This
is the first Father’s Day I will have without my dad who passed away earlier this
year. Now normally the families would
get together for lunch or dinner and that would be a nice moment. Now such
moments carry a bit of melancholy since I have a family yet my own father is
gone. This is how things go in life and while it hurts, I have a feeling of the
now with my family and the past with my dad.
When
I was a child, I watched on many occasions The
Wizard of Oz on TV and being moved to tears at the end every time. I
remember my dad taking the family to see a new movie whether it be My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, or Mary Poppins. Because of his affiliation with the US Naval
Research Lab, we even saw a special preview of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Uptown Theater in D.C. which was a stunner
and very confusing to a young boy. My
dad took my younger brother and me to see a double feature of James Bond
movies, Thunderball and From Russia with Love, and I was hooked
on Bond forever. He was a big Dean Martin Show fan and when the Matt
Helm movies came out, we all saw The
Silencers and Murderer’s Row,
pale Bond imitations. When I supervised
the college movie theater at UMD College Park, mom and dad came up to see Moonraker as dad was a fan of Roger
Moore from TV’s The Saint.
I
even remember my first and only drive-in movie that featured a triple bill of The Satan Bug-reasonably exciting, The Train-boring for a kid, and Get Yourself a College Girl featuring
the Dave Clark Five-I didn’t get it. He
took us to see Batman the movie based
on the hit TV show and it was lame. I
recall my dad taking my brother and me to Cabaret
which was powerful and really adult themed.
Pretty
soon, I was able to see most movies on my own as I would be dropped off to a
theater by myself, and it was a new era for movie watching for me. We would still see movies together but less
frequently. Even rewatching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or The Empire Strikes Back was fun to see
them with dad. He and my mom saw Terminator 2 and he liked it which
surprised me pleasantly because this was a man who was a physicist and would
pick apart any movie’s technical inaccuracies. We saw Glory together and it was a moving experience. We saw a movie based on my dad’s love of graphic
novels of Chinese super heroes and fantasy like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and in the past would see imported
Chinese sword and martial arts films that were actually quite good even though
some were over the top. My dad even took
us to see Enter the Dragon which was
the culmination of Bruce Lee’s prowess in kung fu. Speaking of which, we loved
TV’s Kung Fu with its action and
philosophy. One of the last movies my brother and I watched with my dad was Lincoln.
TV
watching was a huge thing in our household and I remember the old black and
white sets with manual channel knobs and no remote control-we would wear out
the knobs and have to get a new one, or the TV would break down and we would go
shopping for a new transistor tube at the local drug store. We got our first color TV later on and it was
glorious! I grew up vividly recalling
early 1960s shows like The Untouchables,
The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Combat. My dad often liked
the same shows as me although once in a while he would watch something I really
didn’t care for or tolerated. For example, he loved The Lawrence Welk Show which had old
standards and ended with the maestro dancing at the end of the show with a bevy
of older women. It was a tradition for
many years. The Wonderful World of Disney was a staple on Sundays which usually
started out with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild
Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. It was also the mainstay of Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea at 7PM
which would have our family having dinner that night usually at a Chinese
restaurant or the local Hot Shoppes and my dad faithfully rushing us back to
catch the beginning of my favorite sci-fi TV show (this when there were no
VCRs.) In fact I couldn’t get enough of Allen’s sci-fi shows like Lost in Space or the short lived The Time Tunnel. The Outer Limits scared the crap out of me! Yet I could not get
into Alfred Hitchcock Presents even
though I liked his movies.
Mondays was usually the domain of one of my dad’s favorites, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (which
foreshadowed Saturday Night Live.) CBS
comedies were very popular in our home like Petticoat
Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The
Beverly Hillbillies. I remember
Friday was a comedy block of The Brady
Bunch, The Partridge Family, Nanny and the Professor, The Odd Couple, and Love
American Style. Comedy was big in
our home as the fantasy ones ruled like Bewitched,
I Dream of Jeannie, and My Favorite
Martian.
