Would YOU Want to Read 4 Volumes of DeForest Kelley Phone Logs?

When two DeForest Kelley guests were here a couple of weeks ago, I dragged out my Kelley archives to share with them. Among my treasures are four 4″ three-ring binders, crammed full of  reports of phone calls I wrote down after every call from (or to) Carolyn and De.

 

Calls from the Kelley’s far outnumber my calls to them because I’m decidedly not a caller (I never have been) unless what I have to convey is crucial or unless I’m asked to return a call. I was raised in a family where the home phone was also my parents’ business phone, so we kids were taught to get on fast, say what we needed to say, and get off.

 

So needless to say my phone conversations usually last about 30 seconds.  The early telephone training became a life-long habit.

 

Again: I do not make calls, ever, unless I feel I absolutely must. And when I do, the calls usually last just as long as they need to, not a millisecond longer.

 

Which makes four volumes of phone logs appear to be inconceivable to me! But here they are, mute testimony to a friendship that existed, via actual phone calls, from 1989 until 1999, when De passed away.

 

Just looking at the sheer volume of calls blows me away. But sitting down and actually reading them has been even more mind-blowing.

 

99.999% of the calls were incoming from the Kelley’s. The only time I called them was when they asked me to return a call or I had something monumental to report (a decidedly infrequent occurrence).

 

What blows my mind now is how many of the details in those phone conversations I had completely forgotten about.

 

I went through all of these phone logs and my journals while I was writing my DeForest Kelley book (the first edition, in 2001) to pick and choose what had to be in the book, but I hadn’t been back through them since.

 

I knew I had left out tons of materials so the  resulting book would be light enough to pick up and read, but as I read slowly through the logs now, I’m finding buried treasures that belong in the public domain where fans can read them and get an even better sense of what it was like to be embraced by the Kelley’s in such a dramatic, familiar way…

 

Naturally, I’m not going to type them all up again–it would take the rest of my life to do that–but I might at some point use Dragonspeak or some other voice-to-type recognition program to get them down in a format that I can use to publish them.

 

But that massive undertaking all depends on how much residual interest there actually is in Kelley fandom.

 

Would you (yes, you! You!) enjoy reading detailed reports of more than a thousand phone calls that the Kelley’s and I exchanged? 

 

They fascinate me. They resurrect our friendship in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I find myself laughing, sighing, crying and laughing again as the conversations coast by. They take me back and reconnect me to the Kelley’s in a way that is almost palpable.

 

I know that my book DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal: A Harvest of Memories from the Fan Who Knew Him Best helped readers get to know the essential Carolyn and DeForest Kelley duo–enough of you have written to thank me for vicariously making you a part of the Kelley’s “adopted” human (and animal) family–but is there enough lingering hunger inside you that you’d want to get a volume (or perhaps several volumes) of phone log reports?

 

If you’ve had enough, fair enough.

If you want more, bow howdy–I have it!

Let me know. The ball is in your court.

 

 

 

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save