This Munster Was Not A Monster

My childhood included TV shows with premises that, even to my jejune sensibilities, seemed wildly improbable or just plain stupid.  I mean, who gets shipwrecked on a deserted island during a three-hour tour?*

You have to admit, though, that some of the characters and the actors who played them were fun,even lovable.  They included Grandpa Munster, portrayed by future Green Party gubernatorial candidate (in New York) Al Lewis.

I mean, how can you not love a guy who wears his normal work clothes while riding a bike?

No Lycra for him!

*—There was a show about a recently-departed woman who’s reincarnated as an antique car her son buys. She talks to him, and only him, through the car’s radio. One of my uncles told me, years later, that I squealed, “A grown-up thought of this?” during the one episode we watched.

Ride-along Cassidys

By now, you've heard that David Cassidy is gone.

Now, I am not going to idolize him.  Plenty of teen and pre-teen girls (and more boys than would care to admit it) did that back in the day, as we say.  And, as too often happens to young people who become famous literally overnight, it was--at least in some ways--his undoing.  Like Michael Jackson and others, he simply couldn't live up to the fame he achieved so young.  I don't think anybody could have.

I will admit that I watched The Partridge Family.  Everybody did.  At least, everybody I knew did.  Our Friday Night Lights, if you will, were TPF, The Brady Bunch, Room 222, The Odd Couple (still one of my favorites) and Love, American Style.  My parents, like many others, didn't really want their kids to watch that last show, but relented because it was, well, Friday night.

But no parent I know of ever tried to stop his or her kid from watching The Partridge Family.  I suspect that not all females who fawned, overtly or covertly, over him were under the legal voting age (which had gone from 21 to 18 during the time the show aired).  I also suspect the same could be said for his female fans--or his soeur d'ecran Susan Dey, a.k.a. Laurie Partridge.  She was, and is, pretty, though I liked her better years later, when she was on L.A. Law.

The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch made their debuts the same month--September 1970--as All In The Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show precisely because they weren't AITF and TMTMS.  If you were around then--or, even if you weren't--you know it was a tumultuous time.  The Kent State students were gunned down only a few months earlier; the Vietnam War raged on with no end in sight, like the protests it sparked.  The energy of the Civil Rights Movement inspired, in many ways, the Women's and Gay Rights Movements, which changed people's (particularly young people's) ideas about families and society.

All In The Family and The Mary Tyler Moore show reflected those changes.  The Brady Bunch did, in a different and less-threatening way:  Mike is widowed. (Carol is divorced, but that was downplayed.)  Moreover, Mike has boys and Carol has girls; the females take on the Brady surname when Mike and Carol wed.  Shirley Partridge, played by Shirley Jones, is also widowed.  And her kids, like the Bradys, are about as wholesome as can be:  Their hair might be long, but it is straighter than I ever could have been, and shiny.

That might have been the reason I never had a "crush" on David Cassidy--or, for that matter, Susan Dey (at least when she was on that show):  They were just a little too good, a little too cute, for my tastes, even in my jejune fantasies.  That, by the way is how I also felt about Paul McCartney, as much as I've always loved the Beatles.

Speaking of whom:  In the Partridge Family's heyday, David Cassidy's fan club had more members than the Beatles' and Elvis Presley's fan clubs combined.  I'm sure that none of the members cared that the show or the music (a bit about that later) were cheesy:  They, like much of the show's and "band's" audience, wanted to indulge in simplicity and innocence--or, at least, a fantasy of it.

I'll admit:  I can't hate someone who looks the way he does on an old three-speed (which, actually, wasn't so old back then).  Most of all, I can't hate someone who had Shaun Cassidy for a half-brother.

You might recognize that image even if you didn't see what it came from:  the ill-fated Breaking Away television series.  In it, Shaun takes on the role Dennis Christopher played in the film:  Dave Stohler, the young man who's marooned in Indiana with his obsession for bicycle racing and all things Italian.





