About Me
Greetings (the Draft Board did good with that one), this is Ralph Torelli, along with Charlie Baumgartner. We have a dream, and it’s plain and simple. Twenty years later, my partner and I want to take over where R.A.L.P.H. left off in the late 80’s. If some of you are unfamiliar, R.A.L.P.H. was a Honeymooners fan club organization founded by two very sharp, passionate, and driven men, Peter Crescenti and Bob Columbe. That same passion for this GREAT Television show, lives on within my partner and myself. The name R.A.L.P.H. was a very creative acronym, which represented the "Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners." Their slogan was pretty catchy too… A Regular Riot! After Jackie Gleason, The Great One, passed on in 1987, Mr. Crescenti and Columbe found it appropriate to stop the organization shortly thereafter, which we totally understand. However, the dust has settled over the past 20 years, and we’re more than ready to get the Conventional Behavior back in FULL swing again. And Away We Go into a NEW era of Honeymooners fans!
If you had to pick one thing that makes The Honeymooners so special to you (besides being extremely funny), what would it be? Well, the answer that we get most often is that it brings out our childhood spirit. Magically, it brings out the kid in all of us. Like Ralph Kramden, we become that Big Baby as we watch, and drift away into the magical world of The Honeymooners. All our cares, fears, and worries just tend to melt away as we are mesmerized by its wonderful spell. If you think about it, and not even including the Honeymooners skits that originated on Gleason’s earlier variety shows, the start of the Classic 39 episodes in 1955 were over 50 years ago. So, unlike when R.A.L.P.H. existed in the 1980’s, at this present generation and time, many fans living today were either not even born yet (such as my partners and myself), or very young children when these shows originally aired. That means that most of us were very young when we first started watching the show, either when they originally came out, the re-runs, or on video/dvd recordings. This is another big factor that contributes to those childhood feelings that the show pulls out of us like a magnet.
Therefore, considering the fact that The Honeymooners has this very special effect on all of us, we wanted to keep the name and theme of this new organization very plain, simple, and true to what it all boils down to…Happy childhood memories through the magical comedic work of those four amazingly talented actors and their wonderful staff. Henceforth, the name and slogan, Mooner Memories Association, A Bunch of FULL-GROWN Nuts! Appropriately, the slogan comes from Ralph Kramden in one of the 39 Classic Episodes, Young at Heart. We have come to find out that there’s A LOT of full grown Nuts around here, but that’s what we like!
