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Bob Crane's hobby



Well, since I wasn't around on Friday--I was attending the excellent
NWA, CIMA, SRMA, NOHA conference in Boise, Idaho, which was
one of the best I've been to in recent years, by the by, even if I
somehow failed to meet in the flesh Terry Abraham and Steve
Fisher, mea culpa!--I wanted to comment on something I saw over
the weekend was kind of intriguing.

Probably should post this on AMIA instead, but I don't know the
folks as well as here.  There I was, watching TRUE HOLLYWOOD
STORY on the E! network.  I know, it's usually trashy and tabloid-
ish, but hey?  The episode was about Bob Crane, the star of
HOGAN'S HEROS.  I watched that show faithfully when I was
younger, and I'd heard some story about him being murdered, so I
was interested.  Sure enough, it turned out he had a "hobby" of
making his own pornographic videotapes, and was beaten to death
with a tire iron in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1978.

What caught my eye, though, was the photographs of the murder
scene which showed the equipment he used for his hobby.  It
looked like a top-loading 3/4 " tape player--Ampex, I think--but the
tapes they showed piled up looked more like Beta tapes.  At any
rate, it was a huge amount of equipment; a couple of the tape
players, which were very large, piles of tapes, the camera, and so
on.  I kept thinking wow!, what a pile of stuff to lug around for your
"hobby."  The prurient archivist in me wondered what had happened
to the videotapes, of which there seemed to be quite a few, judging
from the crime scene photos; probably still moldering in the
Scottsdale PD evidence room.

Roy


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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