I Beg Your Pardon

        Good, bad, or indifferent, towards my efforts as a communicator during my past forty-seven years of endurance within what many of you wrongly refer to as “show business”. In 1951, I stumbled on a book by Al Hirschfeld entitled “Show Business is No Business”. Admittedly, I didn’t grasp what the well-traveled Mr. Hirschfeld was getting at.

        It was seventy-one years ago. A much younger man about town named Harvey Kalmenson was eighteen and had recently graduated from high school here in Los Angeles. I had two goals—I was going to either become a professional baseball player or become a big-time operator in the magical world of entertainment, or the “attainment” industry.

        Three years passed, and I returned from Korea and the army; “Let the banging of one’s head into this new world of “No Business” begin”. And so, now at the magnificent age of nineteen and void of any near great mental eruptions taking place, an uneventful— sometimes successful—lifetime adventure began taking shape. Or so I thought! Age twenty-one. Love, luck, or skill?