I was somewhere not terribly north or south of 10 when I heard my first episodes of "MASH." My bedroom was downstairs, where my parents went in the evenings to relax after a long day of having (as opposed to giving birth to, that process having been completed for the last of us some years before) four children.
My pillow was on the wall farthest from the wall on the other side of which contained the device that entertained my parents nightly. So the voices were muffled. I recall a stern voice -- probably Harry Morgan's, though the show lampooned military leadership enough that it could have been any number of beleaguered, deliberately clueless generals.
Given such noise, of course, and the general lack of any need for sleep until around 4 a.m., I made excuse after excuse to leave my room and see what was going on. To get a drink. To see if I had done my homework. Whatever.
And let's face it -- "go back to bed" becomes less effective each time it's said the same way.
Five years later (give or take a bit), I was in my junior year of high school and we were going to watch "Inherit the Wind." The teacher said some of us might recognize Col. Potter from "MASH" as the judge.
Suddenly, those trips to get water, when I had a perfectly good bathroom adjacent to my room from which to get the stuff, became vital. I recognized Sherman T. Potter. I had a connection to my home — 483 miles away geographically, decades and degrees of separation away via this movie and Harry Morgan's roles in it and "MASH."
That is my first clear memory of the man.
My high school television watching was generally limited to sports and Sunday evening cartoons. "MASH" was not an option. And in my first few years of college, I got about as much of the show as I'd gotten before.
Then I moved -- got engaged, moved across the state, suddenly had my life sort of to myself, after a fashion -- and the TV was mine for a giant pile of time. And so began among the most important parts of my education, in half-hour segments.
I cannot separate "MASH" from Sherman Potter, and I cannot separate Sherman Potter from Harry Morgan, and I don't have to, so there's no need to. As far as I will ever care, Sherman Potter lived through Harry Morgan, and Harry Morgan lives through Sherman Potter.
And Harry Morgan and Sherman Potter are, after all, the same person, after a fashion. See, I look at Harry Morgan (he's Harry Morgan, not Harry) and -- I mean this as sincerely as I've meant anything, including "I do" -- he's not acting. He's playing himself. With each of the other people on the show, he acts like someone who is in turns their friend, their leader, their advocate, their judge and jury, ... the person they need him to be, even if they don't like it.
He is, in short, the father they need while they're away from the father they have (Hawkeye) or had (Radar) or the father they need because they are not close to their father (Winchester).
And I was 21, engaged, living with the girl and her mother, and absolutely not an adult except chronologically. And my father was now again more than 400 miles away and in no condition to drive down to see me.
So I watched "MASH" and learned about responsibility from Sherman Potter.
The most important lesson I learned from "MASH" helped remove from me some of my elitism.
Early after Radar left ("I just got a wire from the boy's mother in Iowa. Radar's Uncle Ed passed away."), Klinger was company clerk. It was not going well. He was doing about as well as you'd expect for someone stepping into someone else's system, designed by that person and playing to that person's strengths.
Sherman was not interested in excuses. He was interested in failings. As a CO, he was acting like Klinger should be able to do the job from day one. As a father, he missed Radar and was taking it out on Klinger.
Along came the hospital priest with a story of another company clerk who had been absolutely horrible in the beginning. A 25-minute story made short, Sherman learned that as Radar got to make the job his, so must Klinger get to make the job his. The solution comes not from Sherman and his decades of military experience but from an Army captain -- albeit one (a priest) who spent significant parts of many episodes helping people understand their problems and solve them. Father Mulcahy is not regular Army, and he's not trying to be. He's trying to be what people need.
The analogy was and is imperfect, but the importance of giving people a chance to get comfortable and the importance of giving due footing to people of lower rank was vital to the survival of an elitist in coal and tobacco country.
I had grown up half an hour from Washington. I was bilingual -- worse, in French, seen in many places as a snooty language. And I had been conditioned to be different on purpose.
And now I would have to get by in a place where the things I was good at were valued only rarely and most of the things I disdained were all around me and didn't give two unripened figs (rather unappealing food) how much I objected. I was bloody well going to have to learn to put up with a lot of crap.
I don't remember when I first saw that episode. The change wasn't overnight. The realization wasn't immediate. But while I am still a terrible elitist, I now get paid to be one -- and I can put up with basically anyone.
Seeing Sherman deal with the transition from Radar as company clerk to Klinger in the spot helped me deal with what was another world.
Seeing Sherman deal with the death of the last of his friends from another world -- and another war -- helped me, in retrospect, deal with the finality of moving away from home for the first time as an adult and, so far, the last time at all.
