In July of 2005, a great comedy writer and actor named Pat McCormick died. The importance of Pat to comedy and to the lives of many people in comedy might best be demonstrated if I listed just some of the people who spoke at his funeral: George Carlin, Buck Henry, Jack Burns, Chuck McCann, Gary Owens, Paul Williams, Shelley Berman, Paul Mazursky, Henry Gibson, Fred Willard and many, many more. They didn't have time for Carl Reiner…that's how jammed the place was with funny folks.

Pat died in July, 2005 but for seven years before that, he lived out in the hospital of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills — the one which they just announced is being shuttered due to economic woes. Pat could not speak and his brain seemed to only function occasionally. Back in this post, I told the story of the tragic events that put him there. You don't have to click and go read them. I'll quote the relevant part here…

In 1998, Pat was scheduled to perform with his friend and sometimes partner, Jack Riley, at a live show Merv Griffin was hosting at the Beverly Hilton hotel. They had a routine called "The Smartest Man in the World" in which Jack acted as straight man, peppering Pat with questions. The show was about to start but Pat had not arrived. Suddenly, from the direction of the garage, everyone heard some sort of explosion and they ran out to see what it was.

Pat had driven his car in and…well, he either suffered a stroke which caused him to crash his car into a concrete wall in the parking lot or he crashed his car into the wall and that triggered the stroke. Either way, it was an awful crash that caused the auto to catch fire. Unreported at the time, for some reason, was that Pat's life was saved by a little old lady. Some tiny woman, reportedly in her sixties or seventies, pulled his 6-foot-7 body out of the flaming car and dragged it to safety.

That's the way the story was told to me by one of Pat's closest friends and it's true…except that the little old lady was not a little old lady. It would be a more colorful story if it was and I guess that's why whoever changed it changed it. Anyway, the rest of the tale is true, as affirmed here by a woman named Danielle Villegas. And she oughta know, seeing as how she was the lady who pulled Pat out of that car…

I was happy to read your story about Pat McCormick written in 2005. The last time I checked about him was before then. He was at at the Motion Picture nursing home — no details.

I would like to clarify the story since you got it pretty close, and you were right, no one else had or has ever told that story.

I was the "little old lady" who pulled Pat McCormick out of his burning car, however I was not old (good story, though). In 1998 during the weeklong set-up for the Golden Globes, I was working for Merv Griffin Productions setting up for the parties. I had a crew of two guys working with me. We drove a small pick-up, up and down the parking structure delivering equipment and props to the rooftop tent. It was on one of the trips up (around 4 PM) with the loaded truck that I noticed a car parked in an odd position with hood up in the garage. I slowed to see what was up but when I saw someone inside the car move, I figured things were OK (regrettable moment).

We drove up to the roof to unload the truck. After about ten minutes, I noticed smoke rising from a lower level. We jumped in the truck, sped down the ramp to see the vehicle totally engulfed in smoke. Although we could not see flames, the engine was burning furiously. The engine screech was deafening, the tachometer must have been up around 5000. I jumped out of the truck, ran into the blinding smoke, opened the door and as I feared, discovered there was someone still in the car.

Eyes and lungs burning, I darted away to catch my breath. The crew bolted away with me. It was going to explode any moment. "Get back here" I cried, "there's someone in there!" They followed me right back into the inferno. After unhooking his seat belt, the guys (who were no bigger than 150 lbs. each) heaved his 6' 7" motionless body out of the car. I grabbed his heavy feet and we rushed him off, away from the now flaming vehicle, which only then exploded.

Since I had once been a certified EMT, I guessed by his signs he had suffered a stroke. I loosened his tie, his eyes bugging out more than usual, were pleading for me to help him. For the next few minutes, he struggled to talk, get up, be done. I made sure he stayed still, held his hand and assured him "everything is going to be okay." By the time the paramedics arrived, the crew from the rooftop had put the fire out and cut the motor. There was quite a crowd. After giving my statements to the authorities, I went back to work.

