Trivia

Mike Cartel's maternal great grandfather, George Foster, a typesetter from Illinois raced a wagon in 1889 when the Oklahoma territory opened to the first who won (with a claim) the 'land run' homestead race (where some 100,000 participated). When Foster arrived at the water stop of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, he sat up the first newspaper (two other newspapers opened the same day) in the new rail head of Guthrie (and new capitol of Oklahoma). By the turn of the century, when Guthrie lost its capitol status to Oklahoma City, Foster accepted a position at the Kansas City Star newspaper as Theater Critic and later as Night Editor, when Walt Disney was a newsie, (future president) Harry S. Truman worked the mail room and (later) Ernest Hemingway was a cub reporter.

Mike Cartel's father (Eldon Short) owned one of the largest traveling carnivals in the world, Crafts 20 Big Shows. The Crafts midway is the carnival used in the film "Strangers On A Train," (1951)_ directed by 'Alfred Hitchcock (l)' and the movie "The Roustabout" (1964)_ with Elvis Presley.

Drafted into the Army in March of 1968, Cartel got a five-month postponement from the draft board to finish working on a film. He later spent a year in Vietnam as a combat soldier.

Cartel did most of his own movie stunts that included a running leap onto the wing support of a traveling airplane that briefly went airborne in "Bitter Heritage" (1979)_. The hired stunt double refused to perform the scene because of its danger.

Cartel was a reserve Los Angeles Police Department cop from 1982 through 1984 at the LAPD North Hollywood station.

Michael Cartel's parents stopped in Pasadena, California long enough for him to be born while moving to a county fair with a traveling carnival. Cartel grew up on the carnival, working mainly on game concessions (starting at age six), but also on rides and even as the outside talker on a Ten-In-One sideshow.

Mike Cartel was threatened in 1995 by convicted serial torture-killer (of teenage girls) Gerard Schaefer to pay for having called him a murderer in print a decade earlier. Cartel wouldn't retract and Schaefer sued him in Florida court. Before news of the lawsuit reached Cartel in California, Schaefer was murdered in his jail cell, suffering horribly with 43 stab wounds. Schaefer had been a cop while killing and may have murdered anywhere from 34 to 110.

On the set of Daren McGavin's A Wide Place in the Road (1968), director Sutton Roley told burly _Joe Don Baker_ (Billy Joe Corey) to push 19-year-old Mike Cartel (George McBryde Jr.) hard into a stack of heavy Coke bottle crates the last day of shooting. Baker threw Cartel with enough force to make the bottle crates (and Cartel) go flying around the set. Roley wasn't satisfied, so grips redressed the set and two more takes were filmed.

Mike Cartel was in the same drama class as Lindsay Wagner at Madison Junior High School in North Hollywood, California during his senior year. 12 years later they were in the same episode of the "Six Million Dollar Man" (1976) {Love Song For Tanya (#3.20 )}, although they worked on different days and never saw each other.

Four years after selling his decade-old Valley Vantage newspaper, Michael Cartel became a certified Los Angeles Unified School Department substitute teacher. In 2003, Cartel was accepted into and graduated from the prestigious Los Angeles Teaching Fellows program ("...rigorous selection process to identify individuals with strong content knowledge and a record of exceptional achievement."), to instruct special needs high school students.

23-year old Mike Cartel hired fight trainer/manager Gene (Spider) Mock when he was up for the role of boxer 'Ernie' in John Huston's Fat City in 1971. The part eventually went to Jeff Bridges, but Cartel continued training at the boxing gym, sparring with a stable of fighters where Mock said Cartel was the hardest puncher he had ever trained. A few months later, Sugar Ray Robinson (the generally recognized best pound-for-pound fighter in history) arrived at Mock's gym for arranged publicity photos before performing at a charity event that evening. Cartel suited up and sparred for some camera poses with Mr. Robinson, then was invited, along with his father and Mock to the important fundraiser for the 'Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation', hosted by Bob Hope at his Toluca Lake estate nearby.

Two gymnastics coaches (from Grant High School in Van Nuys, California) encouraged Mike Cartel to join the rope-climbing team after seeing him easily outscore most of the regular players. Cartel refused, saying the team he was interested in (he went out for track two semesters earlier) was varsity football, since it was the only sport that brought out more enthusiastic girls than the drama and music/dance production classes he was already taking.

According to a recent DNA test, Mike Cartel is 5.3% Greek; 6.9% Iberian (Spanish); 17.2% English; 29.1% Irish, Scottish and Welsh and 41.5% Scandinavian (Viking). At 14, Cartel said he was likely a mongrel mix. If he meant a large gene pool, he may have been correct.

The FBI and California State hold nine (9) separate fingerprint files on Michael Cartel, with five by exemplar prints on paper cards (using ink) and three by computer live scanning. Cartel's files include prints taken as a soldier, police officer, teacher and collector, from 1963 through 2002.