Another Stroll Down Memory Lane

I see that Adam West has passed away. I’m sorry to hear of his passing. From everything I’ve read, he was a really nice guy, which is always comforting to hear about one of your childhood heroes.

I was about ten years old when the Batman TV show was on, and I, like most sane ten year olds, thought it was the most awesome show ever to be on TV. But my viewing pleasure was slightly handicapped back then.

First of all we only had a black and white TV. It wasn’t until the Batman movie came out that I realized how even more awesome it looked in color. It’s not that I got to see the movie in the theaters. I only had the opportunity to glimpse it from afar when, on a family trip home from the mall one night, Dad pulled the station wagon over on the side of the highway, so I could watch a minute or two of it on a drive-in movie screen which was about a half a mile away.

The other thing that handicapped me was that this show was on during Dad’s thankfully short lived, “No TV on a School Night” phase. While that phase was short lived, it was enough to severely cramp my viewing pleasure - especially for a show like this. Unlike maybe every other show in history, Batman was on two nights a week - Wednesdays and Thursdays. Wednesday’s show ended in a cliffhanger with the exciting conclusion to be wrapped up the following night. On those occasions where Dad buckled in from my incessant pleading and let me watch a show, it was invariably the Wednesday night episode I got to watch. But that was it. For me, the exciting conclusion would have to be wrapped up by listening from the outskirts to the breathless recounting of the episodes by my fellow inmates in the schoolyard of the Harris State Penitentiary.

And speaking of the Penitentiary, I remember having one of those cool rubber Batman rings which I got from a gumball machine. I made the mistake of wearing it one day, at lunch time. Big mistake. I was sitting on the “Cold Lunch” side of the cafeteria, trying my best to blend in with the faceless masses, when I was spotted by one of the guards (Mrs. Moynahan, as I recall.) She came over, put down her billy club, and asked me for my ring (because, obviously, it was causing a major disruption in the enforced fear and silence of the lunch room.) I handed over the contraband and she then proceeded to put on my ring and walk around the cafeteria, mocking both me, and my ring.  Ah, good times! Another hard learned lesson about the dangers of being an individual.

Anyway, despite that all of that, I have fond memories of the show and of those times - outside of the penitentiary, that is. And, it really was a pretty cool ring, especially if you were only ten years old.