Father's Day

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.