The Kisseloff Collection

…and the end of football season, my lovely and long-suffering wife suggested an item with a football theme. I went digging through my memorabilia and came up with this:

I figure people will know the guy in the suit, but anyone want to take a whack at the two guys in their underwear? The next post I’ll fill you in on the story.

Funny though, when I started to look for football stuff, I remembered I used to have a football signed by the then Super Bowl champs, the 1970 Kansas City Chiefs. Alas, I also remembered I sold it years ago to pay the rent on my apartment. Now that had an interesting back story. In the late 1970s, my Dad represented the estate of some guy known in New York City as the “porn king.” Now this was when VHS and Betamax were fighting a death battle, and after the porn king’s estate was liquidated, there were a few things left over that no one claimed, because, I gathered, the guy’s whole family was ashamed to be associated with him.

One of the items was a top-loading RCA video recorder. These things sold for big bucks in those days, way more than I could afford. He also had a complete porn library. My Dad offered me the VHS machine, and he also asked me whether I wanted a bunch of x-rated movies to go with it. Idiot me, I said no, but did he have any Marx Brothers? It turned out the porn king was a fan, and he had a complete collection. This was when a video cost forty or fifty bucks, so the dozen or so films were actually worth more than the Jeff Kisseloff estate. Anyway, I got the VHS (which in the five years that I owned it I could never once figure out how to use the timer to tape a show off the TV) and a film collection that made me the envy of all my friends. Of course, had I chosen “The Devil and Miss Jones” and “Deep  Throat” I would have been even more popular, but you know, a person can have just so many friends.

The day the recorder and films were delivered there was something else in the box: you guessed it, the signed football. Now, how and why he got it I have no idea (maybe he made a porn film called “Kansas City, Here We Come”), but I now owned it, that was, until the day the landlord came knocking and there was nothing in my checking account. To tell you the truth, I can’t say I really miss it much. I still have the Marx Brothers films though. I think my Dad ended up with some highlights from the rest of his library. So porn king, may you rest in peace. In death, at least, you gave me a lot of laughs.