Thoughts In And Around Watching “Father Knows Best”

The show’s beginning, with the great music and brilliant narration alone, long ago, catapulted “Father Knows Best,” to a very high status and place in my heart.

Apparently many or enough other human beings (if only the masses and those in power realized we are all human) felt that way, enabling a “mini marathon” of “Knows Best” yesterday, amidst my dental pain, on Antenna T.V.

Some coincidences, notes and perhaps comments, follow.

In the first episode I saw after sojourning back and forth on public transit to see a superb play “Cost Of Living,” which I will discuss in today’s second post, Jane Wyatt’s “Margaret” tunes to a rich lifestyles show.

The narration details the socialite’s family employing a servant named “Hazel.” Around that time, Shirley Booth, so brilliant in the film, “Come Back Little Sheba,” was playing the maid/”member of the family,” Hazel, on television.

Next Lauren Chapin’s “Kathy” talks of her friend Patty Davis. Later a real life, beautiful Patty Davis, choosing her mother’s name to distance herself from the spotlight, if nothing else, of all things Reagan, posed for Penthouse and with me at an event, promoting it in 1994.

That year my father died. The thoughts of him on Father’s Day, all his travel back and forth via bus, subway and West Side Highway traffic (oh that West Side Highway traffic he would say, once home), Patty and her father, Robert Young/Jim Anderson all ‘pinball” in my mind.

“Father Knows Best” was a great show, both unrealistic and to be commended for great thoughts and humane concepts (Dorothy Cooper was noticed in the quickly passing credits, as having written an episode, I watched yesterday).

Tying it together with a tangent, but one of hope, I evoke Mr. Young’s change to a jacket with patches and the song “Patches” (originally sung by the group not Mr. Sinatra, named “Chairmen of the Board”  Clarence Carter) eliciting a father’s dying words, “Patches I’m depending on you son.”

No such words from my dad, only “I’m not chasing you,” but perhaps he is depending on me, thus through the literal and figurative pain, I go on.

One positive way is this. Talk to your father, learn, grasp, try to see his point, do not placate, but consider his point of view.

Most of all, truly communicate your thoughts, goals and love.