BECKLEY The wife of the late Bob Denver, who played Gilligan in the sixties television show “Gilligan’s Island,” is set to host a book signing this weekend in Beckley.
Actress, award-winning author and wife of the actor Bob Denver, Dreama Denver will be at the Tamarack in Beckley. She’ll be debuting her new book about the life and legacy of her husband. She said the book aims to make the icon and celebrity a little more real to his fans.
“Any classic TV fans will, I think, find this book a treasure because everything is gathered into one place,” she said on the Thursday edition of WVOW’s What’s Your Opinion. “It goes through Bob’s career, he had five different series – it goes through all of those, it goes through the movies he did – people don’t even know about those sometimes, it goes through all of his guest appearances on TV and also his stage career. And I get to be in the book only because I was part of his stage career. That’s how we met.”
The signing for the book, “Island to Icon: The Many Lives of Bob Denver,” will be held Sunday morning starting at ten o’ clock. Admission is free.
Following the book signing, Dreama will be in the Tamarack Theatre at two o’ clock speaking with audience members, talking about what inspired her husband’s career path as well as their life together. She describes her book as more of a scrapbook, and says the process of writing it was like taking a trip down memory lane.
“As I was going through every nook and cranny of my house trying to find any and everything that could be interesting and fun for the book, I found a box in my closet that had been Bob’s mother’s, and I had never looked through it. I can’t believe it, but I’d never looked through it,” she said.
“So, I got it down and I was going through it, and I found scrap books – the old photo albums from the old days back in the 1940’s – with all of those pictures that I just talked about. Then I found a little stack of cards, and I was going through the cards – and I’m not going to tell you all of them but I’m going to tell you one of them. I pulled it up and I went, ‘oh my goodness.’ It was a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays postcard to Bob from Elvis and the Colonel (Tom Parker).”
“Island to Icon: The Many Lives of Bob Denver” can be ordered online at bobdenver.com or on Amazon.
Dreama is originally from Bluefield, which has been hit hard by the remnants of Hurricane Helene. As part of the book signing event this Sunday, she told WVOW that she’ll also be collecting donations to aid in flood relief efforts across West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.