Holster that dootenforzer, pardner!

by David Benjamin 

“… Now he turned my dial to channel one

I knew that this was gonna be fun

He turned my dial to channel two

That station thrilled me through and through…”

— Phil Medley and Bill Sanford, “TV Is the Thing This Year”

MADISON, Wis. — There’s a tableau in Rob Reiner’s classic coming-of-age film, Stand By Me — based on Stephen King’s novella, The Body — when the four fugitive boys break out spontaneously with the theme song from the TV series, “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

“‘Have Gun Will Travel’ reads the card of a man

“A knight without armor in a savage land…”

I hadn’t yet seen the movie or read King’s story when, as I was writing a book called The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, I used Paladin and his “soldier of fortune” lifestyle as a recurring motif. This wasn’t coincidence. King, Reiner and I were tapping a rich vein of American cultural history. When we were kids, the three of us — and thirty million other kids — venerated and emulated Paladin, the cool, charming loner who forsakes the lap of luxury to brave the wilderness, outwit the devil, dance with death, save the farm and rescue the damsel. 

In The Last Kid Picked, explaining the unwritten Code of the Kid, I wrote that “each of us was a Paladin in his soul. We lived in the apparent comfort of home and hearth (well, furnace), just as Paladin occupied the opulence of Frisco’s fanciest hotel. But at a moment’s notice, we each might be cast (metaphorically) into the snarling wilderness, thrown from our horse, disarmed and bleeding from a bullet in our thigh, drinking only the bitter water we could suck from a barrel cactus, shaking a fist at the circling vultures and stalked by villains so merciless that no ordinary lawman dared stand up to them…”

Next to Paladin, the Lone Ranger was a schoolmarm. On Saturday night for more than half our lives (225 episodes), every kid in America was glued to the television to watch, in order, Steve McQueen in “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” Richard Boone as Paladin and James Arness as Marshall Dillon in “Gunsmoke.”

Even had I not regarded Paladin as my moral guiding light, I would’ve watched “Have Gun, Will Travel.” I had to. It was the only show available Saturday at 9 p.m. In Tomah, where I grew up, our antennae picked up only Channel 8, WKBT in La Crosse. But even in big cities like Milwaukee, with three VHF channels (plus “educational TV), “Have Gun, Will Travel” on CBS was almost obligatory. It was — like “I Love Lucy,” Ed Sullivan, “Father Knows Best,” Lawrence Welk and Walter Cronkite — universal. Everybody watched the same stuff. We shared the same touchstones. We all tuned in the Oscars and Miss America. We all hurried home from school for “American Bandstand,” and every pubescent boy in the USA had a secret crush on Annette.

My first TV was a Motorola in a cabinet with a 27-inch screen, that Papa, my favorite grandfather, installed in his living room on Pearl Street in 1955. Along with St. Mary’s school, the Tomah Public Library, the swamps and woods around town and the grownup conversations I overheard, Papa’s TV became essential to my formative years. Indiscriminately, I watched Mighty Mouse — “Here I come to save the daaaay!” — Dobie Gillis and “Playhouse 90”. In third grade, watching Ed Sullivan, I got the idea for my first novel. While everyone else in the house, including my brother Bill, went to sleep, I stayed awake for the Friday night midnight movie and launched my cinema education — with Random Harvest, Rear Window, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Maltese Falcon. With each movie, with every show I watched beside Grandma and Papa, I edged toward the grownup world, learning things they knew, sharing drama, comedy, variety shows and the Friday Night Fights, stretching my personal canon back in time to Chaplin and Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Groucho Marx, Sid Caesar and Spike Jones.

One night on “The Garry Moore Show,” Garry and Durward Kirby did a parody of “Dragnet” in which they replaced familiar words like “child” and “gun” with Yiddish-sounding nonces like “moznik” and “dootenforzer.” I found the entire sketch reproduced in the TV section of the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year and read it aloud to my classmates in Mrs. Ducklow’s fourth-grade class at St. Mary’s. As I recall, it went right over their heads (I was a little precocious).

Here’s a quote. Try to hear, in your head, the monotone voice of Jack Webb in the role of Sgt. Joe Friday… er, Fozmerlude: “… A report came in from headquarters that a woman with two mozniks had been jidnicked and glagened by a man carrying a .38-caliber dootenforzer, Model M-1. It was the fourth jidnicking in three days. My job, to find this glagener. I’m a Floop…”

Wait, wait. There’s more, from the jidnicking victim: “… I was upstairs with my two little mozniks. It was their bedtime. I was reading them a story about Little Red Snootniggin and the Three Snorks…”

Millions more viewers saw this sketch than, nowadays, might see an episode of “Game of Thrones” on HBO, “The Crown” on Netflix or “The Boys” on Amazon. “The Boys,” which I’d never heard of ’til I googled it, was last year’s tenth most popular series. In 1978, America’s tenth most popular TV show was a veritable icon — “All in the Family.” 

You see what’s happened. Like our politics, TV (well, video content) has been decommodified, balkanized, stratified and tribalized. A dozen times a year now, I find myself in conversations wherein friends rave about a serial drama to which they’ve become addicted, on a premium channel, a streaming app or a cable rabbithole. “You’ve gotta see this!” they insist. But then, they have to explain to me what it’s about, who’s in it, why it’s so good, and which platform I need to access if I want to “binge” the whole thing and catch up to the Season Six plotline.

This seems more work than turning on the creaky Zenith in our Tomah walkup and settling in for an evening of “Maverick” and “77 Sunset Strip” on Channel 8. 

Of course, it’s nice to have options. Only a slug could justify uttering the complaint that every kid made at least once a week in my bygone days, “Awjeez, Ma, there’s nothin‘ on TV.”

Now, there’s everything on TV, including nudity, profanity, violence, erectile dysfunction and something called Biktarvy that causes men to kiss each other. And it ain’t just on TV. It’s available (often for a nominal fee) on your laptop, your desktop, your tablet, your smartphone, your smartwatch and an LED billboard in Times Square.

But those shows we used to all watch together at the same hour, same night, “Donna Reed,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Honeymooners” — “To the moon, Alice!” — were an almost magically cohesive experience that united a generation that’s busy dying nowadays, but unaccessible to anyone born since… when? “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” “The Love Boat” and “M*A*S*H”? Thereabouts.

When, in 1953, the incomparable Dinah Washington was singing “TV Is the Thing This Year,” television was beginning to exercise it’s subliminal power to universalize human experience, to give everyone, in America and beyond, common moments with the same characters, to talk about in the morning over doughnuts at the diner — characters etched in memory and somehow as evocative of our nation’s character as Washington, Lincoln and Rev. King: Eddie Haskell, Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, Rochester, Hoss Cartwright, Lassie, Fonzie, Lucas McCain, Fred Flintstone, Eric Sevareid, Paladin…

…and Sgt. Joe Fozmerlude.