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I Hate It When That Happens
It was going to be so perfect. I had an idea for a great post, I was all set to write it, and then stopped to research one detail. That’s when the whole thing fell to pieces. Let me explain.
By now, everyone is aware of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Tom Hanks’ new biopic of Fred Rogers, known to millions of kids as simply Mr Rogers. It seemed like the perfect jumping off point for a post on how we raise children in this country, particularly in the oh so enlightened twenty-current-year. Because everyone knows that Fred Rogers was a Navy Seal, right? Or maybe it was an Army sharpshooter. Either way, he was a war hero and all around bad-ass.
And let’s not forget about Bob Keeshan, the one-and-only Captain Kangaroo. Lee Marvin, a guy made of leather – and not new leather, but old crusty-hard, sweat-soaked leather – called Keeshan the toughest guy he ever knew. He told Johnny Carson all about it during an appearance on the Tonight Show. According to Marvin, Keeshan was a Marine sergeant, tough-as-nails, and another war hero. You know, a stripped-to-the-waist, knife-in-the-teeth, swimming-across-the-lagoon-at-midnight he-man.
I even had a devastating final point to make; our kiddie shows were hosted by war heroes, guys who had beaten the Nazis and then come home to help raise the generation of children they had fought to protect. And what do we give kids now? Drag-Queen Story Time.
I know, right?
The problem I discovered in my research was that there is very little truth to those stories. Fred Rogers was not a Navy Seal or an Army sharpshooter. Growing up, he was fat and asthmatic. If you look at the guys who become Navy Seals, asthmatics are fairly thin on the ground. And as for Keeshan, he was in fact a sergeant in the Marines, but according to Wikipedia, it was late enough in the war that it is “unlikely he saw any combat”.
Well, damn. I hate it when that happens. (Of course, I would have hated it more if I had found out after I posted it all.)
But then I found that all hope is not lost. I came across any interesting little theory that might just rescue my theorem.
(BTW, this entire episode reinforces my long-held belief that research is bad, and only causes problems.)
Published in General
The same protocol has torpedoed more than one brilliant and apposite quote left on my mental cutting room floor.
… and let us all hope that this is the only time that “Captain Kangaroo“ and “Drag Queen Story Time” share #tag space.
That’s really funny because I went through the same futile search about Fred Rogers a couple of years ago. Why did we both think he was a World War II veteran? I was so sure he was.
There’s so much on the Internet now that we are right back to where we started before it became a virtual library enabling us to find information faster than we could find it using the old paper-and-ink storage library systems and catalogs. For the last couple of years, I haven’t been able to find some of the interesting articles that whizzed by me just a few years ago on the Internet. :-) They are lost in the millions of results returned by the Internet search engines :-)
It’s the research that’s the problem, I tell ya.
I once heard Rod Stewart had to have His stomach pumped, but I’m reluctant to do the research.
I would fix that but my tags are already filled up with enough obligatory nonsense, any more and I’d start having to make a list.
Yeah, I heard the same thing. Then I saw he was born in 1928. He would have been 17 when the war ended, so WWII veteran status: unlikely.
Judge is right: research ruins everything.
You could have covered yourself by writing it anyway and saying you heard all that stuff from a whistleblower. It’s 2019, dude.
I really liked Captain Kangaroo as a kid. Amazing in retrospect how little tech that show had to work with.
I have waited for years for news that Captain Kangaroo and/or Mr. Rogers were actually evil pedophiles/staff rapists in what is now the norm for American celebrities. Very glad that has not happened.
Know what I think it is? I think our culture used to know the importance of having heroes, people the kids can look up to and aspire to be like. So we allowed the spinning of fables around them, and it was good for the children. Then something happened in the 1960s and 70s. It became chic to tear heroes down. “Thomas Jefferson? He wasn’t so great. He got a slave pregnant.” Then we saw the first movie (that I know of anyway) with, not a hero, but an “anti-hero.” Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy.
Pretty soon it became fashionable to have every hero of every TV show be damaged somehow. We stopped even using the term “hero” and it became “the lead” or the “protagonist.” Maybe he was a great detective, but he had to be an alcoholic with three failed marriages behind him. Or Carrie in Homeland, a CIA officer with manic depression who turns into an unpredictable hot mess when she’s off her meds (I hope to God the CIA doesn’t really hire anyone like her).
The fashion, in good socialist tradition, became to have a “relatable” hero rather than an unattainable perfect archetype, someone who, in their usual misplaced egalitarianism, won’t be any better than the rest of us. The thinking was that Superman would only give us bad self-esteem, so it’s better to have a loser schlub just like us in the main role. But it isn’t better. It’s only led to a generation of depressed little nihilists who hate America and want to kill themselves .
