Posted on by mikebobsworld

Loss

It was December 15, 1966.  I was 5 years old and my mother and I were in the kitchen.  It was there that she told me Walt Disney had died.  I remember wandering into our side yard and feeling like a light had gone out.  This man had visited our house every Sunday night for as long back as I could remember.  I didn’t understand death, I’m not sure I do yet, but I knew that life had changed and something wonderful had ended.

The next celebrity death that should have impacted me was Judy Garland.  It was June of 1969 and I was 8 years old.  My parents didn’t tell me of her death.  I think they decided I wouldn’t understand.  After all, I only knew Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  If they told me Dorothy had died I would have been devastated.  And it wouldn’t have made any sense.  She was still on the screen, every year.  How could Dorothy be dead?

As a child the TV and movie characters that you love are real.  The actors don’t exist.  Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were Batman and Robin.  Adam West and Burt Ward, the names at the beginning of the show were meaningless.  The need to believe is deeply entrenched in a child.  I never saw the line used to make Mary Martin fly in Peter Pan.  I never saw the cheesy special effects in Dark Shadows.  Peter Pan flew and Dark Shadows scared the crap out of me it wasn’t until I was older that I began to see the flaws.

Other examples are Sally Field and Patty Duke.   Sally Field was Gidget. In an episode of The Flying Nun, where Sally Field played Sister Bertrille, they showed footage from Gidget, where Gidget was surfing.  I didn’t see these as two separate shows, I figured Gidget had decided to become a nun that made total sense to me.  With Patty Duke, I had no clue that  Patty Duke played both Patty and Cathy Lane.  To me, they were two separate people and as real as my own family.

I must have been about ten when the fantasy in life gave way to reality.  That was the year I asked my dad if Santa Claus was real.  He didn’t give me an answer.  He said, “What do you think?”  I thought about it and realized that Santa couldn’t be real and in a very real way childhood came to an end.

Childhood’s end is probably the most significant loss any of us go through.  I don’t know that we see it as a loss at the time.  Most of us are in a hurry to grow up and find out what was in the mysterious bottles kept in the cabinet that only our parents drank from.  Or we can’t wait to drive or for school simply to be over forever.  It’s when we get older that we miss the magic of Santa Claus coming on Christmas Eve or, at night, staring out your bedroom window wishing on the first star you see or hoping this was the night Peter Pan would come and take you to Neverland where you wouldn’t have to grow up and no adult would be around to tell you what you should do.

I guess I’m lucky.  I still wonder about Santa on Christmas Eve and I think about leprechauns on Saint Patrick’s Day.  In my imagination, I can happily visit Middle Earth and Narnia and for a brief time suspend the horrors of this world.  I would rather face a dragon than continue to watch the mess the Republican Party and The Democratic Party continue to make of this country.  You can fight a dragon but you can’t fight city hall.

Since the death of Betty White on December 31st of last year I have been watching Hot In Cleveland.  This was the last show she starred in along with Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, and Wendy Mallick.  It was a show about 3 women from LA who have to make an emergency stop in Cleveland on their way to Paris.  Because of the attention paid to them by the men in Cleveland they decide they could have a better life in the new city and decide to stay.  They rent a house with a caretaker who is played by Betty White and the show is set.

Hot in Cleveland ran for six seasons on TV land and was funny if a bit earthy at times.  The scripts were good and the supporting cast was excellent.  The show had many guest stars from the best of TV, Carol Burnett, Robert Wagner, Tim Daly, and many others.  One show had William Shatner, Shirley Jones, and Georgia Engel all sharing the stage with Betty White and Valerie Bertinelli.  Most of my childhood TV shows were represented on that one stage.

It was when Regis Philbin made his guest star appearance across several shows that I began to feel a sense of loss.  Regis died in 2020 but he was a big part of my daily life both at home and at work.  I was a dialysis technician back in the 80s and the TV sets were all set To Live with Regis and Kathy Lee every morning.  I became a big fan of both of these stars and loved the show.  On days I wasn’t working or went in for the later shift I made sure I saw it.  The legacy of the show lives on with two other co-hosts but no one could match the energy of Regis Philbin and that energy was still present in Hot in Cleveland.  But I realized he was gone.

Not long after that, all the women that starred in The Mary Tyler Moore show came on as guests.  These included Miss Moore, Chloris Leachman, and Valerie Harper.  Betty White was already on the show and Georgia Engel had become a recurring character.  At one point they were all sitting around a table trading very funny insults when I realized that all the women at that table were gone.  This saddened me as well.

