Ty-D-Bol Remembrances

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…


I am reading the obits in the alumni magazine of my undergraduate college. On the same page are obits for a medical doctor and an actor. The MD was the oldest living alumnus of the college. He got 15 lines.

The actor is noted for being “…the Ty-D-Bol man, wearing white pants and a captain’s blazer as he boated around the blue water in a toilet tank.” He got 19 lines, 4 more than the physician.

Nothing is said about either one of them every having a wife, raising children, comforting a friend, playing with a grandchild, contributing to a cause. They are remembered for being real old and wearing a blazer while boating in a toilet tank. This worries me, for I am getting old, and I was once a TV commercial actor.

I was Morgan P. Moneybags, the millionaire, as in “I’m not a millionaire, but I play one on TV.” [1] I wore a top hat and a tux and not only appeared in TV commercials but on the radio and in the newspaper and in parades and on the side of delivery trucks! I “drove” an MG convertible in one of the TV ads. I put “drove” in quotes because they couldn’t get the car to run, so the producer and director pushed it while I waved at the cameraman, who was working hard to keep the pushers out of the frame. [2]

We old folks know we won’t be remembered by many for very long, but we wonder still just how those few will remember us.

If you write my obit, it is okay to mention that I was once “the talent,” as TV directors refer to actors so they don’t have to treat us as persons, just as editors and publishers now refer to me only as a “content provider,” but please mention that I never wore a blue blazer while boating in a toilet tank.

JRMcF

1] Remember that ad for, I think, a headache remedy, where the guy says, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” and then goes on to talk about the product as though he’s a real doctor?

2] I gave the proceeds from my acting gig to a special research fund at the U of Iowa Children’s Hospital, where our grandson, Joseph, was treated for cancer. David Morrell, who was a young English prof at U of Iowa, working on his first novel, about a returned Vietnam vet named John Rambo, when I was a grad student there, gives the proceeds from his book, Fireflies, about his son, Matthew, who died of cancer in his early teens, to the same fund.

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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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