Sentimentality

Movies and television shows that have sad themes, especially those that are animal-related, always bring the tears to my eyes. They have since I was a young girl, and they continue to do so today.

Last night I was continuing to watch the fourth and final season of the classic television series, Route 66. While this season was somewhat weaker than the previous three seasons, mostly because of the awful two-part final episode where Tod (Martin Milner) gets married in a lame spy spoof, there still were some very good episodes. The one I watched last night had to do with poverty and domestic issues. The father of the household, played by Albert Salmi, never seemed to hold down a job because he thought he was better than the jobs he did, but he couldn't or wouldn't do anything to apply himself to make his life better for himself and his family. The family lived in a mobile home, which in those days really WAS a mobile home. The manufactured homes had wheels on them, so conceivably you could just have large trucks move them to another location (I am not talking about travel trailers or fifth wheels that you see today where one or two people might live in them). However, the home was crowded because there was the married couple and three kids, including an infant. The couple had an argument over the baby crying, so the older kids got the brilliant idea they were going to give their baby brother away so he would have a better life than what they had. However, they weren't very successful at this and had their brother stay at this empty house located in the Niagara Falls area.

Well, as you can expect, there was panic with the parents about what happened to their baby. The brother and sister continued to care for the baby over a period of a few days. Of course, Linc (Glenn Corbett) had to stick his nose into the situation, and he decided to follow the kids one morning to the house. He then tipped off the dad and brought him to the house, and what they overheard about made my eyes cry out. It was stinking sad. Of course it all ended well, and I probably shouldn't give the ending away, but I did, but I was bawling by the end of the episode.

Route 66 was a great series, one of the best ever.

Sadly, Albert Salmi didn't fare so well. His first wife was child actress Peggy Ann Garner, with whom he had a daughter, but the two split up. At around the time he made this episode, he married his second wife, Roberta Pollock Taper. He had two more daughters with her.

However, by 1990 he and his family had relocated to Washington state. He and his wife separated. Salmi's life apparently went into a tailspin, as he suffered from depression. Tragically he and his estranged wife were found dead on April 22, 1990, in a murder-suicide. He was 62, Roberta was 55.

I Am

trying to force myself to do things instead of being a semi-invalid, so I went and ate out of Tivoli's at the Eldorado casino, and then, on the way out, I played a 25-cent Wheel of Fortune slot machine. I ended up winning $450 total, and I went home before I couldn't stand it anymore.

I am going to finishing watching an episode of Route 66 titled "The Newborn," with special guest star Albert Dekker, whose death in 1968 definitely qualifies him for the Darwin Awards hall of fame.

From Wikipedia:

On May 5, 1968, after attempting to reach Dekker for three days, his fiancée Geraldine Saunders went to the actor's home. There were numerous messages and notes attached to his door from other concerned friends. Saunders got the apartment manager to open the door, and discovered Dekker's body in the bathtub. Dekker was kneeling nude in the bathtub, with a noose around his neck and a scarf tied over his eyes. A horse's bit was in his mouth, fashioned from a rubber ball and metal wire, and two leather straps were stretched between the leather belts that girded his neck and chest. A third belt, around his waist, was tied with a rope that stretched to his ankles. The end of the rope was found wrapped around his wrist several times and was held in Dekker's hand. Handcuffs clamped both wrists with a key attached. Dekker also had sexually explicit writings and drawings, written in red lipstick, on various parts of his body. He had been dead for several days.

Reports surfaced that Dekker was the victim of a robbery gone wrong due to a great deal of cash and electronic equipment was found to be missing from his apartment, but there was no evidence to support this. Police also theorized that Dekker was a closet homosexual who practiced his eccentricities discreetly with anonymous male prostitutes. Police attempted to attribute Dekker's death to a mishap with a hustler who left the actor dying or dead after something went wrong. Police made inquiries, but Dekker had no reputation among male hustlers, and Dekker's friends denied the accusations. Other theories of a murder made to look like a suicide arose but were never proven.

Dekker's death was eventually ruled accidental. The coroner determined that Dekker accidentally asphyxiated himself while attempting autoerotic asphyxia. Dekker was cremated in East Los Angeles, and his remains were shipped to the Garden State Crematory in New Jersey.

That's enough of that damned shit. What an idiot he was.

Sorry I Am Not

posting much, but I am sitting here watching a DVD of the classic 1960s series, Route 66. Beyond the fact it was one of the best shows in television history, it is fun to watch where the show was filmed for each episode. Of course it was filmed almost entirely on location.

I watched an episode where Tod (Martin Milner), Buz (George Maharis), and the real star of the show, the Corvette, went to Squaw Valley, California. Squaw Valley, of course, was the location of the 1960 Winter Olympics, and it was mentioned on the show. At the beginning of the episode ("Effigy in Snow"), which was about a nutball who had killed a woman skier, Milner and Maharis were parked alongside the road overlooking a lake. I knew it wasn't Tahoe, but never mind. It was Donner Lake, as the two noted, and they also mentioned the tragic Donner Party incident including cannibalization and all. Since the episode was filmed in 1961, before Interstate 80 was built or completed, the location threw me for a bit.

Another episode, "Like a Motherless Child," was filmed in around Carson City and Reno.

I always like how the show picks up right where it left off in the last episode. In the episode I am watching now, the location is Virginia City, Nevada. Near the beginning of the show, they showed Piper's Opera House and some actor mentioned Reno was "90 miles away." That is nowhere near true, and later on, Martin Milner mentioned Reno was "30 miles away," which is more or less accurate. Then they filmed scenes in Reno, at the Mapes Hotel (1947-2000), which was the place to be back then. I had my landlord watch this episode, and it brought back a lot of memories to him. He has been in Reno since 1947, the year the Mapes was built. The hotel was the first hotel/casino in Nevada.

In another episode, featuring Martha Hyer as a blind woman, it featured a seeing-eye dog called "Rex." I was wondering if the dog was actually a real seeing-eye dog. At the end of the show, during the credits, he was credited as "Special Guest Star Rin Tin Tin," descendant of the original (1918-1932), and probably the same dog or the son of the dog (Flame, Jr.) who was in the 1950s television show.*

It's fun to look at these shows, and see how various parts of the country looked then as opposed to now.

This link has a very good recent interview with George Maharis.

*--The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, which I remember in reruns, was produced from 1954-1959 by Screen Gems, which also produced Route 66. The dog in the Route 66 episode either was the main dog on the earlier series or else he was one of the other dogs playing the part in the show.