Radio: Mr. Peepers

In a dull season of summer TV replacements, one new show last week was giving televiewers a pleasant tingling in the funny bone. The program: Mr. Peepers (Thurs. 9:30 p.m., NBC), a weekly half hour devoted to the mild misadventures of a frail, bespectacled little high-school science teacher, played by Funnyman Wally Cox.

On his first day at Jefferson Junior High, Mr. Peepers wasted no time displaying his talent for creating minor disasters. He gestured with his hat, and promptly had it nailed to the wall by a busy carpenter; he scalped another teacher’s toupee with his fork in a cafeteria, prepared to eat it, mumbling “I didn’t order a salad.” His most recent catastrophe: while manfully trying to retrieve a basketball, he falls into the hoop and gets wedged fast.

“Spare the Leaf Mold . . .” But Teacher Peepers is at his timid zaniest when he goes to the classroom. In his special lecture, “Wake Up Your Sluggish Soil” (published originally in Petal & Stem), he concludes: “Spare the leaf mold, spoil the hepatica. Remember, your dirt is the restaurant where your flowers dine.” To his students’ questions he replies with thoughtful absurdities: “Yes, I think tonsils are useful to some people”; “No, I don’t think we know just how fast a dinosaur can run.”

Such goings-on, shrewdly and precisely tied together, are mainly the work of Scripter David Swift and Director James Sheldon. But it is 27-year-old Wally Cox himself who gives the show its real flavor. Detroit-born Wally Cox fits naturally into Teacher Peepers’ shoes. When he moved to Manhattan in 1942, he enrolled at City College for a botany course. “I was a flower-watcher,” he says. “I still am, for that matter, but I found I didn’t care how they worked; I just liked to watch them.” Then he was drafted into the Army where, Peepers-fashion, he spent four months misclassified as a foot soldier before the Army gave up and discharged him as physically unfit. Cox drifted aimlessly for the next six years, studying basket-weaving, working on farms, in factories and for a silversmith.

The Unwanted Rosebush. Finally, says Cox, “I started applying common sense to my pursuits.” In 1948, he joined a Greenwich Village dramatics group. It soon folded, but his director encouraged him to go on alone. Cox polished up a few comic monologues, got a nightclub job, was soon working on radio & TV as well.

Now that he is firmly established in show business, Cox is confidently pursuing the urgings of his common sense. He hopes to get his teeth into playwriting, already has completed a script, Violets Are Blue (about an unwanted rosebush). Although he is now making $1,000 a week (roughly 40 times his silversmithing salary), he still lives simply in a Manhattan apartment, drives the motorcycle he bought from his friend, Actor Marlon Brando, still patches his trousers with plastic cement. He spends his weekends flower-watching on a newly acquired 2½-acre field in Rockland, N.Y. “Next thing,” he says in his timid Peepersish voice, “I think I’ll buy me a bunch of cows.”