A Handful of Kooks

I think we would get along pretty well if we stayed off the topic of politics.

Yes, I would have placed that phrase immediately too.

"The Time Tunnel" was flawed but very interesting. One moment I remember in the series is when Dr. Doug Phillips appears in some town in the 19th century and finds that he cannot get done what he needs to because the town is convinced that they are about to be hit and destroyed by a meteor. He finds out that they believe this because the local physics professor has told them. He knows that historically this town was not destroyed by a meteor. He goes to see the physics professor and takes him through the celestial mechanics calculations on the professor's black board. At the end of the calculation, he gets a confused look on his face, puts a check mark next to the last line, and says, "impact." The professor says, "And nicely done." After a few minutes, he concludes that the meteor must have a less visible companion that will change its course.

This specially appealed to me because I wanted to be a physicist (and eventually became one). I love good black board physics in movies. Another good such scene is midway through the Hitchcock movie "Torn Curtain," an otherwise undistinguished movie.

Oh, by the way, Patrick Macnee based John Steed on three people, one of whom was the uncle of a former girlfriend of mine. Unfortunately, I never met him.

Great recall on that "Time Tunnel" episode. If I come across any good examples of black board physics I'll be sure to share them.

There was a '62-'63 series called "The Man and the Challenge". One of the most memorable episodes was called "The Dropper" – it was about a maniac who'd drive really fast and get motorcycle cops to pursue him at high speeds. Then he'd drop logs out of the back of the car which the speeding cop would hit and then die in the subsequent crash. The hero, Dr. Glenn Barton, with access to a newly discovered psychotropic drug which enables someone to see action in slow motion, uses the drug to catch the fiend. I remember watching this episode as a boy. And now, through the magic of youtube, I was able to find it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoJvzTwQKs0

Did you teach physics or were you involved in research?

Just a quick answer now since my wife just got home from work. I have a BS and MS in Physics, but no PhD. I had a series of industrial physics research/engineering jobs.

In the mid-80s, I had a job to be one of four guys writing a program to enable a heat seeking missile track its target and not let it get away. It was more programming than physics. After that, I only took software jobs, so I had two careers. More on TV later.

I did briefly teach physics in a high school and tutored calculus several times. I got the high school job by telling an employment agent "Anything but teaching."

Here's one we haven't covered. People who have never seen it would laugh, but "Leave it to Beaver" may be the best comedy ever on television. The comedy derived from situations, not cheap one liners. The writing was superb.

They lived in a town called Mayfield. Beaver's universe was better than real. If you had the power to go to an alternate universe, this is where you'd want to go. Beaver had a great brother and his parents were honest and empathetic and would always admit it when they were wrong. Barbara Billingsley played his mother, June Cleaver. For the rest of her life after the series, she received letters from girls from broken homes telling her about their lives and problems. Hugh Beaumont played the father, Ward cleaver. He radiated calm wisdom. It's said that his actual family is not completely happy about the endless succession of strangers who visit his grave.

No one who isn't old enough to have watched it growing up knows a thing about the show's high quality.

You're right, that series was really well done. Wholesome without being syrupy. Believable situations. And Eddie Haskell! I'll have to watch one; I haven't seen an episode since it went off the air!

Got to put this one up:

I think you'd be surprised at how it strikes you as a mature adult.

I haven't had time to watch an entire episode but I did catch a segment of Season 1 Episode 5 – about Beaver's black eye. The first thing that struck me was how young Beaver and Wally are! (I had the same reaction when I looked at an old "Mickey Mouse Club" a few years ago.) But I noticed the quality of the writing and directing even from the limited amount I saw.

I urge you to watch more when time permits. It really is superior.

Switching to music, I don't know at what point or if you became involved with rock music, but, although I love the Beatles, the top 40 music from just before they appeared is among my favorite music ever and makes up most of the CDs in my car. Examples are:

"Will You Love Me Tomorrow" - The Shirelles (1960)
"He's a Rebel" - The Crystals (1962),
"One Fine Day" - The Chiffons (1963),
"I Count the Tears" - The Drifters (1960),
"Chain Gang" - Sam Cooke (1960),
"Up on the Roof" - The Drifters (1962),
"Baby It's You" - The Shirelles (1961),
"Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins (1956),
"Searchin' " by The Coasters (1957),
"Sweet Little Sixteen" by Chuck Berry (1958),
"Til I Kissed You" by The Everly Brothers (1959),
"Hushabye" by The Mystics (1959),
"Runaway" by Del Shannon (1960),
"Calendar Girl" by Neil Sedaka (1961),
"Palisades Park" by Freddy Cannon (1962),
"Twistin' the Night Away" by Sam Cooke (1962),
"The Wah Watusi" by The Orlons (1962),
“Fools Rush In” by Ricky Nelson (1963)

Yeah, those are all part of my classic soundtrack. I wasn't a big consumer of classic rock, in the sense that I didn't go out and buy top 40 hits – I was into "modern jazz" – but I heard all those tunes on the school bus, at parties, and on transistor radios any place kids my age were gathered. We'd switch off between WABC (with Cousin Brucie) and WMCA (Home of the Good Guys) depending on what was being played. The countdown to the top record of the week was always exciting. When I was in Vietnam (68-69), Armed Forces Radio played a good selection but was after the Beatles.

Yeah, something happened after the "British invasion". The Beatles and the Stones were great, and I liked some of the other more bluesy groups like the Yardbirds, plus the "psychedelic" groups like the Byrds, but there was more variety in the hit parade before they showed up. You'd hear some great song by Smoky Robinson or B.J. Thomas and it would be followed by Lesley Gore or maybe even someone like Tony Bennett or Dinah Washington. By the early '70s you had a lot of FM rock stations and the sound was just different. Longer songs, less commercials, smooth-voiced laid back announcers – I missed the punch of the old AM stations and the hyped-up commercials screaming "Crazy Eddie has flipped his lid!"

I'll tell you one, but no one who didn't experience it personally will believe it - at least not completely - but it was real and it was very great. The game show What's My Line" had a celebrity panel who would try to guess the guest's profession and, for celebrity guests, identity too. The panel was unchanging, except that it eventually developed one rotating seat. However, for the most part, it was always the same people and always the same moderator. If you watched all of the episodes, which is hundreds, you understand their inside jokes and self-references, and relationships, and you will eventually feel almost like you know them. You'll go and look up their biographies to see what happened to them later. There is a phenomenon which happens if you watch all the episodes in which you feel like you're part of the group and they're your friends, even though that's not literally true. It's an extreme example of what happens with some TV shows if you see every episode, where you develop a special understanding.

People who wax nostalgic about The Adventures of Superman almost never note that it was predated by the Superman radio show, which I recall listening to. Starred Bud Collyer.

And the Max Fleischer animated series, Superman



Bud Collyer famously hosted Beat the Clock and later, To Tell the Truth. The latter was one of my regular shows and I got to know those panelists the way Brandon9000 describes. Orson Bean, Tom Poston, Kitty Carlisle, and Ralph Bellamy are ones that I can remember pretty clearly. "Will the real edgarblythe please stand up..."

Then there was the scandal over the rigged quiz shows.

The name of one quiz show contestant eludes me. A woman who became popular in later life. Dr. something or other. They intended she would quickly lose and be forgotten, but she kept winning. No matter what they threw at her she had the answer. The category was boxing.

Dr. Joyce Brothers!

She was not among my interests in later years. I didn't even know why she was popular. Never once read her column.