Enotes

James Garner was once asked if he'd ever do a nude scene on camera. "I don't do horror movies," he said. Rim shot. Garner, who died on Saturday at age 86, was a Hollywood leading man but a humble Oklahoman at heart. "I got into the business to put a roof over my head," he once said. "I wasn't looking for star status. I just wanted to keep working." And work he did, especially in the 1960s, when Garner was often teamed with the biggest female names in movies, such as Doris Day (Rock Hudson is more famously connected with Day, but Garner did his fair share with her as well), Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and Kim Novak. The film boom for Garner was set up by his work in TV's Maverick, in which he starred from 1957-60, playing old Western card shark and ladies man Bret Maverick. The show went toe-to-toe on Sunday nights with The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show, more than holding its own. If you were a casting director...

I'm beginning to think that the celebration of Fourth of July with fireworks is carrying on longer than the Revolutionary War itself. In our neighborhood, the pop-pop-pop of things with fuses starts in late-June and is still going on, and this is nearly a week after the 4th. Granted, the pace is slowing, but why are we still hearing things that go boom? If people still possess these firework-like items, what are they waiting for? Maybe I'm more sensitive to this because we have a dog, and he's not unlike many other canines who don't appreciate the rockets' red glare. Last night we set out for our evening stroll and just five minutes into it, something went boom and just like that, our pup was making a beeline for the house. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but do we need to hear the commotion (sometimes past 11:00 p.m.) for a three-week period? I could go into the accidents, some tragic, but that's piling on. It's unfair to take pot shots be...

Before the commercial airwaves on television were taken over by ads for prescription drugs, lawyers and car insurance companies, there was the wild and crazy pitchman. Every city had them. The products being pumped were usually electronics, appliances and used cars. The ads were low on productions costs---usually all we saw was the pitchman screaming into the camera with an occasional glimpse at what he was hawking. The emphasis was on the supposed insanity of the pitchman, because the deals were so good, you see. New York had Crazy Eddie, who pitched electronic gizmos while shrieking maniacally at the viewer. And Detroit had Ollie Fretter. Fretter, who passed away Sunday at age 91, blanketed the TV and radio ad space with commercials for his appliance store, starting in the 1960s and continuing for about 30 years. He promised five pounds of free coffee if he couldn't beat your best deal. The appliance wars in Detroit were hot in the 1970s and '80s. Fretter went...