a fifty-something under-tall half-deaf school librarian in the jersey suburbs with two grown kids and time on her hands

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

links :: quotations :: profile :: email :: :: host :: the weary traveler

03.26.2005

12:18 pm

Then maybe you know Milton Selzer. He wasn't nearly as well known, but if you watched TV in the fifties and sixties -- and well beyond that -- then you knew him. Whereas Charles Lane played every bureaucrat, Milton Selzer played mostly every Jewish stereotype there was: a pawnbroker, an agent, a mom-and-pop type neighborhood grocer. Although my favorite roles of his were in the Twilight Zone; once were he played an alien, I think with Carrol O'Connor, and once when he was a member of a family where they were all greedily waiting for an elderly relative to die and leave them his money and he made them wear masks that reflected their true natures which ultimately became their faces.

Why Milton Selzer? He was probably the very first character actor whose name I knew and whom I could identify on TV, going back to the late fifties. Again, why? Simple. He was a fraternity brother of my father's at the University of New Hampshire in the late thirties, buddies at the Jewish fraternity there, which probably included every single Jewish guy on the campus. Jack would get all smiley when he would see his buddy on TV; he was so proud of him. Selzer had dropped out of college before graduation due to lack of funds, and with the hope of making it in acting. (I see on his IMDb page that he studied acting formally after the war, probably with the GI bill.) It always made my father so happy to see that he had. And he was good, too, an excellent supporting player in the early days of live TV and on and on. This is morbid, probably, but I check IMDb every so often to see if he's still among us. (He is.) Jack, of course, is gone for two years now, but he and Milton had lost touch as far back as World War II. His only contact with him was seeing him on TV. It was always an event in our house when he came on. My kids, too, have identified him on the screen since they were little.

---

I watched Alfie, which I liked very much. Unlike a lot of other movies, it held my interest from the beginning to the end. And I thought Jude Law was very good. Now I need to see the original. I'll have to get over my Alfie issues after all.

--------------------------------------------------
I'm watching Ghostbusters
--------------------------------------------------

last :: next

Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
Christmastime Is Near - 12.18.2006
Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
A Message From Our Sponsor - 12.16.2006