Getting on when most others have gotten off.

Sometimes you develop an interest in something...

... just before it ends, and you wish you had been able to spend more time with it.

When this happens, you're often getting on the train when most others have gotten off.

The first time I recall this happening to me: Discovering the old TV show Switch with Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner. It ran 1975-1978 . I started watching in the last year of the series and only got to see a handful of episodes before it was canceled. I watched it on the black-and-white portable that was in my mom and dad's bedroom.

(I suppose there was something else on at that time that others wanted to watch on the color set in the living room, but I don't remember.)

I developed a renewed affection for religious things a couple years ago; fortunately, that train makes frequent stops and runs 'round the clock.

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Switch repeated a popular formula in the 70's: The buddy detective show that paired an aging icon with a young partner. Hawaii Five-O and Barnaby Jones also did this.

Charlie Callas was in the cast of Switch, too; he was a frequent character actor and fixture on 70's game shows, and I liked him a lot. Detective shows often had a unique second or third banana like Callas that added some unexpected humor or mannerisms. This character was often a pimp or a snitch. Starsky and Hutch had Huggy Bear, for example.

Amazing how many of these types of characters we consumed as children and never gave them a second thought. Some were harmless, some represented darker themes.[1]

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[1]
I don't know if it's true, but I learned on Baretta (I think) that pimps beat their prostitutes with a wire clothes hanger wrapped in a towel, because it was painful but didn't leave marks.

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Started: 2012-12-02