I wonder how many people can remember what they were doing on May 12, 1969, nearly 51 years ago now. It was a Monday, and the big news story that day was that our new President, Richard Nixon, was pressing Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas to resign from the court. (Fortas did, which gave Nixon the opportunity to appoint his successor.)

That night, at 8:00 PM on NBC-TV there aired a half-hour program called Anderson & Co. This was the season when summer replacement shows began (that was a thing back then), and young me assumed I was watching the first of a summer series, possibly something that would continue if it were popular enough. Alas, though I quite liked the show, this was the one and only airing of a failed TV pilot, and I would never get another chance to watch even this one episode, let alone more. But the fact that I still have fond memories of it fifty years later speaks well of the show, and I’m sorry it never got any farther along into production.

The show was set in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, and when it began I thought at first I was watching a TV adaptation of Life With Father. Even at the age of 11, I was already familiar with Clarence Day, though not familiar enough to know that Life With Father had already been adapted into a TV series before I was born (in 1953.)

Still, the creators of the show obviously were also familiar with Clarence Day and were cribbing from him. Anderson and Co. was about the owner of a fictional New York department store of the same name, Marshall Anderson, played by Fred Gwynne, previously the star of The Munsters, and before that, Car 54, Where Are You? Marshall Anderson had a wife, Augusta, and eight children, each of which had a name beginning with the letter A. And the joke here is that the large and boisterous Anderson family is a whole other Anderson & Co. It was meant to be a situation comedy, but if the tone of the pilot was any indication, it was going for quiet character humor, not slapstick and hijinks.

As far as I can remember, the plot of the pilot episode went like this: Augusta is out with her brood of children one day and finds she’s missing some trifle, so she makes an unplanned visit to her husband’s store, children in tow, but one of the children knocks something over, causing a commotion and drawing Mr. Anderson out of his office. He chews Augusta out publicly for not managing the children properly, and she leaves in a huff. Still lacking her trifle, she decides to take the children to the store of her husband’s arch-rival. It’s a Macy’s and Gimbel’s thing. I don’t remember the name of the competing store, so I’ll just call it “Smith’s.”

Anyway, she and the children are shopping in Smith’s, when this catches the eye of a newspaper photographer, who snaps a picture, which appears on the front page the following morning. “Hey, look! Mrs. Gimbel shops at Macy’s.” That kind of thing. Mr. Anderson has to pretend publicly not to mind, though privately he is furious with his wife. The story resolves very neatly when a few days later, a similar photo appears in the same paper, headlined “Mrs. Smith Returns the Favor.” It seems the Smiths were good sports, or else decided this was a great publicity gimmick, and sent Mrs. Smith and a photographer to recreate the earlier picture in reverse at Anderson & Co. Problem solved.

Anderson & Co. was created by Jean Holloway, a TV writer with a long career, most recently as a staff writer for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Gene Reynolds produced the show and directed the pilot. He would go on to great success as a producer for M*A*S*H. Child actor Teddy Eccles played one of the Anderson children, and would play the lead in the feature film adaptation of My Side of the Mountain, which was released just six weeks later. Eleven-year-old me was very jealous of Teddy Eccles, I can tell you that.

I regret that Anderson & Co. never got any farther. It might have turned out to be very successful. It had the right ingredients, and with Gene Reynolds at the helm with his trademark sly and bittersweet humor, who knows where it might have led? It seems strange to lament the failure of a half-hour sitcom pilot fifty years later. But this is what it’s like when you get old. You collect memories, like kids collect bugs or bottlecaps. Here’s an item from my collection I’m particularly fond of.

Vantha in 1981. This is how I want to remember him.

At the end of my previous post about the Cambodian family I had grown so attached to, they had moved to Seattle, and I figured I would never see them again. Three months later, I found myself embracing Vanthy in the Seattle bus station. A sudden death in the family, coupled with some unlikely transportation mix-ups, had left me alone in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes in life you end up in the place you need to be, not because you were brave and dedicated, not because you persevered against the odds, but because you were dragged there, kicking and screaming, through the most improbable set of circumstances.

The Ouks felt lonely in Seattle, and they were as excited about seeing me as I was about seeing them. Vanna and Vantha laughed as they told me about how they’d eaten hamburgers at every meal stop on their bus trip from Philadelphia, because, although they hated hamburgers, it was the only food they knew how to order in English.

