Sad statistic:

Within the next five years we are expected to lose 98% of our surviving World War II veterans.*

According to a study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2008

The Plan

So here is the idea.

I am going to go a road trip with my dad.  We going to visit the places that were important to him, when he was in the Navy: Great Lakes Bootcamp in Chicago, Scranton where he grew up, Old Bridge where he lived when he was in high school, Brooklyn where the Randolph often came into port, and a few more places that I will reveal as we go along.  To further understand the experiences of my dad, I will include interviews with many of the other surviving alumni of the Randolph.  I hope that in treating the history of the ship and the movie in this way, we will gleem a unique perspective on being aboard an aircraft carrier in the United States Navy.

Happy Father's Day

Thanks Dad...for everything.

And thank you to all the servicemen apart from their children today.

Me talking about me

Hey Everyone,

Here is a little interview I did, talking about some of the stuff I'm working on.  We talked about comic books, teaching, and this doc.  Please give it a listen if you have a couple minutes. I'm somewhere around the middle.  Thanks to Alan Mehanna, for putting this all together.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fun-games-ramblings-from-108/id519945568

We will now resume your regularly scheduled updates

Hello Everyone,

Sorry, its been so long since by last post.  I have been producing a movie called The Tailor's Apprentice.  The experience has been something challenging and rewarding a way that I can't really put into words.  Unfortunately though, it has taken up almost every moment of my time.  We shot for a week in Philadelphia, and then the last two weeks here in Orlando.  As the movie wraps, I find myself in the enviable position of being able start work on a movie as personal as Blivits! is.
Over the next few weeks, I will be posting more and more stuff.  Some of it will be how you can help make this movie a reality and some of it will be entertaining.  Thank you for sticking around and continuing to read about this adventure.

Why I Need To Make This Movie

“From their experiences or from the recorded experience of others, men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”

Aldous Huxley

My dad believes that he never really had that good of a relationship with his dad.  I was six when my grandfather died, but I still remember vividly my father being upset with himself for not saying better how much he loved his father.  He hit a cabinet door, I still have yet to figure out what the cabinet did to deserve it.  I have to remind myself of that sometimes because the relationship I have with my father would be hard to improve on.  My parents have told me that they made a choice, to at times forego wealth or career success in favor of building and maintaining a relationship with me.  Even that seems hard for me to believe. 

My interest in history comes from my father’s life.  I believe that is where most of our interest in history comes from.  We are told stories about things that we were not there to witness and it inspires us to learn more.  My dad lived through history.  He was aboard the aircraft carrier the USS Randolph during the Cuban Missile Crisis and when President Kennedy was murdered.  To him, nothing much happened during these moments of international tension. As John W. Gardner puts it, “history never looks like history when you are living through it.”

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the reunion of all the surviving alumni of the USS Randolph, where I video taped a few of the sailor’s stories.  I was moved by how humble they were after what I believe are true acts of heroism.  I wanted to share their story with everyone I could, and that I had to hear everything they wanted to say.  A few months later I found a disturbing statistic that confirmed the importance of telling this story: according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs conducted in 2008, within the next four and half years we will lose 98% of all the surviving World War II era veterans, and 90% of all Vietnam era veterans in the next six years.

I realized that my dad’s story is an example of how to learn from the past.  After a series of aneurysms has hindered his memories, my dad’s past has become an example of how fleeting is the chance we get to learn from our mistakes.  

The challenge of history is to become real, and I believe that putting faces to the stories that we have heard before would go a long way to communicating history in a new way. 

I decided that if this movie is about the Randolph, we should start by looking at CV 15, the USS Randolph.

This is her, circa 1953.