Who Was Jack Kelly?
Monday, July 21, 2014
A kind of pleasant and somewhat unusual
week really began two Saturdays ago. My granddaughter Lauren Stewart, 12,
arrived early afternoon with a request. So we sat down in the living room to
listen to Alice in Wonderland with Joan
Greenwood as Alice
and Stanley Holloway as the narrator. Lauren’s grandfather has a tape player
(the Alice in
Wonderland is a Caedmon/Book-of-the-Month Club cassette. There is another,
Through the Looking Glass) a linear tracking turntable for records, a tuner for
radio and a CD player. I can play anything.
Both Lauren and I appreciate Joan Greenwood’s
phenomenal voice. Just about a month ago we watched on a Saturday evening Alec
Guinness and Greenwood
in The Man in the White Suit. We did lots of laughing with Greenwood’s
Alice. And then she floored me when she picked up my Leica IIIF and wanted to know how it worked. From there we went to my Pentax S-3 and I taught her how to focus and to click the shutter.
During the last two weeks we have seen
(before he died) The Notebook with James Garner, Me and Orson Welles with
Claire Danes, Zac Efron and Christian McKay, Weir’s Gallipoli and finally this
last Saturday evening it was the remarkable film (Lauren said it was boring but
she wanted to know how it ended and what Duval’s mystery was all about) Get Low
with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray and Lucas Black.
On that previous week Wednesday and Sunday
Rosemary and I went to Bard to see Bill Cain’s Equivocation and then Cymbeline (the same cast of actors plus one more).
I am still troubled after having read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. It took me three weeks to read it as I was disturbed by it. It is a novel that I will have to read again and again with that other one with a difficult to figure out ending Daphne Du Maurier’s The House on the Strand.
But I have spent the last few days thinking
about James Garner and how our present times seem to forget some of the
important things men like him did before the age of the internet.
In 1957 and 1958 while living in a dormitory
for about 50 boys (bunk beds) at St. Edward’s High School in Austin we had a TV that was on a high table
in one end. Particularly on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights our prefect
brothers would turn it on so we could watch in from our bunks. In those years
there was only one TV station (I could be wrong about this perhaps there was
NBC, too) it was a CBS affiliate owned by Lyndon B. Johnson. I remember
watching Harbormaster with Barry Sullivan, The Hit Parade, Alfred Hitchcock
Presents, Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt, and American Bandstand.
By the time I was in the tenth grade (still
in a dorm) we watched lots of Saturday morning TV. We watched Have Gun Will
Travel, Gunsmoke, Maverick, American Bandstand, (Howdy Doody, too!), Highway
Patrol with Broderick Crawford, and a
long lost (I could not find any references) in which Calhoun competed with
Broderick Crawford as a cop in a car on a highway.
I have given thought to the fact that in
Garner’s obituary they mention his role as Bret Maverick but no mention is made
that the program alternated from week to week with Jack Kelly as his brother Bart.
To me it seems that between those two “adult”
Westerns, Fred Zinnemann's, 1952 High Noon and Peckinpah’s 1962 Ride the High Country you have
smack in the middle Gunsmoke, Have Gun
Will Travel and Maverick.
In our 10th grade dorm we had a
predilection for the no-nonsense almost brutal violence (in 30 minutes) of
Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel. I would not have known that Peckinpah
directed some of the episodes. There was one episode I will never forget were
Boone opens the swing doors of a saloon and fires his sawed-off shotgun (it
might have prefigured Straw Dogs).
One of my boarder classmates was the
sophisticated Daniel Sherrod who read Road & Track (we all read the rest of
the car magazines). His father had the Aston Martin dealership in Odessa, Texas.
Sherrod was the only one who knew anything about Grand Prix racing and how to
pronounce Peugeot. He liked Maverick. I
can understand that now. There was a level of sophistication, less violence and
the Maverick brothers got banged up a lot for hearsay card cheating. There was
little of the old-fashioned gunfight draws.
Few might not remember that when Garner
quit Maverick Roger Moore stepped in as cousin Beau Maverick.
It would seem to me then that Maverick was
a very important show to which few have remembered exactly why it was
important. But then few might remember
that in those days we unsophisticated Texan and adopted Texans watched Walter
Cronkite and believed that his word was his bond.
