Steve Dalkowski, Fastest Pitcher Ever, Model for Nuke LaLoosh in "Bull Durham," Dies

Threw Hard, Lived Hard - Played Minor League Baseball in Kingsport and Later in Minors Pitched Against Kingsport's Charlie Leonard

Dalkowski pitching, or at least posing for a picture, in J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport in 1957. He played that season for the Kingsport Orioles. 

The headline in the Washington Post this morning jumped out at me: Steve Dalkowski had died.

I thought he had died years ago.

Steve Dalkowski is almost universally considered to have been the fastest pitcher who ever played baseball. He was the real life counterpart of Nuke LaLoosh in the movie “Bull Durham.”

Dalkowski’s minor league catcher Cal Ripken, Sr., who saw them all from Bob Feller to Nolan Ryan, said Dalkowski’s fastball was faster than any of them by far.

The official major league record belongs to Aroldis Chapman, who was timed at 105.1 in a 2010 game against the San Diego Padres.

Ripken said Dalkowski’s fastball was probably in the 110-115 range.

He would easily hold the record but for two things: there were no radar guns on the baseball diamond when he played (1957-`1965) and he never threw a single pitch in the big leagues. He could throw hard but he couldn’t control where the pitch was going. Just when he finally learned control, he blew out his arm in spring training 1963 on the verge of making the Baltimore Orioles team.

Dalkowski pitched hard but he also lived hard. And drank hard. Five years after his baseball career ended he was a migrant farm worker in California. There are many stories about him showing up at a minor league field where an old teammate was managing, begging change for his next bottle of cheap wine. That’s why I thought he was already dead.

There is a Kingsport connection, a big one. Dalkowski spent the 1957 season pitching for the Kingsport Orioles team in the Appalachian League. And he later played against Kingsport native Charlie Leonard in the Northern League.

I spent many mornings in a booth at the Jan-Mar, eating breakfast with Charlie and listening to him tell Dalkowski stories.

I could swap a few back, not from personal experience, but because I included a chapter about Dalkowski in my book “Why Is the Foul Pole Fair?”

But I was in awe listening to Charlie because he actually batted against Dalkowski. Charlie said he had no trouble with Dalkowski’s fastball. “Nobody could hit it but he couldn’t control it either.”

Charlie told me he batted against Dalkowski ten times when Charlie was with Grand Forks in the Northern League and Dalkowski was pitching for Aberdeen. “I walked nine times.”

Charlie says one of his teammates boasted that he could hit Dalkowski. “The first pitch it looked like a cartoon. The guy ducked so fast that his hat was still in the air and the ball went between his head and the hat!”

Kingsport Orioles in 1957 - Dalkowski is on first row, fourth from right.

Steven Louis Dalkowski Jr. spent the 1957 season in Kingsport, playing for the Orioles’ Appalachian League affiliate.

Among the things he is supposed to have done while pitching here:

While warming up, his pitches were so far astray of the plate one night that he plunked a fan who was standing in line for a hot dog.

He frequently threw a fastball so hard and so high that it tore through the screen behind home plate at J. Fred Johnson Stadium.

He once threw a pitch so hard, and so off target, that it tore the ear lobe off an opposing player. See clipping:

He once lost a no hitter because he walked 18 batters and threw six wild pitches. Another time he walked 21. 

His one season in Kingsport he struck out 121 and walked 129 in 62 innings. He finished the year with a dreadful 1-8 record and an equally dreadful 8.13 ERA and probably would have been demoted the next season except that Class D rookie ball was as low as you could go.

There were no radar guns in the fifties so we will never know exactly how fast Dalkowski threw. In 1959 when he was pitching for Aberdeen, South Dakota of the Northern League his manager Earl Weaver took him to the local Aberdeen Army Proving Grounds where military radar clocked his fastball at 98 mph. Of course he had pitched the previous night, throwing 150 pitches. He was throwing off flat ground, not a mound. And he had to throw for an hour before he finally got a pitch in the radar’s range. So throwing with a fatigued arm on flat ground he managed to hit almost 99 mph. On a real radar gun under ideal conditions he most assuredly could have hit 110 or 115.

Dalkowski injured his arm in spring training 1963 in one of those ironies of fate. He wasn’t pitching but fielding a Jim Bouton bunt and throwing to first when he heard a pop in his elbow. He missed that season. He returned in 1964 but his fastball didn’t and by 1966 he was out of baseball.

