Okay, I’ve only seen one of his movies, and it was based on a TV show. But while most of the internet is going crazy over Florence Henderson, I saw the news that Ron Glass had died and took it rather harder. (It’s been an odd few days, given the Fidel Castro thing.) I did watch both of them on TV when I was a child, but while I haven’t watched The Brady Bunch in years, I own one series with Ron Glass and want another.
You see, as a child, I knew him as the suave and debonair Detective Ron Harris of the fictional 12th Precinct of New York. Well dressed. Quite a fellow with the ladies. Concerned with the literary style of his reports. And while, no, the fact that he was black wasn’t quite ignored, it was hardly the most important thing about him. The most important thing about him was that he was cool. While I would want a dad like Barney Miller himself, I’m much more inclined to swoon over Harris.
And, yes, he did lots after that. Lots and lots. It’s just that most of it wasn’t much that appealed to me, and things stopped being so available in syndication, so I didn’t see much of Barney Miller anymore, and there was my memory of Detective Harris. And then, in time, I got taken to a theatre with Graham and some friends to go see Serenity, even though I hadn’t actually seen any Firefly. But, all right, a movie that my loved ones were interested in. How did I like it? Well, my son’s named Simon, after all.
But I didn’t make the connection until there was, at last, a DVD release of Barney Miller. And I knew Detective Harris looked familiar. And I looked it up. And yes. There they both were. The same man.
So that is how I will remember Ron Glass—as the center. He also, it’s worth noting, was the one who looked out for Agent Coulson in that magical place. But in any case, I think both Harris and Shepherd Book were ways of making people be more than they were. Barney and Fish and the others were cops, but there was something about Harris that made them more people. We knew the others had lives outside the station, but Harris seemed to see the job as a way to propel him to who he really was. Conversely, Shepherd Book’s time on the Serenity was a way to make other people be who they really were.
Neither IMDb nor Wikipedia has much about Ron Glass; neither provide any of his own quotes, which has become my go-to method of titling obituaries. But I think the quote from how he came to join the crew of the Serenity is one he would like to be remembered with. And if you’re curious, what happens to him in Serenity was in part because he was in poor health at the time. So perhaps we should, in our mourning, also cherish that we had him longer than we’d feared we might.