Saturday
mornings were so much fun and I would get up early just to watch my favorite
cartoon like Underdog or any of a
number of Hanna Barbara regulars. I started collecting comic books early on
especially since I loved all things with dinosaurs. I had plastic small
dinosaurs and models and watched movies with dinosaurs. I had books and studied about all things
dinosaurs and loved going to the museums in Chicago and D.C. to see the dinosaur
skeleton exhibits. I loved buying those
G.I. Combat comics showing soldiers battling dinosaurs! After a while my dad
suggested I buy something other than just dinosaurs and so I picked up a super
hero one and thus was born my love for DC and ultimately Marvel comics. Imagine reading and salivating over Captain
America and The Avengers with storylines that are now being made into
blockbuster movies, and my dad is partly to blame (or praise). Even old repeats
of The Adventures of Superman and
later watching The Six Million Dollar Man
were part of this appeal.
Saturday
evening was a lock with All in the
Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and its model That Girl), The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show (with Harvey Korman busting up at Tim Conway’s
brilliance.) In fact variety shows were huge and Ed Sullivan Show, The Red
Skelton Show, The Danny Kaye Show, The
Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners, and The Andy Williams Show were staples in my household. The earliest recollections
I had were of Sing a Long with Mitch
Miller and his singers.
I remember watching
TVs Batman and my dad and I thought
it was the coolest thing and so did he! Westerns were popular like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, but he and I preferred The
Wild Wild West. In fact it was part of the spy genre of the Bond films and The Man from UNCLE was terrific
fun! Get
Smart and Agent 99 appealed to my dad. The British import of The Avengers especially with Diana Rigg
showed a female agent way way ahead of her time. Mission Impossible was so innovative and tense those first few
years, and we loved it! Police shows were
big too like the indestructible Hawaii
Five-O and the early private eyes like 77
Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, Burke’s Law
(he loved Gene Barry) and Honey West
were cool, and Mannix was THE Gumshoe!
He liked the intelligence of Columbo (and NBC Mystery Movies with McCloud and McMillan and Wife) and loved to watch Angie Dickinson in Police Woman. He even liked Hee Haw and
The Golddiggers mostly because of the pretty female stars.
The
evening news was usually centered on the most trusted man on the news, Walter
Cronkite. Of course the local evening
news was always centered on newscasters like Gordon Peterson and Max Robinson and
sports with Warner Wolf-what a great team! We would watch the latter’s show about
the Redskins.
Late
night TV was dominated by The Tonight
Show with Johnny Carson and we loved his monologues which sometimes bombed
and we waited for him to do the soft shoe dance when this happened. I loved
some of the routines he would do like Ed McMahon claiming that Johnny’s small
book on his desk had “everything you would want to know about a random subject”
and Johnny retorting, “You are wrong bated breath” or some joke. It got so I wanted to stay up later but often
had school the next day and thus began my night owl habits. Sometimes my dad
and I would fight over my staying up late-imagine that! I eventually had a TV
in my room and would sneak watch late shows, and finally my dad got wise and
would come up later and feel the back of the set to see if it was still warm!
I
saw many movies that came to TV during that period and into the 1970s. It was sort of a cinematic education for me
and nurtured a love for film that continues to this day.
Then
there are the moments in film and TV that make you feel emotions and memories
about my dad. A couple titles come
readily to mind, and one may have directly influenced the other; TV’s The Twilight Zone episode, Walking Distance, about a man walking
back to his childhood town and meeting his dad and compare that to Field of Dreams and its deep sentiment of
a father and son bonding amid Americana.
Both of these, and I’m sure there are others, touched my heart and soul,
and since my dad’s passing will forever stay with me and have an added meaning.
The
last thing we watched together was the Super Bowl which he paid attention to
intently, and it felt good to share a quality few hours with him as we had over
40 years before as we would watch the Washington Redskins on TV during the
George Allen glory days. I realize and treasure the bonds of watching a
movie or TV show with my dad and laughing and watching him laugh too that are
irreplaceable memories. Thank you dad.