I delivered pizza to the wealthy suburbs of Springfield, IL, and a certain MLB player with whom many of you may be familiar was a regular customer. He lived outside Springfield, near his family, in the off-season.
I delivered a pizza to him and got an $8 tip for my efforts. The house was a typical run-of-the-mill McMansion, and at the time he wasn’t a marquee name (and thus bringing in the millions that he is now).
Junior Samples
Another one. A friend of mine was on vacation in Scotland with a friend and they decided to be cultural and take a guided tour around town (don’t remember which). Their tour guide turned out to be Sean Connery.
Not sure if this counts because it was at a meet-and-greet sort of event and not a chance encounter, but it’s a fun story.
Ex-Cub third baseman (and recently departed) Ron Santo used to own a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. One time – must have been the early ‘90s – he hosted a remote radio broadcast on the night before Opening Day, featuring some of the Cubs’ broadcasters (including Harry Caray at the time) and members of the great 1969 team: Santo, Billy Williams, and Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks.
After the broadcast they allowed people to line up for autographs. My friend and I were less interested in autographs than the chance to say hello and chat with these guys who had been such a big part of our childhoods. So we hung back at the end of the line in order not to be rushed. The plan worked and we were able to have short but unhurried conversations with each player.
Ernie was last, but just before we got to him he stood up to return to his dinner table. Then he saw my friend and me and said with a huge grin, “Hey! How you guys been doing?” and rushed up to shake our hands. Having never met the man before, my friend and I exchanged a kind of bewildered look. Unfazed, Ernie invited us back to his table! We protested and said we didn’t want to bother him and he may be mistaking us for someone else, but he’d have none of it. He insisted, and so we sat down and he ordered a round of drinks for the table. We sat and talked baseball, his career, the current Cubs and their chances, and so forth. At one point, Santo, probably feeling obligated to do so because it was his restaurant, came up and said to us, “All right guys, enough is enough!” But Ernie said, “No, it’s OK, Ronnie, these are friends of mine!” So we stayed there a little longer.
Later I read a biography that said Ernie did this kind of thing all the time. He treated total strangers like old buddies, and would talk to anybody about anything. What a great guy and a great memory.
While re-reading this post I realized I’d written about Ernie Banks in the past tense. For the record, he’s still very much alive, and apparently still quite vital and active at 80!
Back around 1990 I worked at a boat slip rental in Southern California. One day one of our clients, Dino DeLaurentiis, stopped by. He pointed at an aerial map of our large facility and, for some strange reason, asked, “Where do the boats go?” I can only think it was because the harbor is very complex and there were thousands of slips. He was low-key and nice.
I once was going out a revolving door at 30 Rock while John Lithgow was coming in at the same time. He was hosting SNL that night.
I thought of a cool one of my grandfather’s. He grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. As a kid he was playing ball in the street with some of his friends, and the ball went flying into a neighbor’s yard and into their flowerbed. My grandfather (being the youngest) was sent in to retrieve the ball. The owner came out and found grandpa trampling his flowers, and spanked him.
And that is how my grandfather met Thomas Edison.
2 years ago, we were on vacation in New York city, staying at a friend’s apartment while they were out of town. On our last night there, I went to the pizza place around the corner to pick up dinner. While I was waiting, Geraldo Rivera walked in, ordered a few slices, and sat down next to me. All I could think of to talk about was Capone’s vault, and his boxing match with Frank Stallone, neither of which seemed appropriate, so I just ignored him pointlessly.
I sat next to him in a Pizzeria Uno one night.
Hulk Hogan sang “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” at my uncle’s funeral.
Jayson Werth went to the same little elementary school as my wife tygre, a few years behind.
A few other sports stories of mine:
Several years ago I was working at a college in California, and I was manning a booth at Parents’ Day. We had a business card draw for free college gear, and one of the students’ fathers dropped in his card. The man looked awfully familiar to me, but I couldn’t place his name. So after we exchanged greetings and he left, I sneaked a peek at his card. He was Ryne Sandberg.
