shoop and dead Howard da Silva

Faulkner tells us that "memory believes before knowing remembers." (If you're a Faulkner fan, you're welcome. Now get out of here.) At any rate, I was thinking of that when I got to revisit a cherished memory--or really, the memory of somebody's memory. It involves my best friend, and a fairly notable dead character actor named Howard da Silva.

da Silva (ne Silverblatt) knocked around a long time on stage, film, and TV. He was the original Jud Fry in "Oklahoma!" in 1943--there's a "betcha didn't know." Dr. Who fans (I hear there are a lot of those) might know his voice as a sometime narrator. But for me, he was Ben Franklin--he'd played the role in "1776" onstage and in the movie (though you don't hear him on the original Broadway recording due to illness). When I was in middle school, our class trip was to see a screening of "1776," and we all laughed whenever the characters said something we thought was dirty. So for a while, I thought Howard da Silva was just about the funniest guy in the world, with his little jokes about the difference between an ox and a bull and his casual use of the term "bastard." When I saw the film again much later, I still thought it was terrific, though I started to wish da Silva didn't titter at his own witticisms quite so much. Still, I thought it was a fairly valid acting choice (Franklin probably did crack himself up), and when I thought of Ben Franklin, I thought he had to look and sound like da Silva (and certainly not Pat Hingle, who I saw in a pretty good Broadway revival. Oh, Hingle was fine, all right, but no way was he Franklin).

So I had considerable interest when, in college, my best friend told me about a film he saw on a class trip--da Silva was Franklin again, this time in a 20-minute educational film created around the nation's bicentennial. Apparently, if you were of a certain age and your class trip led you to Philadelphia, you pretty much had to see it. And my best friend had this way of making the film seem hilarious--in a way that's pretty hard to render into print. But he imitated da Silva emoting about the death of his young child "Frankie" and then veering very suddenly into brisk enthusiasm--"I had a son...he was born and died... and then I set to work on my printing press!!"--accompanied by jolly harpsichord music. And I knew that one day, I'd find myself in Philadephia and that I would see this film for myself.

It took many, many years. I moved to Philadelphia in mid-life, and I wondered if they still showed the film, and if so, where--the Franklin Institute? The Constitution Center? But I stumbled upon it on a trip to Franklin Court, where his old house and post office are recreated around Market and 3rd. And there was an underground museum much in need of funding where they show three films in rotation--the Disney cartoon "Ben and Me," which I vaguely remember kind of predicted "Ratatouille," where Ben is a nitwit and the mouse has all the answers; "The Real Ben Franklin," a somewhat more recent (the 90s) film narrated by a serious-folksy David Hartman; and "Portrait of a Family," with yes, the one, the only, Howard da Silva.

And there he was, mucking around with the printing press (he didn't invent the printing press, of course, but he was a printer and publisher), and then later, reminiscing about his family..."I had a son... he was born and died..." But no, not quite the hilarious jarring shift my friend had remembered. He then mentions the next child, Sarah, or Sally, and then maybe he talks about his stove...I'm not sure. It's a bad enough film, with da Silva allowed to emote and mug into the camera to his heart's content, and it's pretty obvious that none of the other actors are really in the film with him, but it wasn't quite as a funny as my friend's memory--or my memory of my friend's memory.

Still, I'll probably see "1776" again the next chance I get. And I do carry from the educational film my own little memory--da Silva looking impishly into the camera and saying, "Enter a proposal with your eyes open, and go through marriage with your eyes shut. [giggle, pause] You know what that's from, don't you? [wrinkles nose at us] Poor Richard's Almanac!" And then, I think, he should have set to work on his printing press. Maybe that's how I'll tell it one day.