Louis Roney: Stalling for time

• There is a very pretty woman living with me. Thirty-five years ago she was consigned by heaven to take care of me and make me happy. Don’t say anything about this to her, I haven’t told her yet. When I wasn’t watching out, the “love-bug” got me good. Pretty soon I had come down to Florida and bought a house that I didn’t need in the slightest. I was offered a Distinguished Professorship in a university and accepted it, natch, even though I had never thought seriously about shutting myself up in a room with a bunch of rampant students. My thesis is that most of the important things that we do are not predicted by any memorable noteworthy past, but that the things that creep up on us unannounced are the most inviting. Something that is pretty that sneaks up on you is certainly more dangerous than something that is ho-hum and drab. We men make no pretense in playing the love game fairly, and admit the unfair prejudice in “coming on to the comely.” After the first ice is broken, nature takes over to get us into big trouble, whose “bigness” is not recognized until it has used its heavy artillery. Concomitantly, the captured does not realize he has been captured and thinks that he is unusually clever and full of masculine charm! Things can stay that way just so long as he never wakes up and thinks he can take over merely because he is bigger. Bigger ain’t smarter – but I think lucky trumps them both!

• You may have noticed that the Chinese have just bought the Waldorf Astoria in New York for $1.9 billion. I couldn’t match that, so I let it go... Anyhow, the last time I was in the Waldorf most of the people there were Japanese, as they had been in the Chateau Lake Louise and the Banff Springs Hotels in Canada!

• Sometimes I think I’m being punished for the sins of my youth. Alas, my punishment is that I concomitantly have forgotten most of the pleasures of my past sins.

• It is well-nigh impossible for me to imagine what our town looked like before it was settled by men from across the Atlantic. The railroad tracks that run through Winter Park could conceivably have evolved from an Indian footpath through semi-tropical foliage. At any rate, a railroad now halts here several times a day and any Indians have vamoosed. The Park itself is something to be cherished and never to be sacrificed to commerce and the almighty “buck.” I remember well riding my bicycle from near the shore of Lake Sue to my grammar school on Park Avenue. On the same evening, I might well have ridden my bike from our home to our Boy Scout hut on Lake Killarney. In those days, you better believe that we kids had strong legs!

• The original Baby Grand Theater was at the north end of Park Avenue probably seating around 200 – not much more. There was, of course, no air conditioning yet in the Baby Grand, so the theater was filled with people in short sleeved garments of cotton. Carrier Corporation brought air conditioning to New York’s Rivoli Motion Picture Theater in 1925, and of course, A.C. slowly became a must thereafter in every city and town. Not too long afterwards, A.C. came to Winter Park’s Baby Grand and lots of us kids went to the theater to watch the latest flick and get cool for a dime. Just before 1930, the movies we saw changed to “talkies” – another miracle from Hollywood which had given us Rin Tin Tin, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and gorgeous Jean Harlow. Howard Hughes signed Jean for $100 a week and produced the movie “Hell’s Angels ” in 1930, which made Harlow a star. As Hollywood probably put it, “She and Howard became a toothsome twosome!”

• Did you notice that Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was thrown out of the U.S. Navy Reserves for using cocaine? Well, I guess he had to find some way to match his dad’s publicity! So sad.