The evening of my arrival at the Ouk home in Seattle, I was sitting on their couch amid a family gathering, when a boy I’d never seen before—he was fifteen years old, but from his size you would have guessed about twelve—plopped himself onto the couch beside me, dropped an open algebra book in my lap, and said, “Can you hop me?”

The Ouks I knew laughed at him for his presumption and his inelegant English. “Can you hop me?” they mocked. I helped him work through the algebra problem. His name was Sovatha, and he was a cousin of the Ouks, relocated to Seattle along with his mother. His father had died in the Holocaust.

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Vantha (l.) and Vanthy in 1981.

I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania when the Cambodian Holocaust took place, from 1975 to 1979, and the nightmare in that country filled me with an impotent outrage. I can’t explain why, even now. I’m not Cambodian myself; I’m Pennsylvania Dutch, and two more distant cultures are difficult to imagine. I didn’t know any Cambodians. I scarcely knew what a Cambodian was. All I knew was what I had read: that the Khmer Rouge insurgents who had seized control of that country in April of 1975 had turned the entire nation into a huge concentration camp. They allowed no foreigner to enter the country, no Cambodian to leave. They’d emptied the cities, forcing everyone into subsistence agriculture in the countryside. Cambodia had no motor vehicles, no post office, no television or radio, no schools, no doctors or hospitals. Just endless days of backbreaking labor in the fields under the burning sun and the watchful eye of the Khmer Rouge soldiers with their AK-47 rifles.

If you were too weak to work, they killed you. If you complained, they killed you. If you tried to eat anything more than the starvation rations they allotted, they killed you. If you had worked for the former government, they killed you. If you had an education, they killed you. If you knew how to read and write, or wore glasses, or knew how to drive a car, they killed you. And many more who weren’t killed starved to death.

Estimates of the number of victims were in the millions. All this information was available in the U.S. in the 1970s, if you knew where to look for it. I felt outrage at what was surely the worst crime since the Allies had shut down the Nazi death camps. And I felt impotence because no one around me seemed to care. In the late 1970s, the last thing Americans wanted to think about was Indochina. We spent far more time and attention debating whether disco was the best thing that had ever happened to popular music or the worst. Whether Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind had overshadowed George Lucas’s Star Wars, or vice versa.

Meanwhile, then Senator George McGovern, noted for his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, called for a United Nations force to invade Cambodia and oust the Khmer Rouge. Everyone laughed. “Now George McGovern wants to go to war in Indochina.” I thought he had a good idea.

In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. I remember trying to explain to one of my friends at Penn that this was a good thing. “But now the communists will be running the country,” she said.
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I’ve been thinking about The Book Mart lately. It was a bookstore on the corner of Sixth and Court Streets in Reading, PA from 1935 to 1998. When I was a kid, I practically haunted the place. It was the biggest and best bookstore in the area and during my adolescence was my private nirvana. I searched around recently and came up with the above picture, which was taken in the store on Boxing Day 1972, which was exactly the time I was hanging out there. (But I’m not in the picture.) It was in an old building, with linoleum floors that weren’t always level, funny lighting, and cluttered with old book racks stuffed to the ceilings with books. I loved the place.

And it had a science fiction section! And I was there so often the clerks knew me and knew my tastes and often had some newly published book ready to show me when I walked in. I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien at this store. Tolkien’s works were shelved with the science fiction in those days, because there was no such thing as a “fantasy” section in a bookstore in the 1970s. They bagged your books in heavy plastic bags with a cotton drawstring. The bags were printed with the slogan “Our bag is books.”

(For the benefit of you young people, that was because in the early 1970s, when you said something was your “bag,” that meant you were like, way into it, man. So they printed “Our bag is books” on the bags they put your books in. Get it?)

I was way into books. But in time, I moved, and later the store closed. A Vietnamese restaurant that I was fond of moved into the space, and that was great because I could still go there and look around the space. I would reconstruct in my mind how it looked when it was The Book Mart as I was chowing down on my fried frogs’ legs. It was great for me, but not so much for my dining companions, who would have to listen to me reminisce.

The restaurant recently moved to a new location, so as I write this the space is vacant, which makes me sad. It’s too much to hope for a bookstore, I guess, but I’m hoping some business moves in there soon. I want to go hang out there some more.