Happy Thanksgiving! And Notes About NPR, Forgery, Car Songs, and Mary Pickford

Posted 11-23-09. First and last thought: Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! More thoughts about cars, people, forgery, and other subjects:

Tomorrow I am going to San Francisco to be interviewed on The California Report on National Public Radio. It's a taped interview, so it will air in the Bay Area on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, on KQED-FM 88.5 FM at 4:30 p.m./6:30 p.m./11 p.m. It airs on different channels and times around central and northern California. Consult the listings for your area here.

Last week I did an interview with Jeff Figler of the Sports Byline Radio Network, which broadcasts to 700 stations and 178 countries around the world through the Armed Forces Network. This was about Operation Bullpen, my book on forgery which continues to draw attention. (To the right is one of the gang's forgeries; all four sigs of John, Paul, George and Ringo are bogus.) I think the interview aired last Friday but I'm not quite sure. As soon as I find out I'll update this post.

I'm looking forward to my next round of book talks in southern California. Wherever I've gone, everyone has been very generous and welcoming, but I've got to give a special shout-out to Steve Fjeldsted, director of the South Pasadena Library where I will speak Dec. 3. Before my talk, Cottage Industry, a rock band, will play car and road songs for a half hour. Steve asked me for my favorites in this genre, so I chose three from the Beach Boys: "Fun, Fun, Fun," "Li'l Deuce Coupe," and "409." After the band's set, Steve will show a movie clip from "Bullitt," the famous chase scene with Steve McQueen burning rubber in a Mustang over the hills of San Francisco. Then comes my slide show and talk. For details on this show and my two other appearances next week in Riverside and Burbank, see the box to the left.

When you write a book, it's a little like hibernating in a cave. In the case of Wheels of Change, I hibernated for close to three years, mainly writing and reading and researching inside the walls of my office with occasional forays out into the world to see historic car spots, visit car shows, and drive the roads of the state. So it's especially nice to get out of my cave and see and talk to people. At the Pasadena Museum of History last week, I signed a book for a fellow who lived in the house in Pasadena where Walter Murphy had lived. Murphy was one of the great automobile coach builders of the 1920s, designing, among many other cars, the luxurious Doble Series E, one of the most beautiful steam automobiles ever made. I wrote about Murphy in Wheels of Change, and it was a thrill for me to meet someone with that close of a connection to him.

The next night, at the monthly meeting of the Mustang Owners Club of California Club at Du-Par's Restaurant in Granada Hills, a movie camera operator, now retired, introduced himself. He had worked on "The Godfather," explaining how he helped shoot the scene in which Sonny (James Caan) gets murdered, riddled by bullets in his car at the toll booth. A number of vintage cars are used in that scene, and one of them nearly ran over the operator (whose name, unfortunately, slipped past me) as it made its getaway.

At the San Diego Automotive Museum on Saturday, I spoke in the main showroom surrounded on all sides by gleaming old machines that once roamed the roads. Among the friendly faces I met there: Kenn Colclasure and Dee House of the museum, and Bernadine Bogdanovs, event coordinator for the Wheels on Reels film festival, which is devoted to the ongoing love affair between movies and cars. The films were shown at the Mary Pickford Theatre in Cathedral City next to Palm Springs. Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks both loved cars (especially Doug), and here is a picture of Mary with her Pierce Arrow, one of their many deluxe rides. Riding in back, Mary spoke to her chauffeur through a speaking tube that ran from the back seat to the front.