(Originally
published 4/18/16)
Once upon
a time, I was a collector of many things, including autographs. As a teen, I
wrote letters to individual baseball players care of their teams and requested
their signatures. I bought mailing lists with players’ home addresses and
sent them baseball cards to sign, which most of them eventually did. Asking for
autographed pictures, I sent fan letters, too, to politicians in Congress and
in state houses, and typically got them. Granted, some of the John Hancocks
were the work of autopens and, the worst of them all, rubber stamps. And there
were even some very high-quality secretary forgeries as well.
However,
most of the autographs were real and many of them personalized to me. As both a
young man and a collector, I was completely non-partisan in this endeavor. I
received autographs from everyone from Ted Kennedy to Jack Kemp; Henry “Scoop”
Jackson to Tom Bradley. New York Governor Mario Cuomo personally inscribed a
photo to yours truly, and so did Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush,
although he misspelled my name as “Nick Negro.” The Bush autograph was
authenticated and—courtesy of financially tough times sometime later in the
adult world—I sold it at auction for $175.
In the
early 1980s, Louie, our cigar-chomping neighborhood mail carrier, opened our
unlocked front door in the Bronx, walked into the hall, and placed the mail on
the bottom step of the staircase leading to our upper-floor apartment. Aside
from leaving his cigar bouquet calling card, he would sometimes shout, “You got
another letter from the government!” My autographed pictures typically arrived
in 9”x 12” official manila envelopes with a piece of cardboard in them, so that
Louie and his post office brethren would avoid their natural inclinations to
bend and batter mail. Louie came to believe we were a family of spies or
secretive government agents. My father, a veteran USPS man himself, eventually
assuaged Louie's worst fears.
Beyond
baseball players and pols, I once purchased a mailing list of celebrity home
addresses and was excited to send a couple of “Joker cards" from the
“Bat Laffs” series to none other than Cesar Romero on San Vincente Boulevard in
Los Angeles. I was quite surprised to receive a postcard a week or so later
from Maria Romero, Cesar’s older sister. She informed me that her brother was
doing dinner theater in Texas but would be more than happy to sign my
"Joker cards" when he returned. Now this was going beyond the call of
duty, I thought. And a couple of months later, I not only found the signed
Joker cards in my mail, but two more autographs of Cesar as well—one a
photograph of him as the Joker inscribed: “To Nick Nigro, A big hello from The
Joker” and another of Cesar as Cesar. And it was in an envelope the man
personally addressed himself. He paid the postage and affixed, too, a “Cesar
Romero” return address label on the envelope—one he probably got as a
"thank you" for contributing to a favorite charity. He also alerted
the post office minions they would be handling a photo, which was to be treated
accordingly. Of course, Cesar being Cesar said, "Please." I had
always heard Cesar was a class act and liked by everyone—and the proof was in
the Joker cards signing.
All hail, Cesar!
(Photos
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
