Smiley Anders for Oct. 4, 2008

• By SMILEY ANDERS
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Oct 4, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Dear Smiley: The death of Paul Newman brought back memories of the actor when he was here for the filming of “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1957.

In those days I was a newspaperman and usually short of cash.

So when Paul told me he had lost his credit card and asked if I could lend him $20, I handed him the last $20 bill in my wallet, and then worried that I might never get my money back or that he might be slow to return it.

As it turned out, we went to The Village that evening and he found he had left his credit card there a few days earlier.

In retrospect I wish he had never returned my money —that would have made a better story.
Charles East Sr.
Baton Rouge

Outdoors, indoors
Dear Smiley: In a meeting about stand-by generators with Dale Brown and T.J. Moran, attorney Kent Parsons was lamenting Gustav and the tree falling on his house, bringing down refuse and limbs into his 6-year-old daughter’s room.

He said after he cleared it from her bed to rescue her (no injuries), she uttered probably the most profound sentence of the entire hurricane:

“Daddy, why is it raining IN MY ROOM?”
Jim Talbot
Baton Rouge

Horse sense
Dear Smiley: When the “Tree Krewe” came to cut up the tree in our backyard blown down by Gustav, they had limited resources to haul away the limbs they cut.

So we thought we would pitch in and help.

Since our dressage show had been canceled because of the hurricane, my 11-year-old Morgan horse Murphy figured a little cross-training couldn’t hurt.

And since the Morgan was originally bred to pull logs in Vermont, we thought we would give it a try.

We connected the traces of our carriage harness to a improvised singletree, which we tied to the tree limb.