Geezerstock

When I was a kid--this was before television--the radio was my best friend. Lionel Barrymore, brother of fellow actors John and Ethel, great-uncle of Drew, was confined to a wheelchair and played the crippled Dr. Gillespie in the original Dr. Kildare movies. He also had a radio program where he would spout maxims and dispense homilies. In his authoritative, quavering voice, he once said, "Happiness is not a station you'll arrive at, it's the train you're traveling on." That single sentence immediately became my entire philosophy of life.

A few decades later, I would read in Hollywood Is a Four-Letter Town by James Bacon: "Lionel Barrymore once told me, as he sat in his wheelchair crippled with arthritis, that he would have killed himself long ago if it hadn't been for [film producer] Louis B. Mayer: 'L.B. gets me $400 worth of cocaine a day to ease my pain. I don't know where he gets it. And I don't care. But I bless him every time it puts me to sleep.'"

So happiness wasn't a radio station you'd arrive at, it was the wheelchair you were traveling on, and for Lionel Barrymore it must have been an express trip all the way.

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