The mention of The Fugitive the other day got me to thinking back to those heady days of yesteryear.

That TV show was first broadcast in the fall of 1963, but I’m quite certain I couldn’t have been watching it during its first season.

I was in 9th grade in the fall of 1963, we were still living on the hill on West Main Street in Richland, PA, and my mother still had the beauty shop.

Because of the first and third of those things, I doubt very much that I would have been staying up until 11:00 PM on a school night to watch a TV show. The Fugitive was broadcast on ABC on Tuesday nights at 10:00 PM.

My school night bedtime had been pretty strictly enforced at 9:00 PM up until the previous year, as I recall. By the time I was in 9th grade it was relaxed a bit, either because my parents got tired of enforcing it or because I grexed and groaned loudly enough that they finally gave in. Probably a bit of both. 

But on no account could I have stayed up past 10:00 PM. My mother was still up that late because of the shop and she would have seen to it that I stayed up no later than that. 

By the following year we had moved to South Race Street, my mother no longer had the shop, and both parents tended to retire by 9:00 PM or a bit later, so there was no longer anyone to enforce a bedtime for me. That’s when I began to stay up to watch some of the 10:00 PM TV shows, although probably not on every school night.

It might have been Maryann Shellhamer who got me to watch The Fugitive, as she was a very big fan of the show, and I recall discussing the episodes with her the day after they aired.

The show ran for four seasons, and the first three were filmed in black and white, with only the fourth season switching to color. It’s as a black and white show that I remember it, and I was surprised when I got some screen shots of the finale the other day and saw they were in color; I simply didn’t recall that the final season had been shot in color.

I don’t really recall the details of any particular episodes from back then except one (other than the two part finale, of course). I just remember that Richard Kimble, the fugitive of the title, who had been unjustly convicted of his wife’s murder and had managed to escape en route to his execution, was constantly searching for the one-armed man who was the real culprit. Each week, he assumed a new name, got involved with a new family, was able to help that family out in some way, before some suspicious member of the family figured out his true identity and forced him to flee, or Lt. Gerard got wind of his whereabouts and the family members helped him to escape. Every now and then he’d start to form a relationship with a woman, but (you guessed it) a rival suitor (or someone else) figured out his true identity and— 

If that seems awfully formulaic, I’d suggest it’s no more formulaic than a sitcom where Lucy devises a harebrained scheme and gets into trouble, or a cop show where a crime is committed and the perp is brought to justice by the final commercial, or a hospital drama where the disease of the week is cured by the handsome young doctor in the nick of time—or the whodunit where Jessica Fletcher just happens to come across a murder in every town she visits and solves it when the bumbling local police arrest the wrong culprit.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The fugitive often finds himself in situations where someone is in desperate need of medical attention and he is forced to reveal that he’s a doctor. That’s rather like Jessica Fletcher stumbling over a corpse, isn’t it?

It’s a credit to the writers that they kept the formula fresh for four seasons. They did that by putting the emphasis in the stories on the new characters every week, so the show functioned in some ways as an anthology series.

Anyway, the one episode that I do recall from back then involved a woman and her young son who was having difficulties getting along in school because he was “different”. I forget the exact nature of his differences now, but I recall the resolution of the story was that Kimble told the boy that he was “special” before making his escape.

I watched some episodes in the last few days, and last evening I viewed “Smoke Screen” from season one. It involved a California wild fire and undocumented Mexican workers—it almost seemed like it was written yesterday. And yes, Richard Kimble had to perform an emergency caesarian section in the middle of the wild fire which got reported live nationally by a radio reporter which caught the attention of—