Readers respond royally with celebrity stories

   When I wrote about my dad’s friendship with “the Duke,” I asked my readers to share their celebrity stories.

   As is turns out, all encounters were with royalty, leaving me royally outranked.

   Jay Hickson, of Lilburn, met another Duke – Ellington. Hickson was at a ball where Ellington was playing and needed to page a friend. Ellington offered to make the announcement. The friend had a hard to pronounce ethnic name, so Hickson coached him to make sure he said it right. Ellington pronounced the last name perfectly, but spoke the wrong first name. Hickson approached Duke (they were on a first name basis by now) and Duke said, “Tom, Jim, Harry, what difference does it make? There can be only one person in the world with a name like that!”

   Mary Faulkner, of Lawrenceville, never met Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, but she was related to him (She did know Ty Cobb, but more about that next week.)

   And Faulkner’s brushes with high rank don’t stop at Sultan. As a tour guide at Stone Mountain Park, she gave a personal tour to the King of Denmark and received an invitation to visit him if she ever traveled to his country.

   Sue Martinson of Norcross said, “I met and ‘partied with’ two presidents of Finland as a kid. (Father and son both served, one after the other, I think.) I can't remember what we talked about, but I don't imagine I learned any state secrets, not that Finland has many.”

   And State Representative Brooks Coleman met King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers, and now gives motivational speeches inspired by Rogers’ Cowboy Code.

   Pretty impressive! But when you think about it there are hundreds of kings, dukes and sultans around the world at any given time. Not that you’d bump into one of them at WalMart, but if you did, it wouldn’t be anything like meeting the Pope. After all, there’s only one of him. So what are the chances of having a personal story about the Pope?

   Well, Diana Stolle of Dacula has two.

   “My dad used to play chess with Pope Pius XII back before he was even the Pope. Then when I was a teenager, my uncle was a Cardinal. He arranged for me to visit the Vatican and meet the Pope. I got to see a lot of behind the scenes things tourists never see.”

   And finally, there’s Ron Shook of Norcross who has a picture of himself standing arm-in-arm all buddy-buddy like with Charlton Heston, just like the one of my dad and the Duke.

   Now I don’t mean to sound irreverent, but, gosh, isn’t meeting Charlton Heston just about as close in this life as anyone can get to meeting God?

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