One more Dalkowski story from Charlie Leonard. During spring training in Bradenton, Florida with the Pirates, Charlie ventured into a local tavern one night. “Dalkowski was sitting at the bar so I went over and sat next to him. He was crying. He said, ‘I’ve got all this ability and I can’t do anything with it.’”

Dalkowski was 80 and had been in assisted living for 20 years since a stroke. 

A Monkey at the Homestead Hotel and Kingsport's First Dance Band

In 1953 a fresh-faced young reporter at the Kingsport Times named Mary Clement interviewed the innkeeper at the Kingsport Inn, Jim Welch (not the Jim Welch of Eastman), who told her about the perils of his profession, including the story of the monkey at the Homestead Hotel. (The Homestead and the Kingsport Inn were both owned at the time by the heirs of John B. Dennis, who had founded both. The Inn was Kingsport's luxury hotel; the Bumstead, er, the Homestead the economy inn.)

A few years later Mary would marry Alvin Kiss and as Mary Kiss her byline appeared in the Times News until the early nineties.

Here is that monkey tale:

The Monkey At The Homestead Hotel And Other Tales From the Hotel Trade

By MARY CLEMENT

Unhappy pet monkeys, missing bedspreads and stray safety razors are typical of the problems! which confront a hotel manager in his everyday work, says C. J. (Jim) Welch, young manager of the Kingsport Inn.

In his job, he performs services; never noted on a visitor's hotel bill, and may play the role of detective and diplomat as well.

Welch recalls an autumn a few years ago when an entire visiting team of burly football players from a famous southern university registered at his hotel in West Point, Miss., not far from Mississippi State College.

On the morning of the boys' scheduled departure, the worried hotel housekeeper appeared in Welch's office to report that the hotel's linen supply was alarmingly low.

Within the past few days the extra towels, sheets and washcloths had dwindled away gradually, leaving the linen closets practically bare,

Embarrassed, the housekeeper suggested the only possible solution, and the manager politely requested that the head coach ask the team members to open their suitcases.

Every bag, Welch relates, was stuffed with linens, including the missing towels and sheets, and even a few bedspreads, all of which had been destined for a new career in college dormitories.

After apologies from the coach, one of the players slyly suggested that the coach follow suit and display the contents of his luggage.

When the traveling bag was opened, the embarrassed trainer discovered neatly folded atop his shirts and socks an even wider array of hotel property, a contribution of the boys on the team.

Although most hotel guests aren't as enthusiastic in their souvenir collecting as were this group of ball players, Welch says a surprising number of linens vanish into the suitcases of departing hotel guests.

The Kingsport Inn, for instance, loses approximately $1,000 a year in missing towels alone.

"But there's not much we can do about it," he declares. "A towel costs 40 or 50 cents, but we can't go around opening our guests' luggage on their way out. If we did find hotel property in the bags, it would create ill feeling among the customers. And if we made a mistake, there'd be grounds for a lawsuit. So we usually just try to forget about it."

Hotel guests apparently leave almost as many articles as they take, however. Mrs. Loraine Leachman, housekeeper at the Inn, says almost anything may turn up in a hotel room after the visitor has checked out.

"Women hardly ever leave anything. But the men! We find razors most of all more than anything else. Sometimes we find  clocks and radios. Lots of people forget their plane tickets and then telephone back from the airport. And the other day we found an unopened can of beer.

"Once I found a man's gold wedding band, lying on the floor of the room. It was never called for."

Sometimes guests leave money. They place a billfold or purse under their pillow, or hide it inside the pillowcase, and then forget to retrieve it before leaving, Mrs. Leachman says.

Once a maid found a wallet bulging with bills—$500 worth - under a pillow, she recalls.

"She was so afraid to be alone with all that money that she made me stay in the room until she made the bed. It wasn't long until the owner came back and got the wallet."

One year General Bob Neyland's crack Tennessee football squad descended on Welch's hotel for a two-day stay before a game! with Mississippi State. Tennessee was heavily favored to win, and nobody was more surprised than the Vol team when Mississippi staged an upset and won with a score of 7-0,

Only then did Neyland discover that his boys had been in the care of an enthusiastic State fan. Welch had been graduated from the Mississippi college only a short time before. He laughingly admits that he did his best to squelch lightly veiled hints that the Vol team had been "sabotaged.”

Hotel guests' pets sometimes cause the manager a headache. Welch recalls a story from years ago at the Homestead Inn.

Hotel residents complained to the management that they were being disturbed by the sound of a baby crying somewhere in the building.

