By Frank Roberts

This will be my smorgasbord column. Dig in!

Tracy Agnew reminisced in a recent column about her class reunion. Ten years. She is a spring chicken. Recently, I joined my wife and some of her school friends for her 62nd reunion. I graduated in ‘46, and we have never had one of those.

The only one from my class whose whereabouts I know is Fred Sichel, who stayed in New York to practice law. Roland, my best friend, is in California and Enid, the only classmate I dated — a cute redhead — is, or was, somewhere on Planet Earth.

We could never get a reunion going, the excuse being that almost everyone in our class had been divorced a time or two. I regret that. We had a good, fun class — all 15 of us.

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Usually, fortune cookies are not particularly interesting, but during the last six months or so, I got a couple of little gems: “You are the crispy noodle in the vegetarian salad of life.” And “Smile if you like this fortune cookie.” Oh, and this while dining in a Chinese restaurant in Smithfield: “Buy S’field ham.” Well, two out of three are real.

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T-shirt philosophy: “Life is tough and it’s even tougher if you’re stupid.”

I saw that on a T-shirt and, no, I wasn’t wearing it.

This is one that I could really go for. For me, it was very true: “When you love a job, you never work a day in your life.” Amen and amen.

Then, there was this, for those of us in the senior citizen category: “There are 3 signs of old age — loss of memory …. I forgot the other two.”

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One of my favorite Little Theater roles was as Professor Einstein in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” a role I enjoyed with two different theatrical groups. One was in Edenton, the other in Elizabeth City — both, of course, in North Carolina.

Here is the set-up. I was doing the Peter Lorre bit (semi-mastering the accented whisper). I was dressed disheveled-ly in old, ragged clothes. A bottle of cheap whiskey was sticking out of my jacket pocket.

We were rehearsing in a downtown hotel in Elizabeth City and, between my scenes, I was wandering about, mumbling my lines when — lo, and also behold — two ladies from my Baptist church looked at me, semi-aghast.

They passed by wordlessly but, later, they were anything but wordless. Word got around town about my disgraceful drinking habit. Let me add — I drink nothing stronger than iced tea.

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One of the finest country singers in the ‘80s-’90s was gravel-voiced T. Graham Brown, whose hits included, “Wine Into Water,” and “I Tell It Like It Used To Be.”

A decade or so ago, he was the opening act for Kenny Rogers. I reviewed that concert and then went backstage with Jimmy “Catfish” Hunter and his wife, Helen. Brown, it turned out, was a baseball enthusiast, and once he was introduced to Jimmy, that was it. The rest of us settled for talking to the very nice Rogers guy.

Several years later, I saw Brown, and he recognized me right off the bat. He said he sees me every time he gets something to eat, thanks to our picture on his refrigerator.

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Once, I was interviewing Sonny James backstage before a scheduled performance. I had my 11-year-old daughter, Jennifer, with me. Her arm was in a cast, and he wrote a mid-length tome on it. He was aptly called “The Southern Gentleman.” He loved meeting people, and he loved to talk, which is what we were doing when someone informed him it was time to go onstage. He was unfazed — just kept talking — and finally began the show 15 minutes late.

During a 60-year career spanning newspapers, radio and television, Frank Roberts has been there and done that. Today, he’s doing it in retirement from North Carolina, but he continues to keep an eye set on Suffolk and an ear cocked on country music. Email him at froberts73@embarqmail.com.