Send Anything You Can...

Send me photos or videos of Rat Pack stuff and I will post them here: send to skappesser@hotmail.com

Check back in a while. Now developing a new post : movie of a big party in Ellisburg in '74. Jim Abran rented the place for a while.

The Bust

This was a fun day! We shot "The Bust" at Community Park. Unfortunately the last part, the "punch line", was deteriorated beyond saving. Originally, at the end, after the cops send the hippies packing, the cops light up the doobie...

That's our '55 Volkswagen Microbus after I painted it. Brenda Maas' dad, Dick Maas let me use his heated garage during the Spring of '72 and taught me how paint a car. It took several weeks and a lot of tedious work. Dick was a great guy and really knew his stuff.

The tall thin boxes leaning on the The Van are 6 foot speaker columns being driven by an 8-track tape player. There was no such thing as "conversion vans" in those days, so this vehicle was "off the hook"...

Fall 1971 at the Beach

This video is the first movie I made.

The vehicle is a 1955 Volkswagen Microbus that my brother bought from Victor Huerta, an exchange student at SCCS from South America. Victor had driven it up from his home and decided to sell it here. I think Kip paid like $300 for it. You can see that the interior was decorated in the stars and stripes. Later I painted the exterior. You'll see more of "The Van" in future postings.

Appearing in this video: Mike Presley (Skeeter), Jay Reed (Stinky), Dick Samuels (Apache), Mark Liszewski (Goose), Tom Patell (Pads), Pete Kappesser (my lil bro), Kevin McDougal (Cracky), Sue Todd (Cavewoman), Richie Soule, and myself.

Rat Bytes

Here is a brief random collection of Rat Pack Uncut 30th Anniversary Edition movie clips.

Persons featured in this POST are completely nonfictional. Any resemblance to any person living (or not) might be coincidental. No similarity to any person either living (or not) is intended or should be inferred, but the viewer decides. Scenes depicted are sometimes fictionally staged, especially those that might not be, uh, "Kosher"...

Pete Basio's Party... Fall of 1974

In the early Fall of '74, Pete Basio had a party at his place. This party actually occurred shortly before the party at The Farm (see an earlier post on this BLOG).


The band "River" played for us. The lead singer / flutist and the rhythm guitar player of "River" were my roomates, cronies, and partners-in-mischief that year. I have forgotten their names too! In those days we lived at the Artillery Club, which I leased on North State Street in Syracuse.


They were good musicians, especially with songs by the Moody Blues and Cat Stevens. They rehearsed a lot at the Artillery Club... so there was always music there. They played gigs all over Syracuse, several for various student unions on different college campuses, and at clubs including The Firehouse and The Orange. Pretty coeds threw themselves on these guys a lot...
River's lead singer eventually "stole" the girl I was interested in at the time...her name was Carol Templeton...(I understand that Tad Blount eventually won her heart).

Me? During that time I was fresh out of college and working as an electronics maintenance technician at Hutchings Psychiatric Center. Goose (Mark Liszewski), Kooney (Mark Kuney), and Bruce Mothersell's Dad (from Greenboro) worked there too, in the same maintenance building. THAT job was a drastic failure best left forgotten.

Appearing in this video: Gary Sheldon (Garr), Barry Rowe (Wild-Berry), Kirk Kenyon, EJ Lapham (just a small boy), Jack Francher (Jumpin' Jack), Sig (forgot her last name!), "River", Joe whats-his-name on drums again, Frankie Arquette and Jimmy Beach on the swings, and Sharon I-forgot-her-name-too... Well, JEEZ, it WAS 38 years ago... ! Help me out here... for example Carol (Hilliker) Didden emailed me recently about The Farm posting to remind me that her cousin Starr's last name was Hilliker. Thanks Carol.


PART 1










PART 2

Rats in Snow @ Sandy Pond Parts 2 & 3

The people of the Nature Conservancy, that stalwart gatekeeper of the sand, might develop a little heartburn over this post.

Directly across from the Bayview Hotel, owned by Mike Gianetti in those days, was a GIANT of a sand dune on the peninsula separating North Pond from Lake Ontario. Unfortunately, it has eroded down to an unremarkable formation over the years. We loved to play on it. A favorite test for snowmobiles was to see if you could climb it to the top. I've seen more than one sled rolling down that dune...the old '68 MOTO-SKI couldn't do it, but later I had a '69 Bombardier Olympic with the peppy 18HP ROTAX engine. After I geared it for trail (16 tooth drive sprocket for the chain got-r-done) I could blast that sled up that dune. It was glorious...

On this day, once we got to Sandy Island Beach, we had some fun sliding down the giant sand dune that is no longer there... At the beginning of Part 3, I'm on the toboggan . We estimated the speed of the toboggan at 30MPH going down this dune. It was a challenge to get back up to the top...

The last minute of Part 3 records the topography of the southern section of North Sandy Pond, the peninsula, and Lake Ontario side as it was that year. Notice how high the view is looking across to the Bayview shore from the top of the once GIANT dune.

There were rumors in the late '70s that hired men in dump trucks stole a lot of the sand from this dune and another long one just south of it in order to build up some rich lawyer's property on the lake side of the peninsula (his cottage eventually burned down anyway). Many areas that were bare sand on the lake side are now covered with the grasses the college students and green people have planted over the years.

Part 2

Part 3

Rats in Snow @ Sandy Pond Part 1

One of my best memories of fun in the relentless winter at Sandy Pond was an excursion I had with some Rats one day on a toboggan. Thing was, the toboggan was tied onto a rope attached to my Dad's 1968 MOTO-SKI sled. It was the winter of '72.

That was the Kappesser family toboggan. A heavy laminated hardwood piece that Dad got free but broken. He fixed it with his psuedo-carpentry skills and we used it every chance we could - -sliding down Richter's hill, pullin' behind the MOTO-SKI, ice-fishin', etc. During the mid-60's, Dad used to pull me around (not slow!) on the frozen North Pond on a 75 foot rope tethered to his '62 Ford Falcon. Blast, EH?

Back to the topic-at-hand...Stinky (Jay Reed), Squirrel (Harlon Bristol), Dildo (Dave Dillabough) and I decided to make a film clip of Squirrel and Stinky riding a toboggan westward at an alarming rate down Co. Route 15 past Bartlett's Marina (now known as the SPYC Marina) to Sandy Island Beach.

Dildo drove the sled and I rolled the 8mm Kodachrome film (only the best!) while sitting backwards on the back of the sled. I remember having trouble keeping the Kodak M30 movie camera still, I was laughing so much at Squirrel...first Stinky loses his hat and has to go back after it, then they get too animated and wipe out, then you'll see them come a little too close to a red pickup truck traveling east.

Watch this... (More of this romp to follow in another post).