And Now The Dear Boy Himself...

With those words, Arthur Treacher, usually drunk or overindulgent with those blasted fish and chips, would bring out Merv Griffin for another 90 minutes of engaging talk and entertainment.

All the news reports after Merv's death dwelled on the obvious. His Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune fame. The CBS talk shows. The real estate holdings. All the stuff that made me wish I was his other son.

But, what I remember most was that syndicated nightly gabfest that aired on Channel 5 (then owned by the enigmatic Metromedia company) when I was a kid.

I can't say I was riveted on a nightly basis, especially if it was baseball season and I was glued to the Mets on Channel 9 (owned by RKO, thank you very much). But, I can tell you that, on two levels of my Mount Vernon home, both my mother and grandmother (watching separately, of course) had their TVs tuned into Mervyn.

To say that show was easygoing and free form is an understatement. I always felt like I was eavesdropping on a dinner conversation at Sardi's. And, while Griffin certainly got some dynamite guests (JFK, Nixon, Judy Garland) for some long and engrossing dialogues, it was all those regular visitors who intrigued me. Primarily because I never saw them show up anyplace else on television. It was sort of a Sunday afternoon at my grandmother's. The doorbell would always ring around 1PM and some relative was popping in for the day. And some of those Griffin guests were about as recognizable as my grandmother's third cousin twice removed.

There was some Israeli singer named Aliza Kashi, who talked in broken England and then would sing as if she was a graduate of Oxford.

There was a Black comedian named Timmie Rogers, who would punctuate the end of every joke by exclaiming "Oh, Yeah!."

There was this married couple named Jack Douglas and Reiko. He was supposedly a comedy writer, but was grossly unfunny. The main laughs came from his Japanese wife, who also butchered the English language like an expert Samurai. Today, she might be working at a nail salon in Van Nuys.

A frequent guest was Totie Fields, who was the epitome of a Borscht Belt Jewish comedienne. She was on a lot, despite the fact that everytime she appeared she seemed to be missing another limb.

Merv's show was so freestyle that guests were instantly comfortable talking about anything. Or trying their hands at new endeavors. Apparently, Patty Duke was so damn at ease that she used this as a venue to try and become a teen singing star.

Throughout it all, Merv was the supreme host. Oddly enough, he died one year and two days to the date that Mike Douglas checked out. Those two guys formed my knowledge of the entertainment world and I guess I can blame them for the nagging trivial tidbits that keep ping ponging around inside my cranium. And, there was certainly no mystery about what they were like off-camera. You never ever heard a bad word about either one of them.

Of course, every time she won an Emmy for that inane barnyard chatter of a talk show, Fat Rosie would thank both Merv and Mike for the formats that she liberally copied. I was curious to see if Rosie had made an entry on her blog regarding Merv. Nope. She was alternating between pictures of her latest gay cruise and rants about the military draft. Indeed, Merv himself might have done either of those himself. But only in that quiet and classy solitude that was uniquely his.

If he could have only figured how Kramer got hold of his TV furniture...

Dinner last night: BLT at Barney's Beanery.