Judge,
You have reminded me of a long-forgotten question. Just who was “The Banana Man” and what was wrong with him?
Perhaps there are some questions that shouldn’t be answered.
Regards,
Jim
I had heard that Bob Ross used to be a drill sergeant. After his military career was over, he was so tired of giving R. Lee Ermey-style dress-downs that he vowed never to raise his voice again, grew his crewcut into an Afro, and devoted his time to teaching people how to paint “happy little trees” and their friends.
Now after reading your post, I have no idea whether that story is true or not. This type of story (factually true or not) serves to remind the listener that “mild-mannered” isn’t necessarily the same thing as “harmless.” That’s always a good notion to have rattling around in the back of your skull when you’re dealing with people.
Got another fact-check for you. Bob Keegan was a pitcher for the White Sox.
Bob Keeshan played Captain Kangaroo.
I don’t think Bob Ross was a drill instructor; he was “merely” a master sergeant in the USAF.
Don Adams, on the other hand (you know, Maxwell Smart) was a U.S. Marine who participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal and was later a drill instructor.
Research ruins everything.
You’re right; I fixed it. I hate it when that happens too.
And let’s not forget that lovable Jonus Grumby (aka, The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island) played by Alan Hale,Jr., who was a PT boat skipper in WWII and a friend of JFK.
OK. That is just a fan fiction book. In real life Alan was in the Coast Guard during WWII and did not know JFK. But that is still cool.
I think the public may soon figure out … they did.
About Jimmy Stewart’s war record from Military.com:
Where I bet he did not miss it by that much.
Great man
My uncle flew B24 in England. He died in 2005. While going through his things we discovered a 10 x12 glossy of my uncle in uniform and Jimmy in civilian clothes. It was undated with no inscription. My uncle never mentioned it. They did grow up about 15 miles from each other in Pennsylvania but Jimmy was older and I doubt they ever met there. I would include the picture but it is buried in one of my closets.
It was always enough for me that Captain Kangaroo was Frank Zappa’s dad. That made him okay in my book.
Edited: Oops – Google says it was(n’t) Mr. Greenjeans . . . I hate it when that happens.
When they caught Richard Speck and I realized he looked like Mr. Greenjeans, it gave me nightmares for a week, and I was never able to see Captain Kangaroo the same way again.
Did you really think we would stop reading if you hadn’t of put that phrase in? Did you really think, that a plea to “Let me explain” would somehow increase the chances we would indeed read the rest of the post?
I mean, whew, he put “let me explain” in there just in time. Or I would have fallen asleep.
Sometimes, I use phrases simply as rhetorical devices. Let me explain…
I remember the first time I watched Fred Roger’s show. I was in my 20’s, and I was taken. But subsequent shows got old fast. The only show worse than Mr Roger’s Neighborhood was Barney (the purple dinosaur).
I’ve watched Fred Rogers a few times in adult settings (e.g. testifying before Congress), and he talked to adults the same way he talked to kids. I don’t think I would have found him to be all that interesting if I had met him in person.
I never felt that way about Captain Kangaroo. I may have seen him on a rare Johnny Carson show, and Bob Keeshan knew how to talk to adults as an adult. Fred Rogers seemed to want to bring out the child in you, whatever the setting or circumstance.
Andrew Klavan talked about Mr Rogers on his Monday podcast. He has nothing against him, per se, but he also didn’t find him to be the ideal father figure either. Klavan thinks the ideal father figure is someone who is masculine, but who also controls his masculinity.
At best, Fred Rogers is ambivalent about masculinity. I don’t feel that way about Bob Keesan, or his alter-ego, Captain Kangaroo.
Another comedic actor (who also did serious roles) was Eddie Albert (probably best known for Green Acres) was in the U.S. Navy and participated in the battle of Tarawa. He was a pilot of one of the landing craft and rescued 47 Marines.
He was a pretty good actor, who did a extensive range of parts. I’ve recently looked at old Green Acres reruns, and the chemistry between him and Eva Gabor was very good. They really did look like a married couple that loved each other.
On the other hand, though Eva Gabor had a lot of marriages and affairs, Albert was married to one woman and he didn’t remarry when she died twenty years before he did.
Trueish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ross#Military_career
How about another rhetorical device? You could entitle a post, “A Modest Proposal.”
Very clever the first time it was used, but the copycats sound so…
Droll.
And “Let me explain…” sounds so…
Desperate.
How about?
“Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
If you’re disillusioned about Mr. Rogers, you can console yourself with the badass histories of Bob Ross and Julia Child.
Now that we’ve had both a Julia Child movie and a Mr. Rogers movie, all we need is a Bob Ross movie and then we can have a PBS Cinematic Universe!