Your Friend and Mine "Wally", Tony Dow By Author & Contributor Christopher J. Lynch
One of the best things about being a writer is meeting amazing people. Tony Dow was an amazing person.
I first had the privilege of meeting him while doing interviews and research for a biography on one of the other characters from Leave it To Beaver, the late Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell). Tony invited me into his home in Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles and was affable, honest, and open about his time on the show, and with Ken in particular.
I discovered immediately that Tony was not your stereotypical self-absorbed celebrity. In fact, celebrity was something he never felt comfortable with. He confided to me on several occasions that, “I never felt like I was a celebrity, but I always got treated as if I was.”
This humility extended into the feeling that even though his friends, fans, and his wife all thought he should have a biography written about his life, Tony never shared this viewpoint, telling me that, “I don’t think my life is worthy of a biography.”
Far from it.
Besides being a talented actor, he also directed commercials and several hit TV shows in his career in show business. His interests outside of ‘the business,’ were varied and many. I was fond of telling people that Tony Dow was one of most multi-faceted people I ever met; a real renaissance man.
He was an incredibly talented designer and carpenter, and remodeled the home he shared with his wife, Lauren, into a real masterpiece of architecture and design. His talent with his hands also extended to one of his other passions; sailing, and he once resurrected a sunken sailboat and restored it to its full beauty, traversing the Southern California coast and the Channel Islands.
An incredible athlete, he was a Junior Olympic diving champion and set state swim records in his youth. Later, he took up beach volleyball and excelled at this grueling sport as well. He appeared on the TV show, Circus of the Stars, and performed on the trapeze — a tough act for anyone.
Later in life, he turned his attention to art, and was a talented sculptor who saw some of his creations exhibited at the Louvre Museum in France. Once, when he discovered that I was teaching writing at a maximum-security prison north of Los Angeles and that they had a promising art program, he readily agreed to have me take him up there.
We spent the day meeting with the artist/inmates, talking art, and Tony even went so far as to speak to his art agent about getting one of the inmate’s works into a gallery. Such was the kindness and generosity of the man I knew.
Tony Dow played what many described as the best big brother on television. I never had a big brother to compare him to, but I know that he was one of the best friends I ever had.
Christopher Lynch is a Southern California native and freelance writer. His debut novel, One Eyed Jack, a hard-boiled crime thriller about a professional blackmailer, was a 2013 Shamus Award finalist, and a 2014 Writers Digest Honorable Mention for Genre Fiction. Eddie: The Life and Times of America's Preeminent Bad Boy, the memoir of Ken Osmond, the actor who played Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver, is one of the highest rated celebrity biographies on Amazon.
He is also an avid cyclist and a mountain climber with successful summits of Mount Whitney, Mount Shasta, Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Mount Kalapatar in Nepal, and has recently completed a trek to Mount Everest Base Camp.
He counts as one of his greatest accomplishments the successful training and leading of nine blind hikers to the summit of 10,000 foot Mount Baldy, the highest point in Los Angeles County, and the third highest peak in Southern California. A documentary film is being made of the adventure and you can view a trailer at: http://www.baldyfortheblind.com
He enjoys giving back to the writing community by offering free Self-Publishing seminars. He also taught creative writing at a maximum security prison north of Los Angeles. You can see more of Christopher J. Lynch’s writing at his website: http://www.christopherjlynch.com
