Celebrity: Do You Know Who I Am?
“Come on in and get a ride,” he told her, according to a police affidavit based on the girl’s original version of events. “I know your mother; she told me to pick you up.” The girl says she ignored him. The traffic signal blinked to green. She was walking through the intersection when Kallenbach turned in front of her and got out of his car.
It’s me — Kenneth Keith!
What happened next — what precipitated the girl dialing 911 shortly thereafter from a nearby CVS parking lot, “shaking and crying,” according to the report — is unclear, and likely to remain so. That Kallenbach would approach a stranger, however, strikes those who knew him as not only possible, but utterly probable; he was constantly doing this, offering his card, smiling goofily, announcing It’s me — Kenneth Keith! Do you know who I am? Indeed, for a man who’d spent all of his adult life chasing celebrity, it was part of the job. There were no limits to how far he’d go, no potential ignominy too severe.
And, evidently, no distinction whatsoever between the concepts of fame and notoriety.
In the end, five weeks later, as he lay dying in a hospital bed with two prison guards stationed outside his room, it became clear that Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, regardless of his actual guilt or innocence, had paid an awful price for not knowing the difference.
“THE WINNER OF this round gets a copy of my CD with prank phone calls, the Doobie Brothers anthology, and, as a tribute to my friend Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, who passed away last month, I’ve got a copy of his CD, Legacy. You all knew who Ken was, right?”
If any of the middle-aged, margarita-swilling plebeians here do, on Trivia Night at the Tex Mex Connection in Montgomery County, they certainly don’t let on. I’ve come to meet the contest’s regular host, the legendary Captain Janks, né Tom Cipriano, a fellow suburban Philadelphian and Kallenbach’s closest friend from Stern’s Wack Pack. In between rounds, we sit in the back in an empty dining room, where Janks, 42, who lives in an apartment across the street and works at a gas station nearby, nervously chain-smokes Kools. He has a reputation as one of the greatest prank callers of all time — this is the man who told CBS’s Dan Rather, live on air just after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, that debris had fallen on his home in Texas and he’d discovered a tooth belonging to a Stern producer — so I’m surprised by how mild, and how small, in physicality and personality, he comes across in person. For much of our conversation, he fights back tears.
