I grew up in a small house: parlor and parents' bedroom to the front, bathroom in the middle, kitchen and my bedroom to the rear. Like most kids in the early 1960s, I had to be in bed early, but my bedroom door was always open. The soft murmur of the television usually lulled me to sleep.

One Sunday, though, I jumped out of bed and pattered the short hallway to the parlor where Mom and Dad were watching The Bill Dana Show.

"Who's that?" I asked. "I heard Tennessee Tuxedo talking!" (Tennessee being a scheming penguin character I watched on Saturday morning.)

"It's Don Adams," my mother said. "Get back to bed."

I didn't see any more of this fascinating character until the 1965 Fall Preview TV Guide, where I found out he and someone named Barbara Feldon who did commercials where she sprawled on a tigerskin rug would be in a new spy spoof, Get Smart! The Man from UNCLE and the James Bond flicks were big hits and it was logical one of the networks would launch some type of spy spoof.

From the first show I saw, I was hooked. I was madly and for all time in love with Don Adams and his alter ego, Maxwell Smart. Don Adams was my first real crush; I was all of nine years old. I wanted to be 99 so I could go on adventures with Max. Mom viewed my first crush with bemusement but Dad was puzzled: why did I like this stupid git who talked to his shoe and spilled things? I collected the old movie magazines like Photoplay and Screen Stories for their odd article on Don Adams and the first newspaper clipping I ever saved was a full-page article about Adams from the Providence Journal. My TV scrapbooks were full of Don: Get Smart, his other series, Bob Hope specials he appeared on (anyone remember the all-star "Murder at NBC"?), and even old photos of him appearing with Perry Como.

All the snow and ice and hail the postal worker is supposed to go through was nothing next to the obstacles between me and Get Smart. My parents bowled on Saturday nights. I had to conquer insurmountable shyness to ask the guys behind the counter to change the channel on the TV (also behind the counter) so I could see Get Smart, which I then stood and watched rapt for a half-hour, leaning on the counter in reality but off in another world in my mind. On nights the Providence College Friars played I didn't get to watch Get Smart at all. I still haven't gotten over my loathing for basketball.

The transfer to CBS solved that problem, but by then the show had gotten stale and the scripts were ridiculous. But my attachment to Don never waned. I wrote endless stories that I would later learn were called "fanfiction" where I made Max more serious and sent Max and 99 off on adventures in the near future. I missed the series The Partners because it was on at the same time we went to Saturday Mass. It wasn't that much of a series, but it was Don Adams.

I was a fan of Don Adams' Screen Test, which, since I liked old movies, I found pretty funny. It was Don Adams, after all, in the spoofs "The King Lives" and "To Sire, With Love," who helped me discover one of my favorite books (and films) of all time, The Prisoner of Zenda, and in my favorite Get Smart episode "The Island of the Darned," turned me on to Richard Connell's Most Dangerous Game, made into a 1930s movie with Joel McCrea.

Sorry to say I wasn't interested enough in the premise to watch Check It Out, which I found stupid and vapid. But the greatest joy were those seemingly endless (and unfortunately edited) reruns of Get Smart, collected on audio tape and later videotape. Somewhere in the videoverse Don Adams is still out there, thwarting KAOS, flirting with the ladies, tempting Agent 99 and frustrating the Chief.

As they say, he will be missed.

CNN: Don Adams of Get Smart Dead

E!: Get Smart Star Adams Dies

ABC News: Don Adams of Get Smart Dies at 82

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:16:00 PM

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