The episode focuses most obviously on the passage of time and the opportunities and pitfalls they present us. For Sherman, though, it focuses quietly and humbly on the loss of a life and control in two painful senses -- Sherman's life in World War I and his friends, scattered hither and thither, now memories with the promise they made.
To borrow from an old Shakespeare professor, in the episode, we are invited to imagine having grown up in the Midwest, or wherever we were that was far from France, and then going off to war at a relatively young age, and then acclimating ourselves to that experience, and then shuttling off here and there and finally winding up in South Korea about 35 years and 5,500 miles later. The specifics matter much less than the shared feeling of being far from where you used to be.
In other episodes, Sherman laments the lack of people his age to whom he can talk daily. For this episode, then, that lacking is deepest -- he is surrounded by people half his age, most of whom surely have no personal experience with trench warfare, many of whom were not born when he was a cavalry officer, and but for the occasional exception -- Margaret -- really not fighting a war but running a hospital. They are in the Army, but they are in only the rarest of occasions shown fighting an enemy that carries firearms.
In this episode, then, Sherman is essentially on his own, and the phone call that drives this home (delivered in the middle of the night, when nobody is awake to overhear and offer some consolation) tells him that he is, in one sense, now utterly on his own -- he is the last of those friends from his cavalry officer days to live to tell their tale.
It was a long time ago, nineteen hundred and seventeen to be exact, and I've put on a dozen or so pounds since then. We were in France, under a heavy artillery barrage. My buddies and I laid low in an old French chateau. We were quite a group, the five of us. Went through hell together, and lived to get drunk about it. What a great bunch of guys. That's us, I'm the one mugging for the camera. Anyway, there we are in this chateau. So Stein finds a cache of fine brandy and we sat up all night. The shells were screaming and we were singing and toasting our friendship. Then we got down to the last bottle. This very bottle here.
The five of us made a pledge. We'd save this bottle. Let some legal eagle stow it for us, and whoever turned out to be the last survivor of the group, well, he'd get the bottle and drink a toast to his old buddies. For good or bad, you're looking at the last survivor. I got the job when Gresky passed on in Tokyo. He had the bottle sent here god rest his soul.
...
I was sick, just thinking of how all my friends are gone now. Felt a little sorry for myself too, getting up in years. But I'm looking at things a bit different now. I'm a very lucky man. I've had some wondrous, joyous times. That's what counts. We were so alive back then. It was something. But, as much as my old friends meant to me, I think you new friends mean even more. So, I'd like you to share this bottle with me.
As I recall, it was mighty smooth in '17. Just one thing, I would like to make the first toast solo, to my old buddies. Here's to you boys. To Ryan, who died in WWI, the war to end all wars. To Gianelly, who died in the war after that. To Stein, the joker of the crowd, and to Gresky, my best friend, who just passed away in Tokyo. You were the friends of my youth, my comrades through thick and thin, and everything in between. I drink to your memories. I love you fellas, one and all.
Sherman was saying one last goodbye to a life that had for decades been entering the strongly held past and leaving the present -- swapping stories with those who were there and thus renewing his connection to the stories and the people in them. As I sat listening to his speech, tears obscuring any hope I had of watching Harry Morgan be Harry Morgan in a military uniform, I started to say goodbye -- of my own accord, not because I had to -- to life back home and hello to life in my new home.
I wasn't going back, just as Sherman wasn't. And as he could find comfort in his friends even as -- and maybe because -- they did not share all of his experiences, so I could find comfort in the opportunity of a new place.
We do not meet Gresky, or I cannot remember him, so in his place -- deliberately, perhaps -- we are invited to imagine our own Gresky, whether childhood friend, parent as best friend, elder confidante, whatever else. Our loss is Sherman's loss, our gain is Sherman's gain, and Sherman's toast is drunk to -- his friends, yes -- but ours. Our communal friends. His, ours. Those we have, those we've had.
There is an episode for every situation. Somewhere, someone has assembled a Harry Morgan response for everything. I could sit here for the next two hours talking about this Harry Morgan moment or that Sherman Potter line. I wouldn't be done. I would scarcely have started. As an actor, he didn't just say lines, saving the real drama for the important moments. As a good actor, he didn't just use the little movements that make something look real. As a great actor, he didn't just live the pain of a moment where any human would be compelled to cry.
As Harry Morgan, he was Sherman T. Potter. He said so:
The eulogies have been personally and professionally ... complete. If I can do one tenth what he did, that will be a complete life.
He did what he was good at. He loved people. And he gave us a character we could identify with at 5 years old or 15 or 45 or 85.