Tony Rosato

Antonio Rosato was born on December 26^th, 1954 in Naples, Italy. At the age of four, his family moved to Canada, where he lived in Halifax, Ottawa, and Toronto. Not much is known of his childhood and early life. He graduated from Oakwood Collegiate Institute, in Toronto. He was originally going to go school to become a chiropractor, but eventually dropped out to pursue the entertainment industry.

Cooking With Marcello:

Rosato was most known for having been on Second City TV (SCTV) portraying the character Marcello in “Cooking With Marcello” and appearing on the sixth season of Saturday Night Live. Rosato was also in various movies from 1978-1989, including ‘Nothing Personal’, ‘Hog Wild’, and ‘Nightstick’. From movies in the 80’s, Tony spent most of his time in the 90’s in TV. He voiced characters on ‘Pelswick’, ‘RoboCop: The Series’, and most notably, Luigi from ‘The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3’ and ‘Super Mario World’. For me, personally I am most familiar with him as having been Dario Rosso, and Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 (and Under the Skin).

Yes. The same man that voiced Luigi was also Nemesis, the monster chasing Jill Valentine in Raccoon City. It blew my mind when I found this out (I'm guessing they edited his voice to sound more monster like?). Even finding out that the same person who voiced Nemesis voiced Dario Rosso's crazy ass was shocking. Kind of weird that Rosso in game lost his daughter and wife. A little to parallel to real life (Rosato would later be divorced).

Luigi (first lines at 37 seconds):

Nemesis:

In the early 2000’s, Rosato’s career seemed to calm down, and eventually he got married in 2003 to Leah Murray. Unfortunately, less than 2 years after being married, Rosato ran into legal trouble, as he was charged with criminally harassing his wife. Despite Rosato marrying his wife on December 31^st of 2003, apparently the harassment from him started on December 28^th of 2003 to where it escalated through April 21^st of 2005.

In May of 2005, he apparently “frantically called the police” complaining that his wife and newborn daughter were replaced with imposters. Though an article from the NY Times states that he went to the police station to file a missing persons report, since during this time, his wife had left him. Somewhere during this time, he was arrested and a brain scan was done, that showed that there was an abnormality. Rosato was diagnosed (according to the NY Times while he was in the psychiatric facility after the trial) with ‘Capgras Delusion’, a disorder where someone thinks that their loved ones have been replaced with imposters. He was incarcerated for almost 800 days, in jail for two years while awaiting his trial, though this seems to be due to him denying his mental illness and refusal to plead insanity.

There was media scrutiny from this, since he had been the longest person in jail over a harassment charge in Canada. Eventually the trial started in 2007, and was ordered to stay at a psychiatric facility until determined fit to leave. According to a quote from his former wife, she stated that he still didn’t receive any treatment for a year. In 2009, Tony was able to get out on probation, and with the help of psychiatric medicine, his delusions faded. Once out, he started to get back into entertainment, though this caused the dissolution of his marriage.

image from find a grave

On January 10^th, 2017, Tony Rosato passed away at the age of 62 from a heart attack. He is buried at the Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Ontario, Canada.

video: https://youtu.be/sNLOeyXHCZc

[SOURCES]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/arts/television/tony-rosato-of-1981-82-saturday-night-live-cast-dies-at-62.html

https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2008/05/04/tragedy_continues_for_comic_tony_rosato.html

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2009/12/05/a_legend_returns_from_his_long_season_in_hell.html

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2017/01/11/tony-rosato-veteran-of-sctv-and-saturday-night-live-dead-at-62.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/175225578

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tony-rosato-snl-second-city-obit-1.3931938

Various Places of Interest: California Edition Part II (Electric Boogaloo)

1. Garlock/The Ghost Town of Garlock

Garlock jail in the back. Allegedly Charles Manson inscribed his initials in there.

An unincorporated town in Kern County, CA, Garlock was also known as El Paso City, Eugeneville, and Cow Wells. Garlock is close to the Burro Schmidt tunnel as listed in the previous blog post. The story goes that a Eugene Garlock hauled an eight stamp mill (a mill for essentially grinding ore) from the town of Tehachapi. This was due to there being a water supply and its central location for the various mining districts in the area (there are over 14,000 mines surrounding Garlock!). Apparently one of the places they supplied water to was Randsburg around 1896.

Garlock’s mill was flooded with ore, and other mills appeared in the area in towns such as Visalia, Kelly, Smith, and more. It’s success mostly came from the Yellow Aster Mine, and processing cyanide. At its height, Garlock had two bars, two hotels, a stage depot, laundry, dentist’s office, bakery, several blacksmiths, and a school...and more! As business went up, a man named John Kelly was hired, a man known for disliking carrying a gun on him, and was able to talk men into surrendering without one. There was a “crossroads” of tents, frames, and adobe buildings. There were as many as 300-700 hundred people that lived in the town.

