You remember the faces, the places, the names

The kids got a hamster and two gerbils in the last few days. Names for the gerbils, a father and son, have been chosen as Chewy and Tunneler.

My suggestions of Sanford and Son, or Fred and Lamont, were met with silence and quizzical looks. Which is to be expected I guess – those in my house don’t know about this seminal show.

I watched Sanford and Son every week (and for years afterward in syndication and on TV Land), at least until Redd Foxx stopped caring and began reading his lines from cue cards while having a coke spoon blatantly hanging from his neck. Back in my hometown in Pennsylvania, we thought Aunt Esther, Rollo, Bubba and Grady, et al, were hysterical.

But was it racist for us sitting in our lily-white town to be laughing at poor, black junk dealers in Watts? Or did we get a glimpse (even if it was sanitized and exaggerated) of what urban life was like in the decade following the tumultuous Civil Rights riots of the 60s?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In the end, I’ve decided to take the show and the era in which it was created at face value. It was, as most things were and are, a product of its time.

And it was a particularly fine and reliable product in a most uncertain era that also included the aftermath of Vietnam, the social carnage leftover from the 60s, and Watergate.

Strictly 100: Number 16 – Sanford and Son