Having formerly worked with stroke patients, I knew his condition was dire. I had an overwhelming feeling of guilt that I had not stopped when I first noticed the car with the hood up. The stroke would have been debilitating enough but with the added smoke inhalation which would have compromised any oxygen available for those vital minutes, I felt that had sealed a sad fate. My guilt worsened over the rest of the evening. I kept telling my coworkers, "If you ever notice something unusual, stop and check it out!" I failed to do this and felt absolutely terrible. By 10 PM, I was a wreck and asked to go home early (we often pulled 24 hr. shifts the night before the event), my sense of regret totally consuming me.

Now this is where it even gets weirder. I lived in Sylmar at this time, so I hopped on the 405 and headed north. It was a foggy January night with fairly low visibility as I drove home. My coworker/roomate was carpooling with me that night. He was angry with me about something and unaware of my experiences earlier in the day since he was working at another location. I listened numbly to him complain about his day. Tears began to run down my cheeks as he continued to spout off.

That night on the highway, the two center lanes northbound (my direction) were coned off. Suddenly, I noticed "something unusual" across the median. I veered into the coned-off center lanes, skidding to a stop. A car stalled in a southbound lane. As I jumped out of my car, the white sub-compact was struck by a pick-up truck going 65 MPH, which proceeded to flip over several times, ending up fifty yards down the freeway. Now there were two cars down and people hurt. I ran out into the southbound lanes, hoping my spread palms would reflect enough light to see me in my black crew uniform. Somehow, I stopped traffic on the 405 on that foggy night.

I immediately went over to the now-mangled white car. Inside was a limp, young woman with severe head injuries and broken body. For the second time in the same day I was rescuing someone in a life threatening situation. I stabilized her as well as possible, trying to keep her calm and breathing. She too struggled to talk, get out, be done. The paramedics eventually showed up and as they extricated her from the vehicle they ordered me "take her feet." We carried her over to the board, I held her hand and told her, "Everything is going to be okay!" WHEW!

I gave my statements, went home, and had a drink.

This experience changed my life. It was obvious that some greater force (God?) was not about to let me beat myself up for too long (more than six hours to be exact). There were more important things for me to do. I never found out exactly what happened to either of the people I "saved" that night. So I was glad to read your story and actually have something to add. I did recognize Pat as someone famous when I pulled him out of the burning car. Although I told him everything was going to be okay, I knew it probably wouldn't be. I would much rather have told him the story I just told you, about some "other" poor schmuck and the message from God…this was not to be.

It feels good to have finally written this story I have told so many times. You wrote, "A lot of comedy writers are, when you meet them, indistinguishable from guys who sell life insurance for a living. Not Pat." I have to take some comfort in this. I consider myself a writer too, however while networking for my "day job," I am often cornered by grinning people who cock their heads, wrinkle their brows when they ask, "You sell Life Insurance?"

I told Danielle in an e-mail that I can't imagine anyone who knew Pat having anything but sheer gratitude for her actions that day. Guilt that she could have or should have acted sooner is utterly unnecessary…especially when you think of all the people who probably wouldn't have helped at all. (I think it's also to her credit that she sought no reward or recognition for it. Here it is, eleven years later and she's finally telling someone her story…and agreeing to let me reproduce it here. I'll bet few of Pat's friends even knew her name.)

Thanks, Danielle…for what you did and for letting me share your e-mail here. Wish there were more people like you on this planet.

Gee, my country is happy today.

Christopher Hayes connects the dots on our new attorney general's statement that waterboarding = torture and Dick Cheney's admission that he ordered waterboarding.

George W. Bush says he doesn't care about the polls or his stunningly-low approval ratings. Does anyone believe that? Why all these self-serving exit interviews if he isn't trying to get them up a tad before he goes off to claim his post-presidential financial rewards from all the corporations he made rich?

Here's one contradiction, and I'm not the first person to point this out. Asked about regrets and mistakes, he always mentions the "disappointment" of not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Now, on one level, that shouldn't be have been a disappointment. That meant that the sanctions and peaceful methods of disarmament had worked and that Saddam Hussein was not as grave a threat as some thought. Isn't that kind of a good thing?

