New York City, NY. Allison & Mike. Midtown Manhattan. February 2015
You think you know a guy. Well, it's not like I know Mike real well. But I've been to his house. He used to hang out with the great Sly Mee, my old friend from high school, and he's married to Sister Jeni's best friend Allison. And I knew he'd built a successful business from scratch—although I didn't realize his little La Verne pool cleaning biz had grown into a high-end pool building powerhouse for the likes of Ben Affleck. (Mike and Allison even got the invite to Ben & Jen's 1st pool party, where their little girls hit it off.) What I didn't know was that Mike is also the son of a former minor league pitcher, Jerry Kettle, who wrote this book about his life playing baseball. And Mike's grandpa was also a player—a legendary baseball clown and occasional actor, too. Broadway Billy Schuster—also known as "Buffalo Bill" and "Schuster the Rooster"—was a self-described "futility infielder" who was a Pacific Coast League Hall of Famer for the Los Angeles Angels in the '40s and a member of the last Chicago Cubs team to play in the World Series back in 1945. How strange that at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, clear across the country from our hometown in SoCal, I find out this pool building badass friend of my sister has a direct link to the last Cubs team in the World Series. Who knew?!