Grabbing Bobby

I was seven years old when I made the fearsome decision to kidnap singer, actor, and pop-sensation Bobby Sherman and take him up to my bedroom, paste him into my scrapbook, title the page My Hero, and stash him in my dresser drawer under lots of clothes so my twin brother couldn’t find him. I had ripped his centerfold out of my sister’s teeny-bopper magazine without her knowledge. Once back in my bedroom I quickly closed the door to admire him in private. Somehow, despite the age difference, we connected right then and there. I left him in the scrapbook for a long time until I was old enough to be embarrassed that I even had a scrapbook and that his picture was on the first page.

I made the same connection with Johnny Tremain, the lead character in the Revolutionary war novel bearing his name. In the story, Johnny is a silversmith apprentice for Paul Revere and thus is privy to all kinds of intrigue sparked by the Sons of Liberty. He gets to live smack-dab in the middle of one of the most momentous periods in American history and meets the leading patriots like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren. I was so completely captivated by his life that I spent countless daydreaming hours trying to devise a way to build a time machine that could transport me back to Boston to join him in all the scheming. My eventual goal was to end up on Lexington Green with a musket in my hands in the pre-dawn of April 19, 1775.

Over the formative years of my life I made lots of emotional connections with other men. (*A partial list of those men and the shows in which they were featured is the last paragraph of this post.) I didn’t seem to be stymied by the realization that none of these men were my age and they were all unreachable except through the medium of film or television. The majority of these men lived heroic lives, especially those living in the wild West or those who were involved with war or espionage. A few were effortlessly debonair, others were passionately amorous, and still others were just plain funny. All of them impressed me, and for the thirty or sixty minutes they were in front of me on any given evening, I wanted to be just like them.

Together these actors defined for me what masculinity should look like when I got older and identified the roles society would find to be most attractive. Excluded from the assortment of portrayed professions were clergy, farmers, machinists, academics, artists, writers, and hundreds of other vocations not worth depicting on any screen. It didn’t concern me that my interests were narrowly focused on the heroic and adventuresome, and it never entered my mind that my father, an attorney, could be daring or carefree.

Of course, youthful enrapturement slowly gave way to age. All these celluloid infatuations faded, unable to stand the test of time and the intrusion of other more mature endeavors. I understood soon enough that I would never be a cowboy, a battalion leader, or a spy regardless of how much I admired these fictional characters. Looking back, I have to admit these weren’t impossible pursuits, but somehow along my arc they became unattainable. I suppose the whole notion of feasibility came into play as I pondered my future. Then again, maybe I carved out the shortest, easiest path to peace and security and left the adventures to others more capable or reckless.

This post represents the run-up to three future posts that will focus on the men I’ve really loved in my life: Francesco, Adrian, and Bill - men now long gone but who are never far from a fond memory. These are stories I’ll tell carefully because, as is so often the case with reliving the past, what’s left unsaid can take on a misguided voice of its own in the ears of those who believe truth can be mined from nothing. I connected with those men for a brief season and each left an indelible imprint on my soul.

[*Franco Nero Camelot; Ryan O’Neal Love Story; Michael Landon Bonanza; Rick Jason Combat; Peter Graves Mission Impossible; Tony Dow Leave it to Beaver; Bob Crane Hogan’s Heroes; David Janssen The Fugitive; Barry Williams The Brady Bunch; Davy Jones The Monkees; David McCallum & Robert Vaughn The Man from UNCLE; Kent McCord Adam 12; Luke Halpin Flipper; James Brolin Marcus Welby, MD; Lee Majors The Big Valley & The Six Million Dollar Man; James Garner Maverick; Roy Rogers The Roy Rogers Show; Fess Parker Daniel Boone; Don Grady My Three Sons; Ron Ely Tarzan; Robert Culp I Spy; Bill Bixby The Incredible Hulk; Van William The Green Hornet; Christopher George The Rat Patrol; Bobby Sherman Here Come the Brides; Clint Eastwood Rawhide; William Shatner Star Trek; Erik Estrada CHIPs; Patrick Duffy Dallas; John Schneider Dukes of Hazard; Henry Winkler Happy Days; David Cassidy The Partridge Family; Ben Murphy Alias Smith and Jones; Dak Rambo The Guns of Will Sonnett; James Franciscus Longstreet; Randolph Mantooth Emergency; Robert Fuller Wagon Train; Michael Ontkean The Rookies & Making Love; Robert Conrad Baa Baa Black Sheep; John Ritter Three’s Company; Dirk Benedict The A Team; Robert Wagner Hart to Hart; Graham Faulkner Brother Sun Sister Moon; Richard Chamberlain Dr. Kildare & The Thorn Birds.]