It had been a long trip, but I drove all the way to Los Angeles to pay my respects to three of the biggest names that Hollywood had ever known. It was raining that day and I had stopped at the cemetery. Sitting down on a bench, I looked upon the first one: The grave of Mickey Rooney. I have known him from three different films: The Year Without A Santa Claus, The Fox and the Hound and Night at the Museum. However, it was the Red Skelton show that first made me aware of him. Three passerbys seemed to notice me during my grievance and stood by to comfort me.
A while later, I stood upon the piers listening to the crash of the waves upon the Pacific Ocean. It was here that I came to pay my respects to Jack Albertson, whom was cremated and had his ashes scattered into the Pacific. He had starred in The Fox and The Hound and Gunsmoke, but the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is where I first came to know about him.
The last stop I made was quite some miles from California. It was here at the Tobacco Valley Cemetery in Eureka, Montana that I paid my dues to Jeanette Nolan. I have never seen her in any other film, but what I do know is that she had lent her voice in The Fox and the Hound.
Hollywood just doesn't make films the way they used to and even more so, they don't have the soul that these actors breathed into the classics years ago.