OK. Here's my Tom Rettig anecdote:

It was 1989 and my employer, Siemens Srtomberg-Carlson in Lake Mary, Florida was big into PCs. I was in the Software Engineering group and we relied heavily on Clipper to manage our Novell Network.

Two of my compadres from Engineering and I managed to convince management that a trip to Los Angeles for the annual Clipper conference was a prudent move. So off we went to the city of angels.

We stayed at the hotel where the Clipper conference was being held. One the first evening of the conference, we discovered that a group of third-party software vendors had banded together and rented a suite in a neighboring hotel, and were ferrying Clipper conference attendees back and forth to their suite via limousine to promote their respective software packages. Cool!

So, of course, we took the excursion and soon found ourselves in their suite where a nice little food and beverage buffet was set up for our pleasure. While there, we were able to rub elbows with the owners (and, for the most part, the develoers) of some of the cool third-party software products we had been using.

One of the developer-owners was Tom Rettig. (I don't remember all the others, but I do recall that two of them were the developer of Silver Bullet, a Clipper communications tool, and Dirk Lesko, the wizard behind Funky Lib.)

I recalled Tom's actor background and remembered seeing him play Jeff on the old Lassie series on TV. I grabbed my friend's elbow and dragged him over to where Tom was standing. I was nervous and excited at being in the presence of this guy who was doubly famous, both as an ex-actor and as a well-respected software pioneer.

"Hey, Bob", I said to my friend. "This is Tom Rettig who used to play Lassie on TV." Tom just smiled and said, "No. I didn't play Lassie. I played ON Lassie." I just crawled away and grabbed another beer from the bar. I do recall that Tom got a kick out of it though.

Something else of note happened during the Clipper convention. The president of Nantucket (his name was Larry Heimdecker, or something like that) gave the keynote speech, during which he was to publicly unveil the next version of Clipper which was to be released that day. As he spoke, we could see the table on which the new Clipper product sat. The package was covered by a white shroud so we couldn't see it before the unveiling.

Just as the big moment arrived and at the precise moment he swished aside the veil, there was an earthquake. It was almost as if the unveiling had casued it. Really weird! This strange event got a write-up in Infoworld.