After a brief investigation, a troop of employees tracked the sobbing sounds to a room belonging to an out-of-town couple. The man and woman had turned in their key at the desk early in the morning and departed for the day, apparently leaving a small child alone in their room.

Armed with a passkey, the manager entered the room and was assailed by a small brown monkey which greeted him with a torrent of enthusiastic gibberish. He retreated hastily, leaving behind a disappointed little anthropoid, who resumed his crying and kept it up until the owners returned several hours later..

Once the famous fan dancer, Sally Rand, arrived at Welch's hotel and somehow managed to smuggle a tremendous dog into her suite, the hotel's best.

When Welch discovered the animal, he pointed out to Miss Rand that it was against state laws to quarter animals in hotel rooms.

The actress, however, refused to part with the dog, and the animal growled viciously whenever any of the hotel people approached. Maids were even afraid to go into the room to change the bed linens.

The "pet" remained as a nonpaying guest in the Rand suite until their departure a week later.

Welch came to Kingsport a year and a half ago as manager of the Kingsport Inn and the Homestead Hotel. A graduate of Mississippi State College, he managed hotels in West Point, Miss., and Lake Charles, La., before coming to Kingsport.  His attractive wife, Emily, serves as manager of the Inn dining room and as assistant hotel manager here. The couple have two children, a boy and a girl.

 Kingsport's First Dance Band, Maybe

Let’s keep dancing our way through the pandemic; let’s just switch to a different Kingsport band, the Chester Landes Orchestra, and a different kind of music, the dance music of the twenties.

Landes’ local group probably wasn’t Kingsport’s first dance band. But in the late twenties and early thirties it was certainly its most popular, playing, as the Kingsport Times of the time noted, “every cotillion club and social club dance.” The group even played at the introduction of the 1928 Ford at Tennessee Motors on Sullivan Street.

Landes’ day job was at Mead but on weekends he and his eight-piece orchestra helped early residents of the city cut a rug.

From 1927, when the combo got its first mention in the newspaper, until 1930, when Landes was transferred to Mead’s Chillicothe, Ohio plant, The Chester Landes Orchestra was Kingsport’s band of renown.

The Times identified the band members under a photo: “The personnel of the orchestra include Chester Landcs, piano; John Williams, saxophone; Roy Denning, tenor saxophone; Curtis Warner, trumpet; Albert Sharp, banjo; Dave Evans, sousaphone, Allen Gaines, traps, and Pinky Blevins, banjo.”

Landes was an interesting fellow. He was an early hire at Mead Paper, following graduation from Ohio State. He was promoted to an Ohio plant in 1930, then hired away by American Cyanamid in 1936, where he worked for the next two decades. He held patents in synthetic resins, paper and coatings. In 1958, when he was 54, he took a professorship at North Carolina State, teaching in the department of paper and pulp technology until he retired in 1972. He died in Asheville in 1998 at age 94. His obituary made no mention of his years as a band leader.

The Chester Landes Orchestra apparently made no recordings. I can’t find a mention of any.

They undoubtedly played the popular tunes of the time, songs like:

(Click on song title to play)

 Ain’t She Sweet, a song made popular by Gene Austin

My Blue Heaven, a hit for Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra

Flapperette by Nat Shilkret & The Victor Orchestra

Baby Face by Jan Garber and his Orchestra

Dance to the Music...

Let’s dance our way through the pandemic…dancing to the music of Kingsport’s two seminal rock era dance bands, the Scat Cats and the Monzas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPW9PEueMfM

First The Scat Cats performing “Something Is Wrong with My Baby” from their only album, a self-produced CD of a live performance from 1994.(The CD was released in 2010 and is hard to find.)

Now The Monzas performing their most famous song, “Stubborn Kinda Fellow”    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54zMEnYOvw

Now for a little history lesson about each band.

I moved back to Kingsport in the summer of 2002 and began writing a column for the Kingsport Times News that December.

I knew one of the first things I wanted to write about was the Scat Cats, the first local band I think I ever saw.

My high school biology lab partner Johnny King, who had moved back to town a few years earlier, got me the phone number for the Scat Cats drummer Donnie Flack.

In February 2003 I met Donnie in the parking lot of the Garden Basket, or what had once been the Garden Basket, and we sat on the hood of my car and talked for a good hour about the band he had played in for the past, at that time, forty years. Donnie brought along some handwritten notes about the band’s history. I supplemented that with a few clippings I dug out of the Times News archive and wrote my first column about the Scat Cats in February 2003.

