R.I.P. Shirley Temple Black
Shirley Temple passed away today at age 85 of natural causes. I always enjoyed her movies though she was already retired from being an actress when I watched them. She brought happiness and hope to the nation with her irrepressible smile during the depression, singing and dancing her way to being the biggest star at the box office in those days. I loved some of her films, especially when she danced with Bill Robinson -- one of the obits I read today pointed out that she was probably the first white girl to hold hands affectionately with a black man on film.
I knew her from the show I thought of as Shirley Temple Theater, though it's listed online as Shirley Temple's Storybook. It was an anthology series where she had well known actors play parts in fairy tales. One episode of its second season, when I was ten, wasn't so much a fairy tale as a horror story, or so it seemed to me. "The Terrible Clockman" told of a tall grandfather type clock that came to life and wandered around a town "freezing" anyone who looked at it. This terrified me and for weeks I could hardly sleep and didn't want to sit anywhere the clockman could sneak up behind me. I don't think I ever told my mother what was bothering me and I did eventually get over it, but at the time -- it was horrible.
But I didn't hold it against Shirley. I thought it was really great that she became a diplomat in later life and was once a minister of protocol for the country. I like to think of her now up there on the Good Ship Lollipop, still singing and dancing with Bill Robinson and making Americans, still worried about depression and bad times, happy.