E.G. Marshall???!!!!

"You won't notice it happening until you see yourself in pictures."
That's what Tom Kennington told me over thirty years ago. Tom was a boss of mine in Tampa and he had long been a "chrome dome". Tom, a jolly good fellow, seemed more than comfortable in his follicular challenged state. He did, however, seem excited to be rushing a new pledge to the fraternity of the bald pate...that would be me.

To be honest, I had been noticing a slight retreat in the forward area of my hairline. I had been blaming it on recently wearing a steel pot on my head as I helped the U.S. Army hold the line against the godless commies in Kansas, but my forehead was not yet Dunkirk Beach. I'd worry about going bald...later.

So there I was the other day, going through some old family photo albums at the behest of my daughter Katie. She had called to ask for a baby picture of herself for some goofy deal at work. Naturally I said that it would be no problem to locate a sufficiently embarrassing picture of her to provide yuks for her office and began the task of sorting through the now ancient snapshots.
(My task loomed large after she informed me that I needn't send along any "nudies". Damn the good taste police!)

YIKES!! It had been way too many years since I had hopped in the photographic time machine! The "baby" had been a baby thirty-four years ago!
Who were these people? That couldn't be me? My wife? The kids??
It was a karmic whack in the gut. I had one of those "out of body... this can't be happening to me" moments. It was frightening. How could we all have changed that much? How could I now be older than my father was in these pictures? And...what the hell were these children doing with CHILDREN? Very scary stuff.

Now it's becoming clear to me why everybody on TV looks like a kid that I should be telling to clean up his plate or "stop teasing the dog". Thirty or forty years will tend to alter a person's appearance. Who knew?

This also goes a long way toward explaining why all of the pictures recently taken of our family have the late actor E.G. Marshall in them. (I thought they had been photo shopped.)



E.G. Marshall





For now, I'm okay with all of this. However, I may lose it when I start spotting Walter Brennan standing next to my wife and kids.



Walter "Grandpappy Amos" Brennan