When I was writing up the saga of my encyclopedia sales adventure, I left out a bunch of details here and there that I couldn’t work into the narrative, either because they were very vague memories or for other reasons.

But last evening I was watching an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour that featured a young actor who became quite famous several years later, and that triggered a memory that I hadn’t thought about in years.

Just to make sure I was remembering it correctly, I double checked at imdb and sure enough I was right.

During that summer of 1969, when I was traveling daily to the P.F. Collier offices in Reading, PA, the filming of an adaptation of John Updike’s 1960 novel Rabbit, Run was in full flight right there in the city.

Under normal circumstances I might have been impressed, but this was just a big pain in the ass. There were no stars in it as far as I knew, and the filming was blocking off entire city blocks, forcing us to drive way out of our way to get to where we wanted to go, and we really didn’t have time to stand around and gawk. And since there were no stars in it, what was there to gawk at anyway?

The movie was released in 1970, and as far as I can recall, I’ve never seen it. So I ordered a DVD from Amazon. Maybe I’ll recognize some of the notable features of Reading, even though there are no stars in the movie.

[The photo at the head of this post is from the Hitchcock episode that jogged my memory about the movie being filmed. I’m sure you can name him.]