Before we invaded, there were those saying it would be like Waco; that the madman would set his compound on fire and just start killing everyone if he was going down. People were afraid ol' Saddam would use those Weapons of You-Know-What before we could secure them and that a lot of our soldiers would die as a result. Shouldn't we be relieved that that didn't happen? As it was, way too many lives ended without W.M.D. in the mix.

In any case, Bush has said on several occasions that he would have ordered the invasion even if he'd known there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction there. So, uh, then what was the problem with not finding any? If we would have gone to war anyway, then the main effect of not finding W.M.D. is that George W. Bush was embarrassed. He looked clueless and reckless and uninformed as a leader. That "disappointment" is not about the people who were killed or about the destruction or about the fates of the U.S. or Iraq. It's that George Bush looked foolish.

Pressed by Charlie Gibson to name a regret in connection with Hurricane Katrina, Bush mentioned no regret that his appointments had turned FEMA into such an ineffective agency, no regret that New Orleans had been a lake for a couple of days before he even seemed to recognize that people there were dying and needed help. What he said instead was…

I've thought long and hard about Katrina. You know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge? And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, "How could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?"

Look at that reply. It's not about the people who suffered. It's about criticism of George W. Bush, defending the fact that he did a flyover days later and didn't land and stage a proper photo-op to show concern. He thought long and hard, sure…about which course of action would bring him less criticism. For that matter, most of the praise — self-praise and external — for his actions on 9/11 have to do with him giving good speeches, standing on the rubble with his arm around a fire fighter and vowing to bring Osama to justice. It's amazing how many people still count that a high point of his presidency, despite the lack of follow-through.

America is very, very happy to be rid of this man. And while his approval rating may be upped a bit in the future just because we're a forgiving people, I doubt it will climb much. Can anyone imagine anything that could happen that would make the handling of Katrina seem competent or even compassionate? Can we gin up any scenario that will make people say, "Thank God Bush left us that deficit"? Toppling Saddam might eventually look like a wise course of action if Iraq becomes a stable democracy but that's not likely to happen…and if it does, it'll be because of grand diplomacy and engineering by Bush's successors. Even then, I think most Americans will conclude the gains are not worth what they cost us.

I don't think we're going to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (et al) charged with war crimes. That would mean a trial that would involve quizzing Senators, many of them Democratic, about what they were briefed about and why they didn't stop this or that. The Bush administration ain't the only ones culpable…and Obama has way too much to do to disrupt the Senate like that, to say nothing of alienating a lot of needed allies there. We may just have to settle for Bush and his guys going down in history as men who destroyed everything they ever touched. Except Halliburton.

This one got completely by me. I walked into a DVD store the other day and was surprised to see that a favorite film of my childhood — Hey There, It's Yogi Bear — had been released on disc. Had I known this, I would have beaten a few drums in advance. It wasn't the kind of film to make Mr. Disney worry but I was a huge fan of Yogi and other Hanna-Barbera shows at the time it came out — 1964 — so I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I saw it at the Picwood Theater, which is no longer there…but when it was, it was near the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard in West L.A. Here's a photo of the Picwood taken, I assume, shortly after it was built in 1946. By the time I started going there, it was no longer a free-standing building as in that picture. On one side was a bowling alley that was connected to the theater. On the other was a building that kept changing tenants…and one of those tenants was, for several years, the Blue Chip Stamp redemption center that I wrote about in this post.

And if you're going to click around this site, you can find more info about the movie, including a video clip of its best sequence, over here.

Since I'm throwing out memories: I think Hey There, It's Yogi Bear was the first movie I ever attended without my parents. They loved me but not enough, I guess, to sit through that one. Some time in June of '64, I went with my classmate Valerie who lived a few blocks away and was about to move to another city, far far away. So it was kind of a "going-away" day with Valerie. My folks drove us to the Picwood, gave us cash for tickets and popcorn, and dropped us off. Then they picked us up when the film let out and drove us over to Valerie's house, where they left us so we could go in this great Highboy swimming pool she had. I think the water was about two feet deep and the pool was about ten feet in diameter…so you couldn't do a lot of swimming in it. But we got into our suits and splashed around for a while.

