Halloween made me think of my childhood friend Brian Kirk. Last week, I wrote a blog post about going to church on All Saints Day. In it, I mentioned a house that had an elaborate set-up with talking jack-o-lanterns that could somehow converse with the trick-or-treaters.
I didn’t recall the exact cross street but I had a pretty good idea of where the house was in relation to the Kirks’ house. To help my memory, I looked on Google Street View to view the neighborhood. The jack-o-lantern house was on the corner of Westchester Avenue and Lindbergh Place.
In the course of virtually walking through my old neighborhood, I noticed a Google anomaly. The block with the Kirks’ house was missing from Street View.
The Kirks lived in a house that previously belonged to Art Carney, who played Ed Norton on The Honeymooners. I found a photo of the house on the Crestwood Historical Society’s website and on a forum called “Special Houses in Crestwood.”
Three or four days later, I got a message that Brian Kirk wanted to connect on LinkedIn. What an odd coincidence, I thought. I wrote to him about his former home being invisible to Google. Brian replied:
Hi Frank!
I saw you pop up on the “LinkedIn” page and figured I had to say hello.
Maybe the NSA has something to do with the house’s disappearance from Google.
Last I heard our house had a couple with one child in it, I always thought of it as being big, even with nine of us living in it.
I can remember us writing scripts or screenplays or the like in grammar school. You had a talent for it I recall. Turns out that may have figured in your career, well done.
Take care, and glad we could connect.
Brian
