 7th and hope to record a few more songs for the web site.