House Rules

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2009.

Everyone has rules in life. Call your mother on Mother's Day. Take the shopping cart back to the cart corral. Never buy the first newspaper in the stack. Always park the car with the headlights facing out. Never buy a hamburger from a person dressed as a clown.

One of my rules is to always live near famous people. I've been at it for more than 50 years, and it's served me well.

These famous people may be dead at the current time, to quote "Perfesser" Casey Stengel, but frankly it's my rule and I can position the exception to it any way I darn well please, thank you very much. They need not even be famous at the current time, but as long as there was once a connection between them and the outside world that meant if you mentioned their name in polite conversation the other fellow would not look at you with a sense of bewilderment, I'm good.

Like my current neighbor, Smedley Darlington Butler.

I'll get to him more in a moment, but first I wanted to take you back to the early 1970s, when I first began propagating this rule. That was the time period when the family next door to our house in Cincinnati included a young girl who my sisters and I called Sarah and who you now call Sarah Jessica Parker.

Yes, that Sarah Jessica Parker. The "Sex and the City" star. The second "Annie" on Broadway Sarah Jessica Parker. And I'm talking about the Hollywood Sarah Parker, not the Chief Justice of the North Carolina State Supreme Court Sarah Parker. She and her family — three brothers, two sisters, a mother, stepfather and beat up old VW Microbus they never drove — lived next door to my family before she hit it big. (Trivia: SJP's first television appearance was in a local half-hour Christmas special of "The Little Match Girl." We watched it like it was Obama's inauguration. Not to spoil things for you, but her character dies in the end. Don't ask me why.) She moved to New York when I was in college, so I never got the chance to say goodbye.

It certainly should be obvious to the readers of this column that for more than a quarter century I lived in a house across the street from Buffalo Bill Cody and Claude Rains — although unlike my association with Sarah Jessica Parker, I never was afforded the opportunity of playing "Kick the Can" with either Messers. Cody or Rains. (More trivia: SJP was much better at "Cry Wolf" than "Kick the Can." Don't ask me why.) They had both long since shuffled off their mortal coils by the time I arrived in town. Cody wintered at the red brick mansion in the 300 block of South Church Street around the turn of the century while his Wild West Show played uptown, and Rains lived in the 400 block at the intersection with West Dean Street after his days of performing in films as the Invisible Man had come to a fortunate end.

To be sure, the selling point my new landlady pitched to me when she told me about the spot that was to become my new home had nothing to do with its nearness to fame. She was selling availability, not proximity. But for those of you without a proper sense of history, Smedley Darlington Butler was the Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf of his day.

He was born in West Chester to a prominent Quaker family and grew up to become one of the country's most decorated Marines. He served in China, Honduras, in World War I. He uncovered the alleged Business Plot to overthrow the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a military coup, and wrote a book called "War is a Racket." He had not one, but two nicknames, "Old Gimlet Eye" and "The Fighting Quaker." (Trivia: The nickname of my college basketball team was "The Hustling Quakers," although we lost games with stunning regularity. Don't ask me why.) He lived in the 200 block of West Miner Street and so, now, do I.

Thus, when I sit on the porch and gaze across the street I know I am looking not just at a red brick house with anonymous tenants, but at the concrete realization of my life's rule: make a neighbor of someone famous. So thanks for having been around, Smedley. (Trivia: SJP once starred in the movie "Dudley Do-right," the villain of which is named "Snidley." Don't ask me why.)