Nevada Bob Gordon

Excerpt from Nevada Bob's memoir, 50 Years with the Wrong Woman . Bob started classes at the University of Washington in the fall of 1960.  His objective, he explains, was to learn how to communicate effectively, so he took speech classes and English classes and any class that assist him in presenting his thoughts and ideas effectively. The goal of communication is not to impress people with big words.  As many college students learn early on, fraternities do a lot of recruiting in the early weeks of a freshman's first experience of college life. Though Bob  wasn't attracted to frat life, he did go to a dance on one occasion when invited. One evening, I was approached by a group of guys. They wanted me to  come to a dance and join a fraternity. I wasn’t interested in joining the  fraternity, but I went to the dance.  They drove us to Seattle University.  It was at this dance that one of the two most important events of my  life occurred. I was wat...

I have been a longtime fan of the work of Orson Welles. His War of the Worlds radio broadcast showed the power of the medium of radio. His entry into Hollywood grabbed a lot of attention right out of the chute with Citizen Kane . His camera angles were bold and the stories he produced in film were thought provoking. So at one point this all led me to read a biography or two about the man, which led me to discover yet another man who made a mark in Hollywood, the man who most influenced Welles, Josef Von Sternberg. The common denominator between these two men, the latter from an earlier era, was their determination to follow their own vision, to not cave in to the pressure to conform. The book Welles recommended, either in one of his interviews or one of the books I read, was Josef Von Sternberg's Fun in a Chinese Laundry . The book is essentially a memoir of a Hollywood director who shares anecdotes and stories about his life. One of his stories is about how he discovered Marlene ...