Early in the New Year news reached all of us that Bob Saget died in his sleep in a hotel room in Florida after doing his one-man stand-up show.  Bob was 65 years old and it recently came out that it was due to some sort of head trauma that he died.  Bob Saget played Danny Tanner on the much-loved Situation Comedy Full House which ran for 8 seasons on ABC.  He then reprised the role of Danny Tanner in the show Fuller House.

Bob Saget was a well-loved man both on and off the screen.  His co-stars had nothing but good things to say about him and the girls, now women, who played his daughters looked at him as a second father.  Not long after his death, I started to watch Full House again on HBO MAX and found myself welling with tears at almost every episode.  The episodes made me laugh but they were filled with a genuine sentimentality and the show plays just as well today as it did when it first aired in 1987 to 1995.

Many other celebrities touched my heart at their death.  Ethel Merman was first. She passed in 1984 but she was a part of my life because I had fallen in love with Broadway. Ethel Merman was and still is the queen of Broadway. No one was like her and no one like her will ever come again. Lucille Ball in 1989 was next.  Lucy was and always will be my favorite.  I felt very sad the day she passed.  Something else wonderful had gone out of this world.  In 1990 Mary Martin passed away.  My Peter Pan was gone, and I remember it well, a little magic left my heart.

Why do celebrity deaths or better yet the death of stars bother me so much?  I think with some of them I’m watching the generation before me flicker out and die.  Soon all those who grew up in the 20s, 30s, and 40s will be gone and all that will be left is memories and photographs and these are not just the stars they are my father, mom is already gone, my aunt’s and uncles and all those I hold dear to me.

Then there are the celebrities of my generation.  Bob Saget was 5 years older than me.  Mike Nesmith was a bit older but still part of my generation.  David Cassidy played a huge part in my life.  I went from Puff The Magic Dragon to I Think I Love You because of him and The Partridge Family.  I was saddened when he passed as well.

Seeing my generation begin to pass away made me realize that life is very short and your time could be up at any point.  The Bible says that “all the days of my life were written for me before I was born.”  This means that God knew when I would enter this world and the day is planned for when I will exit and that day is much closer now than it was when I was younger.

I don’t want to leave anything half done when it’s my time to go.  I don’t think I can make all of my dreams come true but I believe that some of them still can.  I’m writing this blog weekly for more than 6 months.  That’s the grace of God and me leaving something behind that may help others.  I’ve lost a total of 25 pounds so far.  I have quite a long way to go but I want to do it and make some of my other of my dreams happen.  It will be good to have a healthy body.

There are still wonderful adventures ahead.  I have no idea what most of them will be but opportunities will come and it’s up to me to say yes and find out what will happen.  Peter Pan says in the play written by JM Barrie that “Death will be an awfully big adventure.”  And it will be, “The journey doesn’t end here.  Death is just another path, one that we all must take.  The grey rain rain-curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass.  And then you see it.  White shores and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” – JRR Tolkien

Posted on by mikebobsworld

Situation Comedy: My Golden Era

Situation Comedy

With the passing of Ed Asner earlier this week I began to realize how blessed I was to be born in the early sixties.  Situation Comedies had been around for a while.  The idea of a show that settled around a group of regular characters getting into outlandish situations went back to the days of Radio where The Goldbergs, My Favorite Husband, Amos and Andy, Fibber Maggie and Molly and Our Miss Brooks ran supreme on their respective radio stations.  Film and Vaudeville stars such as Burns and Allen and Jack Benny would also have on going series on radio. These shows were half story and half variety show as a singer would be on hand to perform as well.

The Goldbergs would be the first of the radio shows to jump to the new medium of television.  The Goldbergs had been on the air since 1929 and President Roosevelt was quoted as saying that he didn’t get America through the Depression, The Goldbergs did.  The show went off the radio in 1946 and ran for awhile as a Broadway play.  In 1949 the show was brought to television and would air until 1956 on different networks.  In 1952 the show was dropped by CBS and I Love Lucy took it’s nine o’clock time slot on Monday nights.  Lucy would remain in that spot in various incarnation until 1974.

The Goldbergs, though a very important show in its time, was quickly forgotten as the years rolled by.  Other radio shows would cross over including Our Miss Brooks, Burns and Allen and Jack Benny to name a few.  But these were the ones that would be remembered.