My (now) ex and I were on our honeymoon in 1997, traveling by train to Glasgow, Scotland. A tall, young guy and his mom sat down across the aisle and started talking about the drink carton he had. The guy tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Excuse me, but do you guys here really drink this stuff?” My ex saw the carton and said, “Oh, Vimto, I love that!” “It’s horrible!” said the guy. So we all talked for a while, and he said he was going to play at St. Andrews and he’d been looking forward to it his whole life. A few other clues started to drop, and eventually I asked, “Hey…aren’t you Matt Kuchar?” Indeed it was…he had recently won the US Amateur. Now he’s one of the top 20 golfers in the world…and his career has lasted more than 10 years longer than my first marriage.
Not me, but a friend related this story–he was in Florida a couple of weeks ago and almost literally ran into Yogi Berra at a restaurant.
If I was ever in a situation like that, I would make eye contact and say something like, “Hey, how you doing?” and then open the line of communication, and let *them *do the talking. So even if Geraldo doesn’t feel like talking today, next time he sees me then he could be like, “Hey, don’t I know you from some where?” I wouldn’t be a gushing fan; I’d be a fan they’d want to talk with, if so inclined. 
In my Ph.D. thesis, I have an NMR spectrum/plot that is signed by Julia Roberts. She was filming Mona Lisa Smile in the building for a couple of weeks and I was riding once with Julia and her manager and asked if she wouldn’t mind signing it and that I promised it would end up in the University’s archives. A few weeks earlier/later, Spiderman (1/2?) was filming and I got Tobey Maguire to leave a voice mail message on my cell phone (he was 100x nicer and the entire Spiderman crew was as well).
I once walked right by The Chief from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
The late Lynne Thigpen.
The mid-1980s. I was on vacation in London, and decided to go see Stonehenge. I booked a little daytrip with a tour company–a simple way to solve the problem of getting there and back. On the day of the trip, I found that the only available seat on the tour bus was next to a rather attractive woman, roughly my age (give or take a few years). We made pleasant small talk, and it turned out that she had a few days off and decided to do some sightseeing. She was American, from California, and while she was initially reluctant to tell me what she did for a living, she eventually did. I didn’t react as she expected, I guess, and we hit it off well enough that we wandered around Stonehenge (well, outside the ropes), had lunch together, and had a great day overall. We said pleasant goodbyes when the tour returned to the train station it had started from, and that was that.
I had spent the day with Jean Bruce Scott, from the Airwolf TV show.
I went with two girl friends to see Mike and the Mechanics in concert at a venue that was attached to hotel many years ago. We decided to get a room for the night and were in the hotel bar after the show enjoying some refreshing beverages. One of my friends got up to go to the bathroom and when she returned she found three of the band members sitting at our table talking to us (the bar was crowded and we had extra seats at our table). The look on her face was absolutely priceless.
I also sat next to the captain of the US Olympic men’s volleyball team coming back from CA a couple of summers ago. He let me hold his gold medal. Now that was cool.
I was in a small jury pool with Robert Patrick, the morphing Terminator from T2. When we were all dismissed he drove off in a BMW with THE UNIT on the license plate, probably his reward to himself for landing a regular role in a series.
An acquaintance once told me that he once went to a party at a friends house and Tom Hanks answered the door. Hanks was a friend of one of the other guests and spent the evening answering the door just to see the reactions.
Summer 1984. I was visiting my best friend from university, in the condo he was tasking care of all summer for his girlfriend’s parents. We decide to go swimming in the building’s pool. So we change into our bathing suits, grab towels, and go to the pool. I had taken out my contact lenses and wasn’t wearing my glasses, so everything was kind of fuzzy*.
We swim, dry off, and head back up to the apartment. At the lobby, someone else gets in the elevator. We go up, the elevator stops, and the other person departs. The doors close, and my friend says, “Do you know who that was?”
I say, “How would I know? My lenses are out, I can’t see anything, I’m bad at recognizing faces, and I don’t follow celebrities anyways!”
It was Ben Wicks, the famous British-Canadian cartoonist. I guess he lived in the building.
[sub]*This is one of the most annoying things about being nearsighted. I have to take my lenses or glasses off when swimming, which means that I can’t see all the pretty women at the beach…[/sub]
I met John Glenn at Take Your Child to Work Day about 15 years ago (my dad works for NASA). He was really old even then.
Former Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo almost stepped on my foot outside Fenway a few years ago. I moved just in time. I was in flip-flops, so it would have hurt.