The first mention of the group was a September 1958 ad in the Times News for a dance at the Civic Auditorium featuring “Sunny Sanders and the Scat Cats.”

The classified noted only three members: “vocalizing Sunny Sanders, Joe Manuel and Carolyn Rock.”

A couple of years later the Flack brothers, Donnie and Arthur, joined along with singer Kenny Springs.  

Donnie told me that in the early years, “We didn’t do a thing but play places in town. The Rollerdrome, I think it was called, this skating rink downtown. East Tennessee State, all the colleges, just about every high school. We did a lot of proms, VFW, Elks, the Teen Center we played quite a bit. I can’t think of a place we didn’t play.”

Donnie says that after the first year, “Then things really broke loose.”

After they opened for Ray Charles in Knoxville, a booking agent put together a two-week tour of the south with Johnny Nash, Lightning Hopkins and the Scat Cats. Donnie recalls, “The other guys were a lot older. Me and Arthur were playing in night clubs and we weren’t even supposed to be in night clubs.”

The tour wound up in Miami but Donnie says it was such a success “they did not want us to come home. We just had our pick of places to play.”

And they picked the Mary Elizabeth, a luxury hotel once famous in the jazz world for hosting Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Lena Horne. “Our club was open all day and all night and we did the night bar. This place drew everybody. All the stars and the performers came in after their shows.”

The Scat Cats were living high.

“There were these two guys lived on the top floor, singers. They were just starting. They didn’t have any records. When they would come back in from their shows, they could not wait to get on stage and sing with us. They had this little short bow-legged guy for a manager. ‘These guys need a good band,’ he told us. ‘They like you all; you’d make a good team.’ But the club owners told us to leave him alone, he was the biggest crook in town.”

So the Scat Cats turned the two singers down and returned to Kingsport. “It was about six months later they came to Johnson City to the Armory. We went to see them, me and my brother and Sonny to catch the show.”

The two guys the Scat Cats knew from Miami started their show off with “Soul Man,” followed it with “Hold On I’m Coming,” then continued with the rest of their hits.

“It was Sam and Dave. They seen us and they died laughing. They said, ‘We told you.’ Here we were back home not making any money and they had five or six hits. And that little bow-legged guy was still managing them. We made a mistake. We could have been their band. I told my brother we did a good one. We had a booking agent and they just told you where to go. If we’d had a manager, we probably would have been hooked up with them.”

But it wasn’t over for the Scat Cats. They kept playing in the area.

In the early seventies the Scat Cats traveled to Nashville for a recording session with Columbia Records. By now Manuel had left the group and Kenny Springs was singing lead. “Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins sat in on the recording,” Flack recalled. The result was the single “Walking in the Rain” and it was a pick hit in Billboard, landing the Scat Cats bookings up and down the east coast. They later recorded for Spot Records under the name Kenny Springs and the Scat Cats, releasing “Nobody Else But You” backed by “Let Nobody Love You.”

But bookings fell off, life went on. The Scat Cats stayed in touch.

Joe Manuel moved to Oakland, California and opened a package store. “He got shot and killed when some guys robbed him,” says Flack.

Sonny Sanders moved to Ohio. “He   had an accident working in a factory so he can’t play guitar anymore.”

Kenny Springs “had a son, Kenny Junior, they call him Scat. He’s got a band down in Nashville doing commercials. He sings just like his dad.”

Donnie and Arthur remained in Kingsport.

The Scat Cats story got back together in 2002: Donnie, Arthur, Kenny. “And we’ve added the Wells Brothers from Bluff City.”

The group played local gigs for five or so years.

What happened to all the members of The Scat Cats?

Joe Manuel died in 1976. In high school at Douglass he had been voted Most Popular, Best Looking and Best All Around. He was student director of the 40-voice Douglass Choral Club. He was also a basketball and football star.

Arthur Flack died in 2006. 

Kenny Springs died in 2007. His son, known as Scat Springs, became a recording artist in Nashville. And Scat’s daughter Kandace Springs is also a singer.  She appeared on the David Letterman show in 2014. She records for the legendary jazz label Blue Note.

Charles “Sonny” Sanders passed away in 2017 in Toledo, Ohio.

I still see Donnie around town.

And now The Monzas…

Around the same time the Scat Cats were getting going, another local band was also playing the Rollerdrome/prom/frat party circuit, the Monzas.

