Nashville Knucklehead

Lunch with Jack

The onslaught of b-list celebrity mingling continues. Ryan is going to be positively apopleptic.

Like most of the celebrities I've hung out with, I feel I need to explain who Jack Burns is. Jack started his career with George Carlin as the comedy team Burns and Carlin. He then teamed up with Avery Shreiber as Burns and Shreiber. They had a TV show. He played deputy Warren Ferguson on Andy Griffith when Don Knotts left. He hosted a show called "Fridays." He was the voice of the crash test dummy in all those government safety commercials. If you still don't know who he is, just take my word for it, he is a sort-of-famous person.

Jack liked to take long cruises. What he normally did was jump on a ship in L.A. that was heading south in the winter, and stay on it for months, as long as it was in warm places. He was on the Island Princess when I took a job on it in Tahiti. To help you visulize what it was like, that ship was one of the two they used to film "The Love Boat."

Because Jack was on board for so long, he would become friends with the crew, because all the other passengers would come and go a week or two at at time. I got to know him, because we were both Stairmaster freaks, and there were only two on board, right next to each other.

A common activity for crew members to kill time was to go to luxury hotels for the day while in port and hang out on their beach. One day I ran into Jack at a hotel pool and we had lunch together. Jack bought. I remember thinking how unbelievable it would have been to know, when I was a kid watching him on TV, that one day Jack Burns would buy me lunch at a 5-star hotel in Indonesia.

posted by Nashville Knucklehead @ 9:46 AM