Friday Musings!

Acorn Season!

Still here at "Ketelsen East", and mostly taking it easy! About all I accomplish most days is my afternoon bike ride! I've got a dinner coming up this weekend at the house, so am doing a little cleaning, but mostly watching the Cubs on TV most days, and listening for the gunfire! Actually, the reports are not from gunfire, but from acorns falling from high in the trees overhanging the house. They really do sound like gunshots sometimes, and then you can hear them bounce and rattle down the slope of the roof into the eaves, which will need cleaning at least once or twice before the snow flies.

Cavett at right with Little Richard and Helen Gurley Brown (from IMDB)

This morning, while being lazy, I was channel surfing and found one that is called "Decades", specializing in TV shows from the 50s thru 70s, as many of their ilk do. On it was "The Dick Cavett Show". I was a big fan in those days and was often the only one awake late in the evening on the farm watching it on the only TV in the living room. Seems incongruous that a farm boy was a fan of an erudite Yale man with intelligent talk with newsmakers, but what can I say... Anyway, the show today featured Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, and at one point he allowed them to ask him a question. Evidently he never talked about himself on the show, but Carol asked him what his middle name was. He hemmed and hawed a long time, eventually admitting it started with "A", then finally caving and admitting it was "Alva". My jaw dropped! That is my middle name as well, and I never knew Cavett's. He then stated he was named after his father, whose first name it was - same with me! I find it amazing that 45 years later I learn that I share a name with one of my boyhood idols!

I only know a little of the story of how I was eventually named Alva... When my dad was born October of '31, his mom had already had something close to 12 kids, and suspect she was looking for ideas for names! Thomas Edison had died just a few days before, so chose Alva for a first name. And as was one of the traditions, my middle name is taken from my Dad's first, so I'm indirectly named after, and share middle names with Thomas Edison!