On May 20, 2022 we set out on a quest with a goal we have been trying to accomplish for about fives years now. We set out to find the grave site of Michael "Patrick" Bilon (a native Youngstown, Ohio "West sider") who is one of the actors responsible for bringing E.T. to life.
Michael Patrick Bilon (a.k.a. "Little" Pat) actually grew up about a mile away from where we live. At standing only two feet ten inches tall (not much taller than a fire hydrants), he was considered to be one of the shortest adult actors of the his time.
The image you see above is from "Little" Pat's Find-a-grave page.
We were sitting at home on Memorial Day of 2022 actually trying to get caught up on a few things for work. We had YouTube on playing videos from Hollywood Graveyard (one of Shawn's favorite channels) in the background, and on came a visit to Calvary Cemetery and the gravesite of Pat Bilon. Of course, we both stopped what we were doing, watched the episode, and headed down to the cemetery.
We have known for a long time that "Little" Pat was buried in the cemetery. On several occasions we went looking for his grave, knowing the section, plot, and grave, but the cemetery is so large, we have never been successful. On the video that we watched, we were able to see what buildings and greenery were next to the grave, so we spent about thirty minutes and found the grave site.
When we got home, we started talking. When had walked away from our YouTube channel when COVID first hit, due to time issues with work. It has been three years, and we thought that maybe there would be a good video (and opportunity) to get back into making our YouTube videos and working on this blog once again. It has been almost three years since we worked on this project. It was time.
The following video was our comeback video in June of 2022. It premiered on our main YouTube channel on June 14 at 5 p.m. EST. In this video will will talk about the life of "Little" Pat and show you around some of the locations in Youngstown that were associated to his life.
We decided that will we start to do things a little bit different on our main channel. Moving towards only having content that is related to PANICd and Our Haunted Travels. We did establish a Vlogging channel some time ago, but will be using that more now for actual vlog posts and "behind-the-scenes" information for the production of our main videos.
The following video discusses the making of the main video and shows you a bit more footage that we ran around and took to create the short clips in the main video.
After Shawn was done creating the main video, he wanted to create another vlog that discussed the research behind the main video in order to document some information that might not be correct out there on the Internet and what information was not included in the main video. The following is that vlog video.
The Ukrainian Weekly Articles
As mentioned in the research video, we used a couple of articles from the Ukrainian Weekly to help us put together the information for the main video. These are archived on their website and I had to link to them a bit differently since the links go directly to the pdf archives. They are listed here instead of down in the research list.
The edition that has the interview with "Little" Pat's parents, and his interview from over the phone you can Issue No. 28, Sunday, July 11, 1982,The real E.T.by Roma Sochan Hadzewycz: click here.
That edition that has the article of "Little" Pat's visit to the offices of the Ukrainian weekly, Issue No. 3, Sunday, January 16, 1983,Pat Bilon in Jersey E.T. visits The Weekly: click here.
Photos from our video production
We had a great time putting this project together. We were able to find the grave we have been searching for now for a while, and were able to use this opportunity to get back into working on the "Our Haunted Travels" project. We hope that you enjoyed following along with this adventure.
