On the ground level of our building was a little sundries shop that also had a tiny counter manned by a short-order cook who was known, accurately, as Fat Jack. He was our dinner chef. We arrived home so exhausted that we counted on Fat Jack to whip us up some omelets or toasted sandwiches. He was a garrulous, salt-of-the-oyth Noo Yawk guy who had moved south, and—bonus points!—he knew sports. It was so soothing for me to spend the end of the day in his and Dad’s company, talking about the Miami Dolphins as that sleepy feeling descended. After dinner, it was up the elevator to our apartment for a run-through of the next day’s lines, followed by a bath and bedtime.
GENTLE BEN MARKED a fulfilling time for Dad as much as me. Ivan Tors and Ricou Browning valued him as a writer as well as an actor, having Dad write five episodes of the show. One, “Ben the Champ,” has Ben briefly become a pro wrestler—a nod to his sons’ love of the fake sport. Another Rance Howard–written episode, “Flapjack for Breakfast,” was conspicuously plot-heavy for the Henry Boomhauer character. Can you blame him? Actors are always trying to give themselves more material to chew on.
The Boomhauer character drove a vehicle that on the show was called a swamp buggy but was, in effect, a pared-down monster truck. So when I wasn’t blasting around with Dennis or by myself on the show’s awesome airboat—watch Gentle Ben’s opening credits on YouTube, you won’t be disappointed—I was joyriding with Dad in the buggy. Oh, and Ivan Tors loved having celebrity guests on the show, so I got to act with the St. Louis Cardinals pitching great Bob Gibson. In that episode, Gibson was in Florida for a fishing vacation prior to spring training when his little boat swamped. Dennis’s character happened to be in the neighborhood and rushed in to save him. In gratitude, Gibson offered young Mark Wedloe, a Little League pitcher, some private coaching sessions. It was a lesson in morality: Mark was resorting to unsportsmanlike tricks, such as looking to the sky to distract the batter and then throwing a quick pitch for a strikeout. Bob set Mark straight. The Gentle Ben writers really made out Mark to be a greedy, selfish little asshole. But in this instance I didn’t complain. I was an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s hanging with one of the game’s greats. Another episode featured the great Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr. I was in paradise.
A very humid paradise, however. That was the one thing that really took some getting used to, despite my having grown up in Southern California. To live and work in South Florida was to exist in a constant state of totally drenched sweatiness. And Dad had a certain peculiarity: a deep aversion to air-conditioning. He had grown up on a farm and considered air-conditioning to be an invention for the weak.
He was also primarily concerned for my health. In his view, shuttling between an air-conditioned dressing room and 90-degree weather with high humidity would be a recipe for disaster. He was probably right. He never turned on the air-conditioning in our apartment; he just opened the windows. And he forbade the Gentle Ben people from firing up the air-conditioning in our dressing room in the show’s honeywagon.
A honeywagon is a long trailer that movie and TV productions use when they are shooting on location. It contains dressing rooms for the cast and a couple of bathrooms, men’s and women’s. I don’t know why they are called honeywagons, because they usually smell like shit, and those little cubicles that we had for dressing rooms got really, really hot. Beth Brickell availed herself of the honeywagon’s AC, and so did Dennis Weaver, the environmentalist and health nut. But Rance and Clint Howard? Never. A fan and an open window would suffice. Nowadays I am the first guy to turn on the air-conditioning—I don’t share Dad’s philosophy. But it did help me acclimate to working in those conditions.
The show learned its own lesson about the perils of air-conditioning thanks to its marquee star, Bruno. South Florida is not an ideal climate for a black bear with thick fur. When we returned for the second season, having done well in our first, everyone had received a raise. In Bruno’s case, this translated into a new dressing room that Ivan had custom-built for him, complete with, yes, air-conditioning. They basically took a flatbed truck and put a huge, climate-controlled box on it, so that Bruno would be comfortable during his breaks.