Karen Allen

Karen Allen

After seeing Karen Allen in movies like Animal House and Raiders of the Lost Ark, I wanted to know everything about her. I recorded many of her films on my VCR and collected all the magazine articles that I could find. She was the only actress that had this affect on me. This was back in the 1980’s, before we had the Internet or the World Wide Web.

In 1995 I discovered the newly created web and Mosaic, the first widely available web browser. I had been involved with personal computers at work since the first IBM PC came out in 1981. I even created and ran The Blue Flame bulletin board system from 1989 through 1994, while I worked at Lone Star Gas Company. Like many computer users in those days I wanted to create my own web site. Back then it was common for us computer nerds to do that by simply publishing links to our favorite sites on the web, because the browsers back then did not yet have much in the way of bookmarks. This was how a number of early web search engines were started, such as AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos. So I created my own site that looked pretty much like everyone else’s. It only took me a few weeks to see that mine was as good as most, but not anywhere as good as the best, so I scrapped that and decided to do something else. I found a new site about actress Meg Ryan and decided that I could do that for Karen Allen, using all the photos and articles I had already collected. I put the Karen Allen Page on the web in August of 1995.

Eventually, after adding sites about the Dodgers (1996), Whoopi Goldberg (1997), and Rosie O’Donnell (1998), I decided my sites needed a new name. In 1997 I created the ACME Web Pages. About the same time I found and became a big fan of a site about the film Animal House, that was created by a college student in Pennsylvania. When he graduated, he decided he would not have the time or resources to keep it maintained, so he offered it to me. I snapped it up and renamed it the ACME Animal House, with this caption: ACME Animal House is the work of Patrick Spreng, and is NOT sponsored by or affiliated with Universal Pictures, John Landis, Dean Wormer or anyone else even remotely related to the movie.

National Lampoon’s Animal House, released in 1978, turned twenty years old in 1998, and in celebration of the screwball hit comedy that spoofed campus life, Jay Samit, the head of business development for Universal Studios’ “New Media Group,” hosted a special screening and cast reunion in Los Angeles October 6, 1998. Following a screening of the original film, there was a question-and-answer session with director John Landis, co-producer Matty Simmons, writer Chris (“Hardbar”) Miller, and cast members Karen (“Katy”) Allen, Verna (“Marion Wormer”) Bloom, Steven (“Flounder”) Furst, Bruce (“D-Day”) McGill, Peter (“Boon”) Reigert, Martha (“Babs”) Smith, John (“Dean Wormer”) Vernon, and James (“Hoover”) Widdoes. A private cast reunion party capped the evening’s events. And because of my ACME Animal House website, Jay invited me to come to LA and attend all of these events.

I enjoyed the movie, feverishly took notes during the Q&A, and then spoke to everyone at the party, from John Landis to fellow-Texan Bruce McGill. Of course to cap the evening I spent half an hour visiting one-on-one with Karen! And she even gave me her email address. We also talked about each of our sons – her Nicholas is about four years younger than my son Evan – and about her experience in movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Wanderers, Starman, and The Sandlot, and many other topics.

That was one of the most thrilling experience of my life. Today, nearly twenty years later, I still email Karen on her birthday each year and she tells me about her latest acting gigs and her Karen Allen Fiber Arts business.

Thanks for reading my blogs. Please feel free to leave a comment here or use my CONTACT ME page to send me email.

 

Seeing Whoopi in New York

Whoopi with Jean and I

Over the years I worked at several jobs where I had to live somewhere far from home.

In 1994 after I left Lone Star Gas Company in Dallas, Jean and I moved to Wichita, KS, because I took a job there with USF&G Insurance, which was based in Baltimore, MD. After working there for sixteen months they closed that office and offered me a position with their life insurance division F&G Life in Baltimore. They moved me to Towson to live in a campus apartment at Towson University. After leaving F&G Life I took a job working for IBM in White Planes, New York. There I rented a small bedroom from a Jewish lady in Scarsdale.

In 2003 when I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was in recovery for nine months. I then got a job in Tampa, FL, with Neilsen Media Research, the company that measures what people watch on television (ratings) so the networks can determine how much they can charge marketers for advertising. There I found an apartment where I could walk just 200 yards to the nearest bus that would take me to Neilsen.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up in the Chelsea area of Manhatten New York, but moved to California before she was twenty, where she worked at the San Diego Repertory Theater, and with various groups developing her skills as a stand-up performer. This was also when she adopted her name “Whoopi.” In 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols they created Whoopi Goldberg, her one-woman show, which opened October 24, 1984 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

For that highly successful show’s twentieth anniversary, she and Nichols decided to do it again with a brand new show based on the original creation – a one-woman show featuring several of her character creations: Live on Broadway: The 20th Anniversary Show. Because I had worked for her a few years earlier, she offered Jean and I free seats if and when we could get to New York. So we planned a trip to meet there – Jean from Tulsa and me from Tampa – the weekend of December 3 – 5, 2004 to see Whoopi at the Lyceum Theatre! You can see the photos I took here. Also check out my Whoopi web site.

I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?

How I met Whoopi Goldberg

I was an early adopter of home computers and their use in communicating “online.” I got my first modem about 1985 and built my first online bulletin board system (BBS) by 1989. In 1995 I created my own website, which was little more than a collection of my favorite internet bookmarks. This was how a lot of the early websites began. I soon tired of just publishing my links, and started looking for what I wanted to create online that would be of interest to others. Offline I already had an interest in actress Karen Allen (Animal House, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.), so I created a site about her movies, TV appearances, biography, photos, etc. By 1998 I had bought the URL ACME Web Pages (originialy acmewebpages.com, now acmesebpages.net) and created sites about Karen – (Karen Allen: An ACME Page), the LA Dodgers (ACME Dodgers), the movie Animal House (ACME Animal House), and Whoopi Goldberg (ACME Whoopi).

About the same time – the late 1990’s – Whoopi introduced whoopi.com (which no longer exists). After paying someone for a very glitzy website, Whoopi (or more likely, Tom Leonardis, the President of Whoop, Inc), liking my ACME Whoopi site, hired me to design a simpler, more functional site combining my ACME Whoopi with her whoopi.com. I built and maintained it for about a year, until her reaction to the 9/11 attack caused her to abandon the net for a decade. I was hired November 2000 and spent four or five weeks combining the two sites and adding several new features, and finally went live with my version about January 1, 2001. Interstingly, I also lost my day job in 2001 because of the 9/11 attack – I worked at American Airlines and was let go because I was the low man in the department, so when Whoopi took down her website in October of 2001, we had no way to pay for our home in Oklahoma and my wife Jean had to return to working full-time.

Things went quite well while I was webmaster, well enough that she decided to bring me to California to help with a new project. Whoopi had hosted the Academy Awards ceremony in 1994, 1996 and 1999, but was not hosting the show in 2001. The 2001 Oscars were hosted by first-time host Steve Martin. Instead, Whoopi decided to create an alternate Oscars ceremony online in her Los Angeles office.

For this webcast I built a feature on whoopi.com where fans could guess the Oscar winners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actors/Actresses and Supporting Actors/Actresses. I also built a software tool to quickly organize the entries and identify the winners. Whoopi flew me 1st class to join her in her offices for the webcast. She selected items for the winners to receive – autographed items like glossy 8 X 10s, books, DVDs, etc. – after the end of the webcast. I quickly determined who had won (actually two people had gotten all the answers correct) and sent them emails letting them know they had won. But overall, I was able to spend several hours with Whoopi and her associates at Whoop, Inc.

It was one of the best days of my life!