Jerry McIntosh once recounted for me the beginnings in early 1962. “Jack Ferrell and I had been classmates since fourth grade. We were in Chorus together back when it took a lot of guts to be a guy in Chorus. Jack and I were in Madrigals together. We were roommates at ETSU.”

The two were playing around in a practice room at ETSU. “Al Wilkes came up and said he wanted to put a band together.”

Jerry and Jack were already performing with Jerry Ervin in a group tentatively called the Three J’s so they included Ervin in their new band.

“I’m the Pete Best of the Monzas,” said Ervin, a reference to the original drummer in the Beatles who dropped out before they became famous. “I had to move on. The military called.”

But they kept adding members – and subtracting one, when Ervin joined the service – until they were seven strong. They needed a new name – they weren’t just three J’s now - and they got that from drummer Phil Mullins who had a Chevy Monza. “All the other car names were taken,” said McIntosh.

 And thus was born The Monzas.

The first lineup also included Bobby Cooper, Jim Lane and Mullins.

Ervin remembered, “We first played in the D.E. room at Dobyns-Bennett. Then later we played a Coke Party at the State Theater.”

And then Ervin left. And at first that didn’t seem like such a bad move. In the early days The Monzas were not exactly flush with success. “We had to play in places with upright pianos with cigarette burns,” recalled McIntosh. “We used homemade amps. Our PA was a Rockola jukebox. We were playing a frat party at Georgia and one of the frat guys saw the Rockola amp and said, ‘What’s the name of this seedy band?’”

But slowly things started picking up. They went from playing proms and Teen Center dances to gigs at The Spot on the Gate City-Hiltons Road and on to engagements at Daytona Beach, Myrtle Beach and colleges all over the south.

They even got to open for Jerry Lee Lewis. Another late era Monza, Danny Lewis, remembered, “He had a quart of whisky and an iced tea glass. He poured a drink, then poured another. He walked out on stage with that same glass full. He threw the bottle away, sipped the drink, played a few chords, then stood up, kicked the stool back and became the Killer.”

Lewis described himself as “The Last Monza.” “A year or so after I joined the Monzas, we changed our name.”

In later years the lineup included various and sundry combinations of the original seven as well as Bob Lewis, Denny Coffey, David Riggs, David Roberts, Tom Richmond, Roland Boles and Danny Lewis. There were also two girl singers over the years, Brenda Seal and Kathy Bell.

The late great Al Wilkes, who was my homeroom teacher and my basketball coach at D-B, told me there were two highlights in the Monzas hey-day: “We were a Pick to Click three straight weeks on WLS (the rock radio giant in Chicago) and in 1965, when ‘Hang On Sloopy’ was number two at the beach, our recording of ‘Stubborn Kinda Fellow’ was number one.”

More music...

The Scat Cats sing "Nobody Else But You." Click here.

The Monzas sing "You Know You Turn Me On." Click here.

Oh No...Not Another List of Shows To Watch While Self Isolating 

Bet 'This Is the Only One with a Polish Crime Drama About a Newspaperman and a Cub Reporter. 

Andrzej Seweryn and Dawid Ogrodnik (Please don't take off points for spelling)

A Very Eccentric Watchlist From A Perfectly Normal Person

They are everywhere, “helpful” lists of movies and TV shows for you to watch during these dark days – actually it’s sunny and 71 right now in Knoxville – okay, these days of self quarantine.

Just surfing my iPad this morning I found: TV Shows And Movies To Watch This Week While Self Isolating (Glamour magazine), 5 Shows To Stream Now That You Finished The Great British Baking Show (New York Times), 12 Family Friendly Nature Documentaries (New York Times), The 18 Best TV Shows For Vicarious Travel Thrills (again The New York Times), , What To Stream - 40 Of The Best Movies On Netflix Right Now (The New Yorker).

There’s no shortage of helpful watchlists.

I know all about writing these kinds of stories. I probably wrote a hundred of them during my 30 years reviewing TV, movies and home video for everyone from the New York Daily News to the Dayton Daily News to the Louisville Courier Journal.

(Many times over the years I was challenged by folks who vehemently disagreed with my assessments. “What are your credentials for being a critic?” they would argue. And I would always give the same answer: “I have the job.”)

So I have a little experience with recommending.

I could just dig through my files and post my stories about 12 Sweatiest Movies and 13 Great Ape Movies and 5 Movies with Great Car Chase Scenes.

