The L.A. Times has a good obit up on Dick Beals, who died the other day. It mentions something I totally forgot about Dick: He was a pilot. He liked to get away from Los Angeles for long periods and would sometimes fly his own plane back for recording sessions.
Our pal James H. Burns sends in this remembrance of Dick…
Back in 1999, at the Old Time Radio Convention in Newark (now, no more), I was chatting with Ed Hulse (he, the master of pulp history and a major film buff) outside the hotel's entrance, when Dick Beals showed up from the airport, exiting the hotel courtesy shuttle. We nodded Hello, and Dick went to enter the hotel. He stood in front of the "automatic" glass door —
And nothing happened.
I was about to see if the door was broken or something when Beals simply walked to a side panel that he knew must be there, pressed it, and the door slid open.
I still don't understand how the door's weight sensor, or electric eye, wasn't adjusted to account for what would be the equivalent of a child's size. Maybe it was just out of whack.
But there was this kind of look of sadness in Beals' eyes, this impression of something that had happened many times before, but it was an annoyance — out of no other choice — he knew how to deal with. That look has stayed with me all these years.
(It's far more important, of course, as you point out, to remember all the joy that Beals' talents helped create!)
And maybe I just read too much into the moment. Beals might simply have been annoyed that he was in Newark…!
I've worked with a number of folks who were very short (Billy Barty, Herve Villechaize, Dick) and also very tall (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hulk Hogan). One can usually sense a certain amount of mixed feeling about how nature made them "different." There are the obvious pains of trying to fit into a world built too small or too large for you. I'm not that tall and there are plenty of times when I feel like Gulliver…and wonder how Kareem at 7'2" deals with situations that cramp me at 6'3". On the other hand, if Kareem were 5'8", a lot of the best things that have happened to him in his lifetime would probably never have happened.
Would Billy, Herve and Dick even have been in show business — a field they all loved — but for their physical conditions? I can't speak for how they viewed the trade-off but there had to have been moments when they considered the "up" sides. Billy at least used to joke and say to people who took unwanted pity on his size, "Hey, if I were your height, I'd be working at the Safeway Market."
By the way, James…I'm sad to hear that Newark is no more.