HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ROBERT PRESTON
The actor Robert Preston was born 108 years ago today. His name has snuck his way into a number of the columns I’ve been writing over the years due to my ample admiration and affection for him, serving as he did for my inspiration to become an actor. I wrote extensively of the effect his performance in The Music Man had on me in my book Up in the Cheap Seats, when as a five-year old I first saw him in the 1962 film version of the fabled Broadway production. I was awestruck at how the intense energy of his “Professor” Harold Hill leaped off the screen of the Radio City Music Hall and how I wished that he would have come to my hometown of Great Neck, Long Island to start a band. Believe me, this five-year-old would surely have followed him to the ends of the earth.
