Smith: It won’t be easy deciding who will get Dave Lewis’ model train town

Our story Monday about the model train landscape that traces creator Dave Lewis' 50 years with his wife, Suzan, ended with the surprise that the Windsor couple wants to give the Old Town layout away.

Dave and Suzan wondered if anyone would want it. People do.

Today the couple weighs several requests. Two parties eager to take the layout told of losing their train landscapes to the 2017 fires.

A man shared that he and his wife wanted to build just such a stroll-down-memory-lane train set, but she died last year.

It turns out that giving away Old Town will be tougher than Dave and Suzan thought.

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MATURE AUDIENCE: The laughs started early at Lewis Black's show Sunday night at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

Fans of the expletive-loving comic able to read small print noticed this on the ticket: NO CHILDREN UNDER 5.

Would you imagine that many parents take 6- and 7-year-olds to see Lewis Black?

There was an adolescent or two at the LBC on Sunday night. I didn't notice anyone checking IDs to make certain they were born on or before Jan. 20, 2014.

Black, by the way, seemed genuinely gleeful to be back here. He spoke of how special this area and the LBC are to him, and how dear they were to the late George Carlin.

Maybe you'll recall that Carlin shot “It's Bad for Ya,” his 14th and final HBO special, at the LBC - then the Wells Fargo Center - in March 2008. Less than four months later he died from heart failure at age 71.

At Sunday's show Black, who's 70, praised the LBC as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, large comedy venues in the country.”

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TOM HANKS' FACE owes much to Santa Rosa native and two-time Oscar nominee Dan Striepeke.

Through 17 films, Hanks' countenance was made camera-ready by Striepeke, the brother of late Sonoma County Sheriff Don Striepeke and one of Hollywood's most acclaimed makeup artists.

Dan Striepeke, who got his start in theater at Santa Rosa High School in the late 1940s, died Saturday in Southern California of heart trouble at 88.

A second brother, Santa Rosa's Ed Striepeke, recalls that Dan took his makeup kit with him when, not long after high school, he left Sonoma County for a trip to Mexico.

“On the way back,” Ed Striepeke said, “he went to Los Angeles and that's where he stayed. At 19, he got his first job, on KTTV.”

Dan Striepeke went on to create makeup magic on scores of films: Around the World in 80 Days, The Sound of Music, Spartacus, Planet of the Apes, The Magnificent Seven, Viva Las Vegas, Patton, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

He became head of the makeup department at Twentieth Century Fox, and then Tom Hanks' exclusive makeup artist.

Hanks wrote in a 2006 New York Times piece, “The Man Who Aged Me,” that Striepeke was a true artist and friend who, in the making of Forrest Gump, worked with him for 27 straight days and “took me from a teenager to a Vietnam soldier to parenthood as Sally Field died of cancer, earning him and his team one of Gump's Academy Award nominations.

“Perhaps because few voters realized the makeup was there, he went home empty-handed.”

You can contact columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.