famous people we've all met

[ironmountain]

my cousin dated John Panozzo from Styx for awhile way back when I was little...

I got to meet Neil Peart. My cousin's friend won a drum contest back home in Grand Rapids and he won 4tickets and backstage passes to the show. I was pretty much in awe....

I've spoken with Anthony Kiedis quite a few times. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Mi(my home town) and he'd come home during xmas and at other times to visit his mom. My sister ran a 1950's style diner just north of GR and he used to come in whenever he was home. There was a local bottle of syrup in stock just for him when he came.

Joe Eliot from Def Leppard has a house 5miles away from here. He dated a local woman for many years. My friend's parents stabled his horses.

I grew up with Buster Mathis Jr.

I've met Jason Newsted. His brother is/was a teacher in Hastings, Mich. Had friends that were his students and met Jason briefly at Gun Lake while we were water skiing.

Went to St. Mark's Episcopal Church in GR on Division St. to see Allen Ginsberg read. I arrived early and there was only one other person there. He walked over, sat down next to me and we started talking. Spent 15min or so talking about lit./poetry the local small press that had published some of my poems/short stories (Big Fish).

No idea how many others. Friend's family back home owned a limo/dj service and they'd run people from the airport to different local venues and he'd give us tickets and afterwards we'd sometimes get to hang backstage before he took ppl home. Sam Kinison, the us boys, Steelheart and a few others.

JJ Walker and Elie Wiesel spoke at NMU when I was there and got to meet them...

My bro in-law was a roadie and toured for years with diff bands..kind of cool to see some of the pics/drumsticks/picks/stories.

My dad worked at Keebler and one of the Mayweather's worked there. we'd get free tickets to the Grand Center Arena to see the Golden Glove fights.

I've met Tom Izzo and Steve Mariucci and Lisa Cerasoli. They are all from here.

Will meet Ted Nugent soon. Bro in-law arranges a disabled hunt at Ted's Sunrize Acres. 500$ to shoot a pig (most of the time the costs are donated). Can bring an assistant/caregiver with you. Paul, the head guide for the ranch, handles/oversees the hunt on his weekend off so we go down to help with cooking etc...

 

[ironmountain]

also know Al Mitchell and Tony Stewart personally. Al was the trainer at the USOEC at NMU for years. He coaches my brother in law and my nephew. (the boxing program is now gone from the USOEC at NMU). Tony Stewart is one of my bro in-law's best friends. He's always there when we go visit. Most of the other boxers that have come out of there I've met or hung out with. David Reid, Veronon Forest.. we used to have madden tournaments in our dorm and some of the boxers would come over and hang out. Stew/Al/Luis were coaching at Ringside Fitness in Marquette, but they've combined gyms to form Synergy Fitness. Not sure if they're training there or finding a diff facility.

 

[Bottles r LEET]

I'm going to give this a bump...

I knew Clark Rockefeller personally, before he went on the run. He was really good friends with my Grandfather for a while. This was when he lived in Cornish, one town over from us. He also bought my Grandfather's 91 Buick.

Anyone ever read this?

"Given Burling’s mistrust and dislike of Rockefeller,
he was dismayed when the newcomer got close to, and,
in Burling’s opinion, took advantage of, one of his most
cherished Cornish friends, Don MacLeay. Burling said
he once described Donnie MacLeay in a newspaper
article as “Michelangelo with a Caterpillar tractor.†I
told Burling that I was going to meet MacLeay later that
day. “He’s going to take me to Doveridge,†I said.
“Do please be careful if you get near it,†he said—a
bizarre warning, but one that I would understand soon
enough.

