Sometime a little over 50 years ago I was on a business trip with my parents in Hollywood and we were eating dinner at Norm's, a Denny's style restaurant chain native to LA. Hollywood is a town where you are always seeing people you know from some TV or movie but don't know their names, the great mass of d-list working actors that the stars float above. It is a factory town after all. And sitting in the next booth over from us, chain smoking and looking all Hollywoody and tan was Gerald Mohr!

A little history on this actor. He had kicked around Hollywood since the 30's and never quite made the A-team. He was a leading man in some B-movies, a radio actor and announcer, and also in about any TV show from the 50' and 60's you can name as a guest actor. The perfect example of an actor you kind of recognize but don't know. But I did!

Mainly because I was a huge monster and horror movie fan and Mohr had starred in two of my favorite cheapy flicks: "Angry Red Planet" and "My World Dies Screaming". I went up to him and asked him for an autograph. I could tell Mohr was thrilled to be recognized. He sent his son out to the car to get one of his 8" by 10" glossies. Only in Hollywood do you have them in your car at all times. Mohr died of a heart attack a couple of years later at the age of 54.

Then and there is when I decided that I was going to move to LA as soon as high school was out. "Movie stars....swimming pools....". It took me 8 more years to get there, but I did eventually.....