Most people don’t know that George Clooney had a Mom and Sisters and all that stuff. They used to be my Brother’s babysitter. My Dad put them on T.V. in Philadelphia back in the days of CBS. Really it wasn’t even television. It was called Kinescope. It was blue and white, not black and white T.V. Talk shows started. He put Ed McMahan on with Johnny Carson. He did very, very well to the point that he had a Rolls Royce that picked him up in Grenache, CT and took him to Rockefeller Plaza. I mean, He was good at what he did. In 1968 I was eighteen and at the height of the hippie movement. You know I smoked a lot of pot, took a lot of acid, did a lot of drugs. In the middle of Los Angeles, I took off all of my clothes so I could become one with the earth. I ran around and nobody stopped me, tackled me, arrested me or threw me in jail because you just don’t mess with people who are doing that. That’s all. The next day in Hermosa Beach which is, I don’t know, forty or fifty miles south of where I was in L.A. It was party time again of which I did an extreme overdose. The people that were with me, they became very nervous about my condition and in short, they abandoned me. They left. They didn’t want the responsibility of explaining the dead body to the police. So they just left and I was on my own. However, I remembered about Jesus and I called upon the name of the Lord. I hadn’t read the Bible at that time, just two or three tracts that had been given to me. The scripture says that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. I was saved from that condition. If you’re not familiar with this kind of state it doesn’t matter but I returned to my body. Some of you older hippies there, you will be able to figure out what that means. As I said, I don’t come from a Christian family. They were really upset. They thought; “Oh no, the kid has had too much LSD and now he’s got religion. He’s going to be on this God thing for who knows however long it’s going to be. They were watching me very carefully. I was told more than once that he wished that I had continued just taking drugs like a normal kid. My Father asked me; “Why did you cut your hair?” He was actually pleased because that generation didn’t like long hair, you know, or the hippie statement or the whole mentality there. I told him; “Because Christ had set me free and I had been free indeed. I did not need any sign, any element, any billboards in my life to declare my freedom because I was really free and I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody.” It was at that point that he became really nervous and he approached me and said; “Would you consider going to Philadelphia for a few days of psychological analysis?” I consented. I said; “Yeah, sure I will go.” I don’t know why I consented. I usually was not easy to get along with. I did go to Philadelphia for three days and had a battery of tests. What? Not crossword puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles and I had a number of objects that I had to put together and a number of pictures that I had to balance. A lot of redundant questions had to be answered to check my stability and I had a lot of people looking at me through little windows for about three days as I was doing all of that stuff. When I came out, I came out perfectly fine. They said; “No there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s okay. He hasn’t gone off the deep end. He really is okay.” Of course, I have always kind of chided my family with that. I have my certificate of sanity and they don’t. You know, I’m the only one that can prove it, in my whole family. I would say, it was probably twenty-five to thirty years I was a Christian and my Father would continuously debate my Christianity with me. He never ceased to challenge me and to mock me for being a Christian. However, he never showed that side to my wife at all. He was always very loving and amiable with her. My wife won him to the Lord. He gave his life to Christ sixteen hours before he died. My Mother gave her life to Christ one week, seven days exactly before she died. I am a missionary. I reach people of a different culture than my own. We’ve done several Bible translations. For instance, in Mexico (speaks in foreign language) these are dialects that are spoken by about six million people. I could have stood on my Father’s shoulders and run T.V. stations and media operations and things like that, that he had already acquired. He was already in that position. I simply would have walked in as heir to that. As far as parallels between our careers, I am not involved in retail marketing or grading points. I feel like I have got the message that he should have had.
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