Valerie's parents were away so we were all alone there in the pool. Suddenly, surprising the heck out of me, Valerie suggested that since we would probably never see each other again after that day, we ought to really see each other and take off our swimsuits. I refused and she withdrew the suggestion. Why did I decline? Well, remember I was just a little more than twelve years old at the time. If she'd offered a few months later, I would have been interested.

Here's an Amazon link via which you can order a copy of Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. And here's a link via which you can purchase A Man Called Flintstone, which apparently came out on DVD at the same time, and which I didn't like nearly as much as Yogi's film.

A look at the music of Schroeder. That's the kid who played piano in Mr. Schulz's legendary Peanuts.

Fred Kaplan draws some interesting parallels between John F. Kennedy and Barack H. Obama. And of course it goes without saying that we all hope the parallels only extend so far.

We ask questions here, we get answers…

Divers are combing the Hudson with sonar today to try and locate the engines and the black box, to determine the precise moment that two birds collided with passenger jet. The extremely cold weather and water currents have limited the divers' search. A giant crane has been brought in to help remove the plane from the water off Battery Park tomorrow morning and to bring it to an undisclosed location.

An undisclosed location? Why are they taking it to Dick Cheney?

The whole article can be read here. Thank you, David M. Lynch. Now, does anyone know about the luggage?

This morning, we're all reading about the heroism and skill of the pilot who landed (watered?) that U.S. Airways plane yesterday, and of his crew. And they seem to deserve praise and huzzahs and medals and such, and I don't mean to take away from any of that…but I have one question or maybe it's two. In the articles I've read, I don't see anyone discussing what happens to that airplane that's now at the bottom, I guess, of the Hudson River. I mean, the Hudson is said to be a foul place but I don't think even that water will dissolve an entire Airbus A320…not for at least a few months. Do they haul the thing out in pieces or bring in a big crane or what?

And just out of curiosity, is there any chance of the passengers ever seeing their checked luggage again? I have a suitcase that I suspect could be submerged in water for an extended time without its contents being destroyed, especially if it's in some sort of sealed compartment. Are divers going in to try and get the bags out? Or does this wait 'til they haul the whole plane out of the river or what? Someone reading this will know.

This should interest any comic fan who's going to be in or around Los Angeles between mid-February and August. The Skirball Cultural Center — a large, beautiful facility located near Westwood — will be playing host to two allied exhibitions. One is called, unfortunately, "ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938–1950." Details of that one can be found here. The other is called "Lights, Camera, Action: Comic Book Heroes of Film and Television" and you can find out about that one here. Both run from February 19 through August 9 and both feature art and artifacts from superhero glories.

There will be several events in connection with these exhibitions. Not listed yet on the Skirball site is that on the evening of March 5, there'll be a program featuring Jerry Robinson, one of the great comic artists whose work is being exhibited. Mr. Robinson will be interviewed by that guy who hosts all the historical-type panels at the Comic-Con International each year…what's his name? Oh, that's right: Me. Jerry was also a Guest Curator of the exhibition and I hear it's quite wonderful. If you're going to be in L.A. while it's up, you might want to plan for a visit.

This just in…

Circuit City Stores Inc., the nation's second-biggest consumer electronics retailer, said Friday it had run out of options and will be forced to liquidate its 567 U.S. stores. The closures could send another 30,000 people into the ranks of the unemployed.

Let's hope someone notes that a pretty high percentage of those 30,000 people were folks who were hired, not because they knew anything about computers or electronics or any of the things Circuit City sells, but because they were willing to work cheaper than the ousted employees who did. This is the same thing that killed or wounded Egghead Software and The Good Guys and CompUSA or any other chain that was selling technology. The main reason people go into a store to get a computer instead of ordering it over the Internet is because they want to talk with someone who knows more about computers than they do.

Every time I ever went into a Circuit City or any of those other places, there was — at best — one person on the premises who did…and he/she was always swamped with questions not only from customers but from other salesfolks. At the one near me, the answer to every query was, "I'll have to ask Steve." Once upon a time, before they slashed salaries, those places had a lot more Steves.

It's kind of like a hospital saying, "Business is down…let's get rid of all those doctors and hire some kids who've watched E.R.!" Until companies learn what they're selling, we're in for a lot more liquidating and downsizing in the retail electronics business.