As I walked up to Don MacLeay’s house in Plainfield,
New Hampshire, a small town that abuts Cornish, I
noticed a sign he had plastered to his pickup truck:
DON MACLEAY
BULLDOZING, DITCH DIGGING, TRACKING,
LAND CLEARING,
BRUSH CLIPPING, GRADING, PLAINFIELD—
AND IF IT AIN’T COUNTRY, IT AIN’T MUSIC.
He was a reed of a man who looked to be in his late
seventies, weathered by decades of work and harsh
New England winters. He motioned for me to come
inside the house, which he had built by hand. He settled
into a chair, folded his spindly legs, and began to tell me
his story.
MacLeay had been on his tractor when he was
introduced to Rockefeller, and, work being more
important to him than meeting new people, he told the
neighbor making the introduction, “Let me finish what
I’m doing here, and I’ll be with you in a minute.â€
“I don’t catch names very good,†MacLeay
continued. “I got off the tractor and said to him, ‘So,
you’re Chris Rockefeller.’ And he kind of jumped, a
little irritated, because I called him by the wrong name.â€
As MacLeay and I drove to Doveridge in his truck,
he told me, “I don’t know why he came up here. I
guess he wanted to be in the sticks. He said he was
looking for a place he could do a lot of fixing up.â€
He pulled over, parked in a grassy area off the main
road, and walked me up to the twenty-five-acre
property. “Well, here it is,†he said when we got to the
driveway, which was blocked off with a heavy chain
and surrounded by signs reading KEEP OUT,
CAUTION, and BEWARE OF DOGS.
I gasped. The place was a dump. The grounds were
overgrown, and the house was hoisted up on jacks and
appeared uninhabitable. The signs were there not to
ward off thieves, MacLeay told me, but because parts
of the house, stripped down to the studs, could literally
come crashing down. At the time of my visit, all
attempts to sell it had come to naught.
I couldn’t imagine a successful career woman like
Sandra Boss living there, and apparently she couldn’t
either. She was away on business in the months after
purchasing Doveridge (although Rockefeller made the
arrangements, the deed was in Boss’s name).
Rockefeller wanted MacLeay to oversee all of his
home improvements, but MacLeay told him up front, “I
do excavation; I’m not a contractor.†When MacLeay
asked what he was going to do with the expansive
estate, Rockefeller replied, “Sell honey and hard cider.â€
He wasn’t much better at that enterprise than he was at
renovation, said MacLeay: he ordered apple-grinding
machinery, but not all of it arrived before winter. So the
truckload of apples he’d also ordered quickly froze.
As we ducked under the chain and walked around
the property, MacLeay explained to me Rockefeller’s
habit of hiring and firing people at a furious pace.
“Construction folks,†he said. “He had fourteen different
masoners. He’d get in an argument and fire one, then go
find somebody else.â€
He suggested we walk away from the old house and
get back to the main road before something fell off the
building or we slipped and fell into a trench. I asked
about the gaping hole that had been dug beneath the
house.
MacLeay sighed. “The guy that raised the house
jacked it up so Clark could put a foundation under it,â€
he said, adding that Rockefeller paid $25,000 for
cement alone. “He wanted to put in a basement as a
place to keep his cars. He was kind of a nut for old
cars.â€
True, he didn’t have a driver’s license, but in Cornish
he bought not just one car but a fleet, most of them
antiques. One, said MacLeay, was a limousine, customfitted
with seats that revolved to face each other so
passengers could do business while being chauffeured,
that he insisted had belonged to the Rockefellers in
Woodstock.
“What did you buy that for?†MacLeay asked
Rockefeller.
“Well, our trust is set up where we can buy anything
we want, but we can’t sell anything unless it’s to a
family member.†Rockefeller added that he snapped it
up for a song, just so it wouldn’t end up on the scrap
heap.
“I thought, ‘Rich people are kind of odd,’†MacLeay
said.
Before long Rockefeller’s car collection numbered
twenty-three—vehicles of all vintages and makes, some
so old that they wouldn’t run or be good for anything
but show. He kept them scattered around the property,
because the garage beneath the house was never filled
in, much less finished.
“I’m going to put a pool in,†Rockefeller said one
day, to which his excavator and by then close friend
Don MacLeay responded, ‘Geez, why don’t you finish
something first?â€
The pool was going to cost $50,000. As with many
of his projects, the only stage of it that was completed
was the digging of a hole. Clark and the pool company
didn’t get along. It seemed that Rockefeller was
desperately trying to fit in with Cornish—while also
defiantly trying to stand out. Either way, it was
extremely odd behavior. It was one thing to want to
dupe the strivers in a bustling city like New York,
where one can flit from place to place and person to
person without gossip and innuendo trailing close
behind. But in an insular small town like Cornish, where
everyone knows everybody? Perhaps he had indeed
had a nervous breakdown, as he had claimed. Or
perhaps Cornish was just another lark, to see how far
he could push things before being unmasked.
“I don’t know,†MacLeay said, marveling at
Rockefeller’s various failed undertakings at Doveridge.
“I think he was trying to see how fast he could spend
her money,†he said, referring to Boss. The citizens of
Cornish rarely saw her, but they spoke about her often.
No one could have suspected, however, that she was
the one who made Rockefeller’s big show in Cornish
(and in Nantucket and Woodstock before that)
possible—or that he was dangerously close to losing
her."

THE MAN IN THE ROCKEFELLER SUIT

 

[rockbot]

Wow ironmountain, that is one impressive list. []

Thanks for sharing Ryan.