In my early childhood, as I have stated elsewhere, my mother would do her chores while I watched the reruns of I love Lucy and Jack Benny from nine to ten in the morning.  I loved those shows and Lucille Ball, still the reigning queen of TV comedy, would become a part of who I am.

But there were other shows too.  Though I can’t remember the original runs because I was too young, I was brought up on the reruns of The Patty Duke Show, Hazel, Dennis the Menace, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Gidget.  I think my first memory of a new situation comedy being aired on TV was the premiere of The Flying Nun in 1967.  The Flying Nun was the story of Sister Bertrille, she was light weight, and her habit was in the form of wings when the wind was just right, she would become air born and the fun began.  Sally Field starred in that show.  She had finished Gidget and moved right into The Flying Nun.  She learned her craft on television and, of course, gained film star status with Norma Rae and Steel Magnolias. We liked her, we really liked her.

There were shows too that I grew into.  They were just always on.  Gilligan’s Island (1964), Bewitched (1964). The Munsters (1964) The Addams Family (1964), Petticoat Junction (1963) and The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) are some of these shows.  As you can see 1964 was a banner year for television comedy.  Some of these shows would run into the 1970s and only go off as television itself set a new course.

There are shows that I dearly love that began after I entered grade school that had a huge impact on me.  That Girl (1966), The Mothers In-Law (1967) The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969), Nanny and the Professor (1970), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968) and the two shows that I feel helped define my generation The Brady Bunch (1969) and The Partridge Family (1970)

It was in the early 70s that TV began to get dark.  In many ways it began with The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970).  Though this show was light comedy it dealt in a more realistic way with life than most of its predecessors.  In 1971 Norman Lear changed television comedy forever with All In The Family.  In 1972 things got darker with MASH.  To be honest, and knowing people will violently disagree with me, I believe these two shows ended good situation comedy.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

I think I learned a lot from watching the comedies that came on in the 1950s thru the early 70s.  The Courtship of Eddie’s Father showed that a good relationship between a father and his son could really happen.  This show began in the middle of the times when kids were all saying to “not trust anyone over thirty.”  This show told us that you could.

Some of the shows were just plain silly fun but they had a light message underneath.  Goodness and kindness will always win. This rule held true whether you were on a deserted island or you were married to a witch.

In The Munsters, Herman, the Frankenstein character says to his son Eddie, “The lesson I want you to learn is that it doesn’t matter what you look like.  You could be tall or short, or fat or thin or, ugly, or handsome, like your father.  Or you could be black, yellow or white, it doesn’t matter.  But what does matter is the size of your heart and the strength of your character.”

In the first episode of The Flying Nun Sister Bertrille gives us a little taste of the how God feels about people.  She quotes Saint Irenaeus who said, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”  These are some of the lessons I learned from situation comedies.

There were others too.  How to get along in tough situations (Gilligan’s Island), That every person has value and has something to give that they don’t even know about (Hazel) That single parents can make it on their own with a little help from family and friends (The Partridge Family, Nanny and the Professor, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father), That brothers and sisters can get along (The Brady Bunch) That life can be an adventure and that you have the right to dream and to chase those dreams (That Girl).

Some shows were just plain fun like Gidget and The Mothers In-Law.  The Mother’s In-Law had a lot going for it when it premiered in 1967.  It was produced by Desi Arnaz and he had all the power of The Desilu studios behind him.  Writers that wrote for Lucille Ball were brought on board and the shows stars Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard were respected names in their professions.  Eve Arden had portrayed Connie Brooks on radio and TV in Our Miss Brooks.  Kaye Ballard made a name for herself in comic roles on Broadway and she brought Lucy Van Pelt to life on a record album along with Orson Bean as Charlie Brown.  She played one of the ugly stepsisters in the original Rodgers and Hammerstein TV production of Cinderella starring Julie Andrews. (The other stepsister was played by Alice Ghostly who would appear regularly on Bewitched and Designing Women) The shows premise was that two neighbors who just tolerated each other had grown children who fall in love and elope.  This entwines the two families in a love hate relationship.  The antics that these two women get up to in the two-season run are on par with anything Lucy and Ethel or Laverne Shirley ever did.  The show should have run longer.  The cast expected it to and showed up to begin filming the third season.  They were told the show had been cancelled due to a network change in what comedies should look like.

