Maybe you don't remember "I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster," but I do.

"Onscreen, the sandpaper-voiced [Marty] Ingels was best known for his role in the short-lived sitcom 'I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster,' broadcast on ABC in the 1962-63 season. Mr. Ingels (as Fenster) starred opposite John Astin (as Dickens), as one of a pair of jovial carpenters. Off screen, Mr. Ingels — who began his professional life as a talking peanut and was later a booker of celebrities on television commercials, a frequent TV guest star and a voice-over artist whose credits include Pac-Man in the animated series of the 1980s — was by all accounts highly voluble, genially combustible, energetically litigious and unmistakably larger than life."

I'm sorry to see him go, this man most famous for being the husband of Shirley Jones. As for litigious, I remember when Shirley Jones sued The National Enquirer for an article that — as the U.S. Supreme Court decorously put it — "alleged that respondent drank so heavily as to prevent her from fulfilling her professional obligations."  I taught that case, Calder v. Jones, in Civil Procedure class many times.

But I loved "I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster." 1962-63. That was during the JFK administration. Before we knew John Astin as Gomez on "The Addams Family," which didn't start until 1964, the highly transformative year that followed the Kennedy assassination, the year of The Beatles, the Civil Rights Act, and much else. 1962, that was a different time, and John Astin and Marty Ingels were carpenters. (Shirley Jones was Marian the librarian in "The Music Man" in 1962, long before "The Partridge Family.") Do you think it was funny? He's a segment all about "It's not funny":



ADDED: I made an "I'm Dickens He's Fenster" tag, because I've written about this TV show before. Twice. Both times were back in 2004, the first year of this blog. April 17, 2004:

Why isn't TV more like the Internet? Why can't I just watch any old episode of, say, Dobie Gillis or I'm Dickens, He's Fenster whenever I want? Why can't I sit down any night and call up, say, "The Dalton Girls"? (Althouse trivia experts should know that was the first movie I ever saw in the theater. According to an IMDB user summary it's "Just another 'B' western, except the outlaws are babes." I see the plot was "After the Dalton boys are killed by the law, one of the Dalton girls is forced to kill a lecherous mortician who tries to rape her...)

Maybe I need to make a "Dalton Girls" tag...

AND: Weirdly, that April 17, 2004 post has Donald Trump in it. I'd just watched an HBO on Demand documentary called "Born Rich" — "a nice documentary, made by a born-rich guy who had access to other born-rich kids, because (as I learned in the documentary), born-rich people are an inbred subculture": "There's a nice variety of rich kids to react in different ways to. And I must say one of the nicest ones was Ivanka Trump, which has to remove a layer of loathsomeness from Donald Trump."

Imagine being 12 years old in a world where everyone was reading about your father giving some woman who is not your mother the best sex she ever had.

Politico has a story this morning about Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka, "The Quiet Power Behind the Trump Throne/Ivanka Trump is her father’s most influential adviser, his most powerful surrogate—and his total opposite." Excerpt:

The caution and composure Ivanka brings to business is applied in every corner of her life and is, in part, the product of growing up as the child of a mother and father who often made tabloid headlines, including the New York Post front pager—“Best Sex I Ever Had”—about her father. Looking back at that time, when the whole world seemed to be taking sides in her parents’ divorce, she says, “You can’t control for other 12-year-old girls bringing a copy of the newspaper to school. People knew. They heard their parents talking about it at the breakfast table, so they would ask me.” Ivanka sounds like she’s straining as she seeks the most positive light for this dark moment. She says the scandalous episode probably made her appreciate her parents more. But in the end, she concludes, “I actually view it, all in all, as a thing that obviously was negative.”

I was curious about "Best Sex I Ever Had." I couldn't call up the original story, but I found a Post piece from 2012 titled "Worst ‘lust’ Trump ever had":

Marla Maples famously gushed “Best Sex I Ever Had” in a Post Page One headline when she started her affair with Donald Trump back in 1990 — but The Donald wasn’t as thrilled, according to a gossipy police confession tape.

Chuck Jones — Maples’ shoe-fetishist former publicist — has recorded a video statement for Manhattan cops and prosecutors.... “I said [to Trump], ‘Did you love [Maples]?’... He thought about it,... And it’s not like he said, ‘I’m madly in love with her.’ He said, ‘You know . . .I think it was lust . . . and had I the opportunity to do it over, I would have stayed with my family,’ ” meaning Ivana and their three kids.

Interesting... not that there's much reason to believe Jones, who convicted of "burglarizing Maples’ home and stealing 70 pairs of shoes, which he admitted he was having a 'sexual relationship with.'"

Trump is now married to his third wife, and I suppose I think more highly of a man who's on his third wife if I know that he regretted ever leaving his first wife. But how awful to be 12 years old and to see everyone reading about your father giving some woman who is not your mother the best sex she ever had.