I actually saw the TV series years after it aired.  It didn't take long, for only eight episodes were made.  The show had the misfortune of making its debut during the 1980-81 television writers' strike.  It normally takes a TV series at least a season--normally 24 or 26 episodes--or two or three to develop a following, even if it is based on a movie as loved by both critics and audiences as Breaking Away was.

So, a show featuring Shaun Cassidy never got the chance to  live up to the promise its predecessor generated--just as his half brother, as a thirty-something and middle-aged man, never could shine as brightly as his predecessor, if you will--the younger David Cassidy, a.k.a., Keith Partridge, did.

Riding With And Without Trigger

Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when I could hear the word "trigger" and not think about shifters.  For that matter, there was even a time when that word would not bring firearms to my mind.

The reason for that is that I was born a little too late to watch '50's TV shows and movies when they first ran.  I did, however, get a fairly steady diet of them in reruns.  It seemed that whenever you flipped the channels, you could find an episode of  "I Love Lucy" or "The Honeymooners".  Or "Lassie" or "Dragnet".  And, of course, there were the shows that continued to produce original episodes well into my childhood, and even on the eve of my puberty:  I am thinking now of "Perry Mason" and "Leave It To Beaver".

It also seemed impossible to escape from showings of  films like "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben Hur".  Another movie that, as I recall, often showed on the small screen was "Son of Paleface."

In the latter, one of the "stars" was a Palomino horse named--you guessed it--"Trigger".  Astride him in "Paleface", and in many other movies, was none other than Roy Rogers.  
Because he and his cinematic (and real-life) partner Dale Evans so often appeared with their equine companion, it's not easy to imagine either of them riding anything else. But, apparently, they did, every now and again, trade their spurs for pedals and hooves for wheels:

Is This What Cycling Needs?

About twenty years ago, some cycling buddies and I were enjoying a post-ride pizza.  (Actually, it was more like pizzas, plural:  If I recall correctly, we did a long ride at a brisk pace.) Miguel Indurain, possibly the least effervescent personality ever to dominate a sport, had just won the Tour de France.  While we all admired his talent and skill as a rider, a couple of us lamented the fact that he was all but unknown outside of a few European countries.  That was one of the reasons why so few Americans, at that time, were paying attention to the Tour or racing in general. 

A few years earlier, Greg LeMond won the Tour for the third time in five years.  There was some “buzz” in this country about him and cycling, but it died out pretty quickly after he hung up his bike.  Of course, some of the waning of American interest in the Tour, Giro and Vuelta could be blamed on the fact that no American rider of LeMond’s stature followed him, at least for nearly a decade.  

Although people who met him said he was likeable enough, he wasn’t particularly compelling in an interview.  Moreover, the same people who professed to liking him also said, in the immortal words of a journalist I knew, that he “wasn’t the brightest thing in the Crayola box”.  A couple of interviews I saw mostly confirmed that impression.  

At least he was more interesting than Indurain.  Some reporters said the Basque rider was a jerk; others said that spending time with him was more narcotic than aphrodisiac.  Even he himself admitted, in a post-race interview, “My hobby is sleeping”.

As we gobbled our slices of tomato, cheese and dough, one of our “crew” came up with this insight:  “What cycling needs is a Michael Jordan.”

If my sense of history of accurate, Jordan had retired from basketball for the first time.  I don’t recall whether it was during his failed attempt at a career in baseball, which he said was always his first love in sports.  But even in his absence, Chicago Bulls #23 was, by far, the best-selling sports jersey in the world.  Kids were wearing it in France when I rode there later that summer, and a newspaper reported that he was the most popular athlete in that country.

I thought about my old cycling buddy’s insight  yesterday when I was listening to the radio news station and the sports reporter said that in a few days, the Yankees will start their first training camp in two decades without Derek Jeter.  Some would argue that he was the greatest baseball player of this generation.  (Even though I’m not a Yankee fan, I wouldn’t argue against that claim.)  He, like Jordan, “Magic” Johnson, MuhammadAli and Martina Navratilova, was one of those athletes known to people who aren’t even fans of his or her sport, or sports generally.  And, although neither basketball nor baseball is starving for fans in the US, I’m sure that the executives of the leagues in which they played—not to mention legions of marketers and advertisers—were glad that Jordan, Johnson, Ali, Navritalova and Jeter came along.

