From Mom's Mixed-Up Files: George C. Scott

My mom was an energetic correspondent, especially when aggrieved. I inherited this trait from her. But I had no idea how deep hers ran.

When she died, I found a treasure trove of letters, in which she complained about everything from construction on the Whitestone Bridge [right] on opening day at Shea Stadium to PC Richard on the failure not only of her DVD/VCR combo, but on its website's woeful inability to calculate the number of miles between her house and the nearest repair center.

Often she was a Donna Quixote tilting at windmills, but occasionally her advocacy did bear fruit; after she sat at an intersection down the road from her house and kept a log of traffic light changes and cars backed up behind people waiting to make a left turn, the village actually installed a left-turn lane.

But I was completely surprised to find among the weary bureaucratic responses to her single-spaced diatribes, a few letters from celebrities.

Partly because I myself had, as a teenager, done the same thing (see my blog post about it here), and gotten responses from people like Michael Palin of Monty Python [left] and John Belushi, en route to becoming a professional celebrity pursuer at Rolling Stone.

But I was also surprised because she'd framed some letters she'd gotten when she was younger from the likes of Adlai Stevenson, but these writers shoved into a folder deep in the recesses of her house -- Kurt Vonnegut and George C. Scott -- were pretty impressive "gets."

My mom wrote to Scott to compliment him on a TV series