Most of all, I remember Mama...

On April 10, 1910 -- one hundred and one years ago yesterday -- my mother was born in the borough of Jenkintown in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Thirty-one years after that, she gave birth to me, and sixteen years after that, on October 4, 1957, she died.

One of the things our family did every week from 1949 until 1957 was gather around our little Philco television set (12-inch screen, three channels, black-and-white pictures only) on Friday nights and watch a program called Mama. Please do not confuse it with Mama’s Family starring Vicki Lawrence, which didn’t come along until decades later. (It would be difficult to confuse the two programs; they could not have been more different.)

Mama starred actress Peggy Wood, who probably is remembered chiefly nowadays for her role as the Mother Abbess who sang “Climb Every Mountain” in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. The television program Mama was based on a 1944 play by John Van Druten called I Remember Mama that ran for 713 performances in New York and included Marlon Brando in a supporting role in his Broadway debut. The play, which was made into a 1948 film starring Irene Dunne and a very young Barbara Bel Geddes, had been based on a book called Mama’s Bank Account by Kathryn Forbes.

This particular Mama’s family lived in a Norwegian-immigrant community in San Francisco around 1910. There was “little sister Dagmar” and “big brother Nels” (played by the then very young Dick Van Patten who later played the father in the TV series Eight Is Enough) and, of course, “Papa” (played by Judson Laird). But most of all, most of all when Kathryn (the narrator) would think back to those days so long ago, most of all, she remembered Mama.

Mama was one of my mother’s favorite television programs, and it became one of mine. Television was different in those days before Dancing With The Stars and American Idol and Desperate Housewives and Celebrity Apprentice, not to mention all the stuff available on cable and satellite. Mama seems quaint today, almost like local community theater, and nothing at all like what today’s audiences crave. In spite of the many inventions and improvements and medical advances that have taken place, I think that our society as a whole and the individual family in particular are not better off as a result of the changes in what passes for entertainment.

In 1957 the days were simpler, quieter. Mama didn’t have a laugh track or a studio audience or even very many commercials. In fact, in the entire half-hour programs there were only two commercials, one at the beginning and one at the end. The days depicted, those even-earlier days of 1910, were quieter still, simpler still. And they were something else, too. They were sweeter.

Below is an early episode of Mama from 1950. Although the children are all quite Americanized, the adults speak with Norwegian accents (“Make yourself at home, Yenny; I’ll be with you in a yiffy”). No one was more surprised than I to hear Peggy Wood speak without that accent in The Sound Of Music. It ranks right up there with my surprise at discovering that Jean Stapleton’s natural voice is a whole octave lower than the voice she used in her role as Edith Bunker on All in the Family.

I realize that there is no fool like an old fool, but cut me a little slack during my mother's birthday week and let us all now hearken back to the days of 1910 as seen through the eyes of 1950. Let us all say a prayer for what has happened to our society.

And even if she is nothing at all like your own mother or mine (although I’ll bet she may resemble her more than you suspect), let us all remember Mama (28:55).