From Triangle Offense

As I thought about that, I thought about Lance Armstrong and realized I hadn’t heard much about him lately.  After his last Tour de France victory in 2005, he seemed poised to become, possibly, the first cyclist to transcend his sport, even if he didn’t dominate it in the way Eddy Mercx, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault  and Indurain did during their careers.  

(Even when they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, most European cycling fans agreed with such an assessment of Lance.  Although he won the Tour more often than the other riders I mentioned, he didn’t win, or even enter, many of the other races, including the “classics”, on which those other riders built their careers.)

Of course, part of the reason why he would have been a transcendent phenomenon was his “Lazarus” story.  Even before he confessed to doping, there were whispers that he faked his cancer (having known people who lived with and died from it, I don’t know how it’s possible to do such a thing) in order to lull his competition and create a media sensation.  But, even if he hadn’t gone from wondering whether he’d lived another day to leaving peloton wondering how far ahead of them he would finish, he probably would have gotten all of those offers he had for commercial endorsements.  I even think he would have been mentioned as a candidate for public office, as he was before his now-famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) with Oprah.  

What I’ve said in the previous paragraph makes sense when you realize that even before he won his first Tour, he was in demand as a motivational speaker.  Of course, some of that had to do with his bout with cancer, but even if he hadn’t faced such adversity, he would have been invited to give pep talks.  He’s not a great orator in the classic sense, but he is the sort of person to whom people would pay attention even if he weren’t so famous.  Although not necessarily loquacious, he’s articulate.  But, perhaps even more to the point, he is an intense and fiery personality who doesn’t have to tell a particularly compelling story or use florid language in order to capture the attention of his audience.  At least, that was the impression I took away from the one brief in-person encounter I had with him, and from the times I’ve seen him interviewed.

If Lance indeed consumed as many illicit pharmaceuticals as has been alleged, and if he bullied his teammates into doing the same, the story of his rise and fall is a sort of Faustian tragedy.  But his tumble from grace is also sad for cycling and its fans because it denied the sport its first universal household name.  For that reason, it will be a while before the early Spring Classics will generate as much attention in the US as the beginning of baseball’s Spring training season.

Election Day: My Endorsements Are At The End Of This Post

Today is Election Day here in the US.  I am not going to make any endorsements, but I think that if you've been reading this blog (or my other), you have a pretty good idea of who I would--and wouldn't vote for.

It's interesting, though, to see how bicycling has become, as it were, a campaign issue in some places.  In San Francisco, the Bicycle Coalition has a pretty detailed list of positions and endorsements on its website.  From what I've been reading, cycling and progressive mass transportation policies are very much on the minds of large numbers of voters in the City By The Bay.  I haven't been there in a while, but I can't say I'm surprised to read about such developments.

I've never been to Austin but, from what I know about it, I'm not surprised that cycling safety is also an important issue there on this election day.  Pedestrian safety is also a priority. I don't see much about mass transportation:  I can only guess that there isn't much of it--or, at least not as much as in cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York--there.  I am making such an assumption based on what I saw in my admittedly-limited time in other Texas cities.

Perhaps one of the cleverest attempts to use cycling to "get out the vote" is taking place in Denver.  B-cycle, the city's bike-sharing program, is waiving its one-day membership fee today. 

Being the cynical New Yorker that I am (ha, ha), I wonder whether some candidate is behind the freebie.  Even if that's the case, I still applaud the move.  A free bike share is better than a lot of other things politicians have given people whom they want to entice to vote for them.


Speaking of politicians and bicycles:  The 1946 Schwinn catalogue featured, among other things, a President-to-be and his first wife with Schwinn Continentals, "the only really fine lightweight bicycle made in America today".

Whatever you think of his politics, you've got to admit that very few people ever looked better with Continentals (which, at the time, had Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs) than Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.  In fact, those few included a couple of other Hollywood stars featured in that year's catalogue:

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall will always get my votes!