Rant #2,296: Up the Junction (Part 2)

"Seek and ye shall find."

"Where there's a will, there's a way"

"I'm going to top you off."

Well, the last one isn't a popular saying to anyone but Russ Meyer afficianados--even years after his death, there are plenty of them--but that last one is a quote from his 1976 film, "Up!" and if you have read this Blog this week, you know that "Up!" and I have a history together spanning more than 40 years.

Raven de la Croix, the absolutely gorgeous star of the film, was my first celebrity interview, which I did for my college newspaper, Dowling College's "The Lion's Roar," in the fall of 1976.

Through the wonders of Facebook, de la Croix--who is some type of new age spiritualist these days--came across some of my posts related to the interview I did with her, and asked if I had a copy of it for her own collection. She thought she might have had it in a scrapbook she kept, but she was not sure.

Well, when a Russ Meyer girl asks a poor schlub like me to do something for her, just like in the movies, I set about doing it.

Little did I know what a job this was going to be!

I scoured my house from top to bottom to try and find not only this article, but my own scrapbook of college articles that I did from 1975 to 1979 when I attended the school. I know that everything was in a blue looseleaf, but alas, although I found plenty else--my scrapbook for my later writings from "The Island Ear" entertainment newspaper from the 1980s and 1990s--I could not find this thing, no way, no how. I searched everywhere.

But then a thought came to my head that proved to be the linchpin for this entire exercise.

Dowling College, after decades as an independent liberal arts college, went under about two or three years ago. and it had a vast history--just its very existence on the Vanderbilt Estate in Oakdale, Long Island, made it somewhat noteworthy.

Some time back, this history was recognized by Adelphi University--which it was affiliated with at one time when Dowling was known as Adelphi Suffolk--which set out to collect everything and anything from the school, archiving it and saving it from the dumpsters.

I remember reading that the school newspaper was part of the stash that Adelphi saved, so I went ahead and contacted via email Todd Wilson, Strategic Communications Director, University Communications at Adelphi, who hooked me up with David Ranzan, Associate Professor and University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Adelphi. Ranzan told me that Dowling microfilmed its student newspaper--something that I had completely and totally forgotten about--and he would try to locate and send me a copy of the article.

Voila! Yesterday, he sent over a PDF file with the article, and I now have a nice file that I can send to de la Croix as well as a nice memory of mine preserved for eternity. Here is the JPG version of this file, broken down to three JPGs.

Again, I have to take this into its proper context. This was a 19-year-old Larry writing this thing, and 43 years later, well, it certainly doesn't rank up there as the greatest thing I have ever written, but it is good for what it is--really the very beginning of my career as a writer/journalist/editor, and I don't care if you are a doctor or a plumber or a chief executive officer, everyone has to start somewhere. This was not my very first article in print, but it was near enough to the beginning to give me a glimpse of where I might be going in the future ...

But obviously, I could not think 43 years in the future back then. Heck, I was just a fresh faced teenager with a full head of hair back then!

Let me thank Wilson and Ranzan and Adelphi University for helping me with this endeavor, and I know that I have dozens of other articles on the microfilm that they have in their possession, and if I ever need to go back again to those days, I might be able to find what I am looking for through them.

And I am not giving up on finding my own scrapbook here in the house. I looked everywhere, but when you look everywhere, there may be some nook or cranny that you missed, so I still have some work to do to convince myself that this thing is lost.

But whatever the case, I have the article, here it is, and we can all enjoy it--and laugh about it--thanks to those two people at Adelphi University.

And thanks to de la Croix, for asking me for it.

Thanks so much to them, and I am sure Russ Meyer, wherever he is now, is smiling, or at least is ready to stop me right in the middle of reading my old story because I am getting too personal with de la Croix.

"Up!" ... "If you don't see "Up!" you'll feel down!"

https://youtu.be/ucSZgPlgJGQ

(As an aside, no, I did not like the film at the time, but as I got older, I began to appreciate Meyer and his work--and the work of his starlets--a bit more. He was the Walt Disney of X-rated films, and all of his movies are so out there that, well, they are in. I have rewatched "Up!" in recent times, and it really isn't as bad as I portrayed it to be in 1976.)