Readers and writers blog

I never got a chance to tell Tony Randall what I really wanted to say, and so he hurried through a perfunctory answer to my perfunctory question and turned away before I could say anything else.

I felt like an idiot, which I was, but not for the reason most fans are idiots.

You know, for a print journalist who in 38 years never worked for big newspapers and didn’t win big awards, I met a lot of celebrities. Including face-to-face meetings with four of our last six presidents.

I’m not trying to impress you. Because it wasn’t due to any particular skill or importance of my own. Some of the meetings were happenstance, but most of them were because I worked in places where public figures congregate — specifically, New Hampshire and Maine.

Having worked for two of New Hampshire’s seven daily newspapers, I can tell you that national politicians are easy to find every four years — that is, before the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Of course, you can’t find them after the primary.

“Do you want to talk to Jimmy Carter,” said a head craning into the doorway of the Valley News bureau in Claremont, N.H., in February 1976. “Not particularly,” I told the advance man. I was alone in the office and busy. “Oh, all right, come on in.”

We had a polite conversation, much of which I didn’t catch because of Carter’s then-thick Georgia accent, but the conversation never made the paper, anyway. Because the story was that he went on that afternoon to the local high school for a student assembly where, even though most of them didn’t understand him either, they loved him. In the post-Nixon days, an honest face was welcome. Later that month, Carter won the New Hampshire primary.

I met both Bushes in 1980 at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, when I worked for the Portland Press Herald. The elder Bush, running that year for president, was charming and gentlemanly. His son, on the other hand, treated reporters with an imperious, nasty temper.

Bill Clinton I met in Georgia in early 1992 when I was working for the Savannah Morning News and went to one of his campaign rallies. Clinton, I told a companion, could easily win the Democratic nomination, “but he’d get killed in the general election.”

Perceptive, huh?

I also met celebrity entertainers. Ask me sometime about my dinner with Pavarotti. I know, no one but a few family members believes it, either. But it was when, like many of the politicians visiting New Hampshire, he wasn’t famous.

Short version: In 1972, I was writing features for a college arts center in New Hampshire where Pavarotti was to appear. He showed up on a small plane, joined a few of us for dinner, then we went to the auditorium. When he sang the first note, the audience’s jaws dropped collectively to its chests. A few days later, he got a record 17 curtain calls at the Met.

But Tony Randall wasn’t just a celebrity to me. He was a hero. Not for “The Odd Couple” or any of his movies. No, it was a 1952 TV show called “Mr. Peepers.”

That was a bad summer for me. I was 12, and the hormones were raging. I was depressed. I was anxious. I was convinced I was going insane or maybe going to die. I lived from day to day, looking for anything to soothe me. And then came “Mr. Peepers,” a summer replacement show that I fell in love with — a quiet science teacher played by Wally Cox and his smart-guy pal, fellow teacher Harvey Weskit, played by Randall.

That gave me Thursday nights to live for. Other positive things followed over the next few years, and I eventually realized I was going neither crazy nor to my death. But that show was the first positive thing that summer.

I met Randall only five years ago in Poughkeepsie where he was a guest speaker. My wife, Bonnie, had interviewed him by phone for a story she did for our newspaper, and she met him after his appearance and introduced me.

I started to tell him how I worshipped him when I was 12. Then I realized that in 1952, he already was an adult in his 30s. Now Tony Randall always looked younger than he was, and I, once prematurely and now just gray, have always looked older than I am. I couldn’t tell him that someone who looked older than him had idolized him as a 12-year-old.

So instead, I told him I couldn’t remember who played Mrs. Gurney on that show, even though I knew full well that it was Marion Lorne.

“Marion Lorne,” he said, then turned away. Another dumb fan.

He died the next year. So, Tony Randall, wherever you are, I want to thank you. Because 56 years ago, you helped save my life.

– Sid Leavitt