Instead I went through my Recently Viewed Lists on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Acorn and Hulu (Hulu came free with my phone) and picked out the shows I enjoyed the most. They are listed in no particular order. And I’m not including any of the usual suspects: Cheers, The Office, The Irishman. You can find those on other lists.

You will notice a slant toward crime dramas, particularly British police procedurals. The remote wants what the remote wants.

(One Caution: These recommendations are provided for entertainment purposes only. Writer assumes no liability.)

Here they are…

Man Hunt - Based on a true story from the early 2000s in London, it stars Martin Clunes as the supervising detective on the trail of a serial killer. Clunes looks like your least favorite college professor. This is my favorite of the last few months.

The Mire – Drop this title into the conversation the next time you go to a cocktail party, whether in 2021 or 2022. I’ll bet no one else at the party will have watched a Polish crime drama. It is the story of a world-weary newspaper man (is there any other kind, in film or in the real world) and his bright-eyed and bushy-tailed cub reporter protégé (also is there any other kind). It’s set in 80s Poland but it seems like the 60s in America. I love all the manual typewriters and ash trays, you know, the good old days of newspapers.

The Americans – Sticking with the 80s, this spy drama focuses on a married couple from Russia embedded in Falls Church, Virginia. Spycraft was very different before surveillance cameras and the internet. They actually use drops, hiding secret communications behind a wrought iron fence.

Hinterland – Police procedural set in Aberystwyth, Wales, and yes that town name may have a typo or two in it. Flawed police detective solves crimes. Three seasons that wrap up nicely. It’s in English not Welch so you don’t have to learn a new language just for one show.

Broadchurch – Another British police procedural starring a flawed police detective. Set in a fictional seaside town in Dorset. I really enjoyed the first two seasons; the third, not so much.

Prime Suspect – The grandmum of British police procedurals with Helen Mirren as the DCI Mum. Everybody smokes.

Tennison – The prequel to Prime Suspect features a great cast of character actors. I like it almost as much as the original; most people don’t.

George Gently – Set in the sixties, which means everyone smokes, Inspector George is not so gentle, particularly with this Beatle-haired protégé John Bacchus. In an episode I watched last night he slapped a suspect for his insolence.

Foyle’s War – An inspector who can’t drive so he is assigned a very odd soldier chauffeur. The War of the title is WWII.

Endeavour – The prequel to Inspector Morse, which was followed by Inspector Lewis. The title character is a young Morse. I highly recommend all three series.

Fargo – A very odd series based on a very odd movie. Love Minnesota and Minnesotans so I love this series. I’ve only watched the first season. I can only take so much weirdness at a time.

Silent Witness – For my doctor friends this British crime drama follows a team of forensic pathologists as they dissect crime victims – just keep telling yourself, “It’s all blood by Revlon.” Many was the night I had to turn my head. And in fact I bailed before the final seasons. I like the years with Emelia Fox, daughter of legendary actor Edward Fox, the best.

Rockford Files – My favorite private detective. Jimmy, his dad Rocky, his sleazeball friend Angel and his girlfriend/lawyer Beth Davenport are always entertaining. Rockford was the first detective who would get in a fist fight and come out shaking his hand because it hurt from hitting the bad guy. Years ago I thought I might write a book about the show and even landed an interview with the elusive producer Meta Rosenberg, who was publicity shy. She told me she had been Raymond Chandler’s secretary when she first came to Los Angeles. And that Juanita Bartlett, the writer on many Rockford episodes, had started out as her secretary. I never got around to the book but somewhere around here I have a tape recording of Meta Rosenberg.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – Much acclaimed comedy loosely based on the  early career of Joan Rivers. Lots of fun historical references including appearances by Lenny Bruce.

Homeland (seasons 1 and 2) – Spycraft in the age of terrorism. I love the first two seasons but after that the series falls off the tracks.

Bosch – World weary L.A. police detective Harry (real name Hieronymus) Bosch fights crime and his superiors. Yes, most TV detectives are world weary.

Patriot – Father-son spies. You don’t hear much about this show but I enjoyed it.

Schitt’s Creek – Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara are a formerly rich couple suddenly stranded in a motel in Podunk. Very funny.

The Worricker Trilogy – Essentially three movies gathered under an umbrella title. Written by David Hare (British playwright; you’ve either heard of him or you haven’t). It’s spies, it’s politics, it’s allegations against the Prime Minister and it’s Turks and Caicos.

Catch 22 – You read the book, you wondered how it could ever be filmed. A good try here in this six-episode series.

I accept no responsibility if you hate every one of these shows. My advice is free which is list price.