Huckaby: Raising a glass to TV dads
Darrell Huckaby, a native of Porterdale, Ga, is a double graduate of UGA and a retired educator with 40 years of classroom experience.
As I glanced at the calendar and realized that Father’s Day was approaching this week, I thought of my own father, of course. He died a long time ago.
I have now been without him longer than I was with him but remain thankful for every moment we shared on this earth and look forward to being reunited with him in the real world.
But aside from my own father, I gave some consideration to all the TV dads I’ve known over the years. There has been a multitude. They tell me that I grew up in the golden age of television and, judging from all the non-scripted nonsense that fills the airwaves these days, I would tend to agree. The sitcoms and the westerns were the kings of prime time when I was a kid and there were as many parenting styles on display as there were fictional family patriarchs.
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"Father Knows Best" was the epitome of such shows. Remember Jim Anderson? He would be off at work all day - presumably at his insurance office - while Bud and Kathy and Betty created all sorts of drama and even mayhem in their private lives. Springfield was such a little Peyton Place! (I don’t know how Bud and Kathy turned out, but Betty became a pharmacist, changed her name to Elly and moved to Mayberry, NC.)
Jim Anderson would come home from work, swap his suit jacket for a sweater, read the afternoon newspaper and then solve all the problems of the world within the thirty minutes allotted for the show. And he did it all with a smile and a hug and without raising his voice. Oh, if parenting were only so simple.
Ward Cleaver was of the same generation as Jim Anderson, only he lived over in Mayfield and had June to handle a lot of his preliminary work with Wally and the Beaver. His temper was a little worse than Jim Anderson’s, but then he had to work with Lumpy Rutherford’s dad and he had to put up with that creep, Eddie Haskell, so I guess I can understand why his disposition might have been a bit sour from time to time.
One of my favorite TV dads was not only a father but also a grandpa. Grandpappy Amos and his clan, you recall, pulled up roots and moved from West Virginia to California. Although Luke and Kate were the parents of Little Luke and Hassie on the show, Grandpa was the center of attention and the straw that stirred the drink.
It seemed that an unusually high number of TV fathers were single parents. I suppose the networks were foreshadowing what was to come in society. Poor Ben Cartwright lost three wives each of whom had given him a son. There was Adam, the elitist snob, whose mother had been a New England aristocrat, Hoss, the lovable gentle giant whose mother was of Swedish descent and the hotheaded Little Joe, whose mother was a New Orleans Creole. Ben seemed to be about the same age as his sons to me, but was always levelheaded when he needed to be; he spoke softly and carried a six-shooter instead of a big stick and used it when needed to protect the Ponderosa or his sons.
Little Joe grew up to be quite a television father himself. Charles Ingalls was the kind of man who always made the rest of us look bad. He was talented and funny and knew just the right thing to do or say in every situation. He even knew how to deal with that nasty Mrs. Oleson.
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Oh, but for my money, the best of the best TV dads was Sheriff Andy Taylor. He had Aunt Bee and Barney to help him out of course, but he raised Opie to be a fine young man and struck the perfect balance between work and play.
There were so many others - all full of love and good advice and common sense: Lucas McCain, Mike Baxter, Mike Brady, Danny Tanner and, more recently, Phil Dunphy. And we can’t forget Frank Reagan who runs a family and the largest city in America and still finds time to be home to say grace at Sunday dinner every week.
I aspired to be like all of them as I raised my kids, wise and caring and all-knowing.
Alas, I was going for Jim Anderson, but sometimes I fear I was more a cross between Archie Bunker and Fred Sandford, with a little Homer Simpson thrown in for good measure.
But Happy Father’s Day. I can’t help but think that the world needs a few more good ones.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Huckaby: Raising a glass to fathers on television