Apparently, the town officially died the day the constable’s wife (Ida Kelly) became postmistress. This was on April 10^th, 1896. I am not sure why this is, but if this woman’s name is still remembered today, I can only guess the people really hated her. But this is not the only reason Garlock went on a downhill. Nearby, Barstow and Yellow Aster Mine built larger mills and railway, which I’m sure attracted more people. But overall, once Eugene Garlock himself died in 1907, the town was completely abandoned.

Interestingly, the post office operated from 1896-1904, and then again from 1923-1926.

If you go to Garlock today, there is very little left standing. Many of the buildings are dilapidated and fallen to the ground, which honestly isn’t surprising considering they are over 100 years old. What is interesting is that, back in 1898, there was a fire in the nearby town of Randsburg. The fire destroyed many of the buildings in their business district, so many of the buildings in Garlock were moved to Randsburg. I can see why many people left Garlock, since in a way, their town was in a whole other place.

Two last things that I found really interesting was that the old jail in Garlock was apparently visited by Charles Manson at some point, where he carved his name in to the wall.

And post heyday Garlock’s school was turned into a brothel during the 1920’s.

There is a really good blog post by secretmines.com that I’ll link below. It has really interesting information about the town.

Today, Garlock seems to be privately owned. From pictures I’ve seen, there are many parts fenced off, which is probably for the best, since people love to vandalise things.

It is landmark number 671 in California’s Historical Landmarks.

2. Saltdale/Koehn Dry Lake

The salt from the lake has dilapidated any buildings that were left

Another unincorporated town in Kern County, Saltdale (a moist play geographically) was founded for the basis of salt harvesting from the Koehn Dry Lake beside it, in 1914; though the Diamond Salt Company started development between 1911-12. Supposedly, back in the day desert Natives would store the salt from the dry lake. There were various salt companies that worked in the area, from Diamond to Consolidated Salt, to Fremont Salt (1919-1927), and Long Beach Salt (1928, who still works there today. In its heyday, the town boomed and there were tons upon tons of salt shipped to the local areas. Saltdale had a key location in being so close to Los Angeles and San Joaquin Valley. Under the Consolidated Salt Company, business did especially well, though there was a problem with getting salt transported with South Pacific, shipments would be delayed five months at a time. By 1924, business started to go into a slump, and with a water shortage, the salt output went from a previous 240 tons a week in 1914, to 6 tons a day (or 48 tons a week).

Very interestingly, the school from the aforementioned Garlock was shipped to Saltdale, though it turned out to be a pretty bad idea. The building itself was “little more than a shack”, the school had the highest rate of absences in the whole county.

In 1925, Saltdale’s output was the lowest so far, at 6900 tons that year. In 1927, the output went back up to 17,000 tons. That same year, the Long Beach Salt Company took over. By the time they did, there was only a school, post office, company store, and service station in the area. Things started to look up. The school was repaired, repainted, and set record attendance rates.

There were still problems though with the area. Saltdale itself was pretty isolated, the nearest amenities such as a jail was still 16 miles away (which was really far back then before modern cars) in Randsburg. The nearest hospital was in Red Mountain. Many women gave birth at home, and, “during the same week that a boy was born to one family, in December, 1931, the infant daughter of another family died.”

There was proposal in 1931 to merge the school disctricts of Saltdale and Cantil, though it wouldn’t happen for another 20 years. Despite the 30’s being the decade of depression, the company was prosperous. The 40’s was a decade that essentially shut everything down. From gypsum being found in the salt, limiting their business to lack of rain, by 1949, there were only three workers left. The post office closed in 1950, and school district was done in 1951. The mill that was there remained and was mechanized. The mill still stood in May of 1980, but a year a half later it was gone.

There were various claims for the area, but essentially were all ruled null and void in 1975 by the IBLA. By this time, there were four workers, and none lived in Saltdale.

The dry lake itself is at the base of the El Paso Mountains near the Last Chance Canyon. Years later, the area of the lake was used for filming Star Wars, but I don’t know how true that is.

Pictures of the Salt Lake can be found on the digital desert website, which I’ll link here: http://digital-desert.com/a/trona/sd01.html

For a very thorough history, please read the post on this site: https://vredenburgh.org/mining_history/pages/saltdale.html

Atlas Obscura page with more pictures:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/saltdale

[SOURCES]

http://www.secretmines.com/p/garlock-ghost-town.html

https://www.ghosttowns.com/states/ca/garlock.html

http://digital-desert.com/garlock/

https://thediggings.com/places/ca029-99937749

http://mojavedesert.net/desert-fever/saltdale.html

http://clui.org/section/koehn-lake