First and foremost I would like to acknowledge my family. When I decided to retire and to work as an extra, my family supported my decision. They also tolerate me with amusement when I show tapes of some of my scenes, much like showing family movies to guests. My family includes my wife Rose Marie, who has shared the good times and bad times with me over many years, and my five adult children. They are Joe (a sportswriter), Paul (a prosecuting attorney), Ann (a part time supermarket checker and full time mom), Kris (a clothing store employee), and Jennifer (a college student). Ann is the one who worked as an extra when she was in college.
I would also like to acknowledge the casting directors who placed me in the various jobs I worked. Most of all, my thanks to Kathy, who always saw to it that I worked as much as I wanted to and put me in good roles. She was my favorite casting director, and I believe I was one of her favorite extras. Others that I would like to thank include Veronica, who was my close second favorite casting director, and Shannon, Mary Ann, and Louie, all of whom cast me in some good roles. Without these and other casting directors, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to gain all these experiences as a Hollywood extra.
Making the many boring hours waiting around on the set tolerable was the friendship of the many extras with whom I worked. There are too many to name and some whose names I can't remember or never knew, but they were an interesting group of people with a variety of backgrounds. For example, one of my best friends among extras was a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who was divorced and began working as an extra in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles. Another was a hotel manager who moonlighted as an extra. He had been an Olympic diver from Austria who never got a chance to compete because of World War Two. I also worked several times with a married couple who worked together. He was a retired Army Master Sergeant, and she was a native of Great Britain. I worked with a few other married couples who usually worked together. I worked with a woman who was married to an Air Force Sergeant and commuted from her home in San Bernardino County. I worked with a number of women whose husbands had careers, and who supplemented the family income by working as extras. One of them commuted all the way from Ventura.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and other companies that have provided the technology for me to write my book, make corrections, and print manuscripts much easier than it would have been a few years ago.
This page was last updated on September 14, 2003
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