LETTERS FROM HOME: THINKING AND WRINKLING OUT LOUD

Aug. 10, 2000

Dear Leslie,

At the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, millions of American kids sat before TV sets each week to watch "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," a show that told us everything we needed to know about love and life.

You hate to admit that a TV show had any effect on you, especially one as purposefully numbskulled as "Dobie Gillis." But if you were a middle-class kid growing up somewhere in the middle of America, a sitcom about a middle-class kid struggling to figure out girls and parents and friends was like having a support group.

I don't know if you girls looked at the program the same way we boys did, as a kind of primer on teen-agerhood. Even though not yet teen-aged, I knew Dobie's yearning for pretty girls. Most boys are girl crazy from an early age. We're just afraid that if you know it you'll have more power over us than you already do.

Of course, the girl Dobie was crazy about much of the time was the heartbreakingly ravishing Thalia Menninger, played heartbreakingly by Tuesday Weld, while the girl who really loved Dobie, Zelda Gilroy, was merely cute. But some chemical reaction occurred between Zelda and Dobie. When she wrinkled her nose at him, his nose uncontrollably wrinkled back.

"Now cut that out," he commanded.

If Dobie's life revolved around girls, it was not an unexamined life.

Sitting before a statue of Rodin's "The Thinker," he thought out loud about life as he knew it. Almost certainly, nothing he said to himself was profound. But the mere fact that he was reflecting on his life was enlightening. Kids don't see that much.

I don't recall the show having a social conscience. The morals seemed to be about holding onto the prevailing post-war, pre-1960s ideals that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver" championed: Father did indeed know best, though mother usually had to clue him in.

The writers of "Dobie Gillis" didn't mean it to be as good as it was.

"I gotta kill that boy. I just gotta," Herbert Gillis often was heard to say. He didn't want to kill his son literally, of course. He just wanted to kill the teen-ager in Dobie, the now sad, unrealized potential in himself.

There was TV's first beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs, pounding his bongos, talking about Thelonious Monk, staying as far away from work as possible.

Maynard probably was the first but far from the last person on TV to say "Like, wow."

He was supposed to be silly, but rolling into the 1960s he manifested the revolutionary notion that you could drop out of mainstream society, an idea that soon would occur to many more people.

Males, even boyish ones, recognized themselves in Dobie, questing after the most beautiful women while never asking themselves what it was about another woman or girl that made us happy to be around her.

"Cut that out," we were always saying to those women in one way or another.

I spent some years chasing women who would not have me, spurning good women who would. If he'd had a longer TV life than four years, eventually Dobie would have discovered that fantasy women are exactly that. When real women wrinkle their noses, real men can't help but wrinkle back.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.