Gary Burghoff - Gary Burghoff: To M*A*S*H and Back

Chapter 1

I t was 1949. I was having the dream again. It was as if I were a living camera, looking out through my own lens. I viewed a quiet meadow, green with new spring grass. The sky was calm, clear, and very blue. At the bottom of a knoll, the lush green grass formed a bowl, filled with placid, clear ground water. It was always the same. I awoke, and felt euphoric. The feeling lasted for several minutes until I shook off sleep and began another day of life in my sixth year.

My father, mother, brother and I lived in a small Victorian home in the town of Forestville, Connecticut. I shared an upstairs bedroom with my brother David, who was six years older. Our two-story house was white with green shutters, much like all the homes on East Main Street, homes filled with normal, peaceful, average, dysfunctional middle-class American families. Dysfunctional? You bet, though we had no idea we were. Who knew? By whose standards did we judge ourselves? Sigmund Freud was long since dead and therapy was not a word in our vocabularies. Neither were words such as compassion, tolerance, sensitivity, ecology, understanding, and duality. That was all somehow functioning in our lives, but the words were never used, nor our neuroses identified.

The two words I did hear often were love and progress . If a week went by without my mother quoting a Methodist sermon entitled God is Love, or dad dismissing destruction of our natural environment with the phrase thats progress, my six-year-old mind would have been very confused. Those two words encompassed all I needed to know. If God is love, I was expected (having been created in His image) to be lovable and to love others. And, I was expected to overlook the destruction of natural beauty in the name of progress. Hmm! How simple! Too simple, I was to learn.

These were exciting times although I had no way of knowing it. Just four years earlier, we had won World War II. Everyone was rebuilding! A new concept had arisen in American home construction called tract housing . That meant a small network of streets lined with identical little homes, one blue, another white, then yellow, otherwise all the same, thirty feet apart, on very small lots. No room for vegetable gardens, chickens, goats, a family cow, horses, trees... just manicured green lawns and a one-car garage. This was new to us, and although we never owned a cow, some of our neighbors did, along with chickens, ducks, and goats. People still brewed dandelion wine in sheds. Some even had outhouses!

On weekends, I would be driven a few miles to the Rhineflesh Farm to spend two eagerly awaited days doing chores, riding the ponies, and plucking freshly killed chickens for dinner. Although the killing was, at my request, not one of my duties, I accepted it as the normal way of things. Evidently, God is Love did not extend to chickens! I remember feeling a mild sense of guilt because I did love chickens, and found the conflict between loving them alive and loving how they tasted discomforting.

One evening at the dinner table, at our house, I refused to chew my food..

Gary, what on earth is the matter? my mother asked..

Im trying not to crush the germs, was my answer..

What germs? asked Dad..

The germs we cant see. They live on everything, especially food. I read it in a book..

Here! Eat this part. Germs dont live on this part of the chicken..