In other words, they were going darker.  Realism would take the place of farce and physical comedy.  The writers had less work to do as did the scenic designers and effects workers.  Lucy would never get covered in chocolate or bleached again.  Hazel wouldn’t stop up a chimney with a football by accident and Gilligan wouldn’t fall into the lagoon or be wrapped on the head by the skipper.  There would be no Hillbillies in Beverly Hills and Samantha would twitch her nose no longer and her husband Darrin would never be threatened by his mother-in-law.  People, or so we have been taught to believe, had grown out of such things.  Instead they wanted pot shots taken at the government (All In The Family) They wanted shows that centered on sex (Love American Style) They wanted shows where the humor came out mostly in people being cruel to each other (MASH)

The Partridge Family became a hit in 1970 and ran for four season and 96 episodes.  The story of a mother with five children who perform together as a band was an immediate sensation.  There was at least one song a week and some of these made it into the Billboard top 100.  I Think I Love You, the shows first hit made it to number one in 1970. The Partridge Family produced 8 studio albums including the Christmas album and 5 compilation albums. Though no longer played on the radio the music is still available on CD or Spotify and the show still runs on various TV streaming services.  The show still has a lot of fans who gather in strength on Facebook.

The Partridge Family shaped my taste in music.  I became much more interested in pop music than conventional rock and roll.  My favorites today remain The Partridge Family, The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and another TV show band The Monkees

Shirley Jones who played Shirley Partridge. The mother on the show got her start quite by accident.  She was on her way to becoming a veterinarian.  She was in NYC and found out that Rodgers and Hammerstein were holding open auditions for singers.  She went and sang for I believe it was Richard Rodgers.  He was so impressed he took her to another theater where Oscar Hammerstein was working.  In the first theater she sang with a pianist, in the second she had full orchestra to accompany her.  Needless to say she was hired.  I believe she started in the chorus of one the R and H shows but eventually would play the lead for them in both the film versions OKLAHOMA and Carousel.  She would go on to play the lead in The Music Man on film and then move on to dramatic roles and comedy roles on film.  She was suited to play the singing mother of five and it gave her a chance to stay home and raise her three sons.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Nanny and the Professor were short lived but remain two of my favorites.  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was based on the 1942 film.  That movie was set in England in the 1800s.  The TV show was set-in present-day America on The New England coast.  The show revolves around a widow with two children and a housekeeper who settle in a house once owned by a sea captain.  They quickly come to realize that captain is haunting the house and the spirit, and the family must learn to live together and getting used to a supernatural prescience with all kinds of ghostly powers is quite the funny challenge.

Nanny and the Professor is what I like to call a mash up of Mary Poppins and Bewitched.  The show starred Juliet Mills as Nanny and she played the role to perfection.  “The beginning lines of the theme song are “Soft and sweet, wise and wonderful oooh our mystical magical nanny.” And that’s what she was.  Watching Nanny and the Professor was like wrapping a warm comforter around yourself and having a cup of tea.

I could go on and on.  I have stories about all my favorite shows. Betty-Jo Bradley was probably my first crush.  She was the youngest daughter on Petticoat Junction and a tom boy, I thought she was great.  I also loved the mother, Kate Bradley, played by Bea Bernadette.  She was a regular on television since the 1950s.  Playing George and Gracie Burns’ neighbor on their show and then playing Jethro’s mother on The Beverly Hillbillies.  And she voiced Betty Rubble in The Flintstones when that show premiered in 1960.  In 1968 Bea Bernadette passed away leaving a gap in the Petticoat Junction cast.  I felt that passing but was pleased when June Lockhart, Mrs. Robinson from Lost in Space came in to fill her shoes.  Not as mother to the girls, who were basically grown up, but as a resident doctor named Janet Craig.  Petticoat Junction would end in 1970 having run for seven years.

We call some foods, comfort foods, foods like mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and pie with ice cream are foods we go to when we want to feel better about something.  There are comfort TV shows too, especially the shows I grew up with.  Lucy  always brings a smile to my face in all her incarnations.  Hazel is the adult friend you always wished you had when you were a kid.  You can laugh and C’mon Get Happy with The Partridge Family and you can learn to have faith in the things you cannot see in The Flying Nun.

A lot of these shows are gone now.  Some are still available to purchase on DVD and some are being shown on the cable channel Antenna TV.  Some have gone out of copyright so you can purchase them on eBay from independent manufacturers, These shows include The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Nanny and the Professor.  Some shows are only partially available.  Petticoat Junction has it’s own streaming channel and The Beverly Hillbillies only seem to allow the first few season to be available.  I know this all has to do with copyright law.  I hope one day they straighten that mess out and let all of these treasures out for the public to enjoy once again.