Other Memories of San Francisco Part II

In live theater, I saw Zero Mostel in “Rhinoceros”, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”, “The Fantasticks”, “Little Me” (with Sid Caesar) and “110 in the Shade” (based on the “Rainmaker”). At a later date (2001) I had an opportunity to see Richie Havens perform at the Paradise Performing Arts Center. I got to tell him that I had seen him at the Hungry I in 1968 and that his hair was grayer than it was when I first saw him!
I saw my first improv comedy group “The Committee”. Some of the members of the group are still acting and I see a few of them once in a while on TV and in the movies.
One was a regular on the Bob Newhart Show. Larry Hankin I see often. He was the original Kramer on Seinfeld.
I went to Muir Woods National Park once and , in walking around the loop trail, I recognized a national figure and his wife walking toward me. It was Daniel Ellsburg who wrote “The Pentagon Papers” which exposed LBJ and his reasons for going into Viet Nam. After I asked him if he was Daniel Ellsburg, he backed away. I told him I admired him for what he did for our country. He told me that when people came up to him, as I did, he didn’t know if they were going to hit him for what he had done or not. The night before I met him, the FBI and broken into his home in Mill Valley and ransacked it trying to find anything to discredit it him.
One time, I was listening to KSFO to hear Don Sherwood, my morning DJ, when there was an announcement of a contest for a limerick for Golden Grain Pasta. I immediately sat down wrote:
There once was a man named O’Toole
Who disliked pasta as a rule
‘Til he tried Golden Grain
And it went to his brain
And now he is a Pasta Fool
When I went to work one day, Jerry Harkenrider said he had heard the limerick from “Bob Ramsdell of Yuba City”. I guess that was my 15 seconds of fame. I was surprised a few days later to get a box from Golden Grain with 30 pounds of every type of pasta they made. We had several packages and my wife sent me down to the spare bedroom to get another type only to find out that the cat had peed all over the pasta and we had to throw it out.
I happened to be in San Francisco in June of 1946. I was listening to the radio, one afternoon, and there was “breaking news” story. There was an escape attempt on Alcatraz. I grabbed my brother-in-law’s 20 power binoculars and rushed up the hill to where I could get a good view of what was going on. I braced the binoculars against my knees to steady them and watched the event. There were many small boats circling the island and I could see guards on the outside walkways lobbing tear gas grenades into the barred windows. I could also clearly hear machine gun fire on the island even though it is 1.4 miles away. No one escaped that time although I think a later one, which the Clint Eastwood movie was based on, the escapees made it to near the Golden Gate Bridge. On an attempt to duplicate it on the “Mythbuster” program, it was a possibility that they had escaped.