After eleven years of daring good humor, TV's finest half-hour signs off
Letter sent from the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital based in Ouijongbu, Korea:
Dear Mom,
Well here I am in Korea. It's a long way from Ottumwa, Iowa, but then I guess it's a long way from everybody else's home town of the guys around here too. The only thing we're not far from is the front. Three miles down the road, the war is going full blast. It's our job to patch up the wounded and, the way they say it around here is, send them back to get wounded again. Actually, I don't do the patching. I'm kind of like what you might sort of call the company clerk, which is still a pretty good thing for an 18-year-old farm boy to be if he's gotta be here. They call me Radar on account of because I can sometimes figure out what somebody's gonna say before they say it—but you knew that already. Just about all the guys here are great, my boss Colonel Blake and the surgeons and even the nurses, they're great guys too. But I miss you, Mom. Enclosed I've put some of my pay, so you can keep up your electrolysis. Love to Uncle Ed and all the animals and especially to you.
Your son, Walter
P.S. They say this war won't last long, Mom. I sure hope they're right.
Stage 9 of the 20th Century-Fox studios in Los Angeles is dark. The backdrop of khaki-drab Korean hills and everything that might serve as inventory, booty or memento have disappeared. Gone are the tables, tubing, clamps and surgical gowns from O.R.; neither the blandly frazzled Lieut. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) nor the avuncular Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) will preside any more over that surgeons' battlefield. In the mess hall, the serving trays and cigarette packs are missing; Corporal Klinger (Jamie Farr), the drag queen of 4077, will never again ask Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) to give absolution to the food. The officers' club has been stripped of its jukebox and banners; only the lingering perfume of Major Margaret ("Hot Lips") Houlihan (Loretta Swit) will drive the ghost of Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) into rages of ecstasy. And in the most famous barracks since Stalag 17—Hawkeye Pierce's Swamp—the cots, footlockers, stove, framed pictures and even the distillery are gone. The giggles and groans of Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) and B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) and Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) are now distant, poignant echoes.
The wish that Corporal Radar O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff) made has come true. In real time, the Korean conflict was over in three years; in CBS's prime time, it lasted eleven increasingly popular years; in syndicated reruns, it has proved so successful that it could outlast the Hundred Years' War. By next Monday, when its 2½-hour send-off episode is aired (8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), M*A*S*H will have earned its stars as one of the funniest, most humane and formally adventurous shows ever to leave its mark on TV.