Robert Young came to television out of film and radio. and for nearly 30 years he was revered as television's quintessential father figure. In his role as Jim Anderson in the domestic melodrama Father Knows Best and as the title character in the long-running medical drama Marcus Welby, M.D., he was admired as a strict but benevolent patriarch. Gentle, moralistic, and highly interventionist, Young's television persona corrected and guided errant behavior, initially in a family setting, then as an omnipotent doctor, and, perhaps most self­ consciously, when he portrayed "himself' in a decade­ long series of commercials for decaffeinated coffee. With a simple raised eyebrow and a tilt of the head, Young's character convinced even the most hedonistic of costars to relinquish their selfish ways for a greater noble purpose.

     Young began his career as a second lead in Hollywood films. Displaying a generally unrecognized versatility, Young portrayed villains, best buddies, and victims with equal aplomb and performed for many of Hollywood's finest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Borzage, and Edward Dmytryk. Frustrated with his secondary status (he described his parts as those refused by Robert Montgomery). Young ventured in 1949 into radio, where he co produced (with his good friend and business partner Eugene Rodney) and starred in a family comedy, Father Knows Best? Running for five years, the program was a soft-hearted look at a family in which the benevolent head of the family was regarded with love but skepticism and in which mother generally supplied the wisdom. At the time, most family comedies were characterized by wisecracking moms and inept fathers. Young took the role on the condition that the father, in his words, not be "an idiot. Just make it so he's unaware. He's not running the ship, but he thinks he is."

     In 1954 Young and Rodney were approached by Screen Gems to bring the program to television. While Young was hesitant at first, a promise of joint ownership in the program convinced him to make the move. Upon network insistence, the question mark was dropped (they thought it demeaning), and Father Knows Best premiered on CBS, under the sponsorship of Kent cigarettes. Because of advertising and network time-franchises, the program was placed too late in the evening to attract a family audience and quickly died in the ratings. A fan-letter campaign and the personal intervention of Thomas McCabe, president of the Scott Paper Company, resurrected the program, which was to become an NBC staple for the next five years.

     The television series was quite different from the radio version. Most significantly, the radio program's ambivalence about the father's wisdom was removed and replaced by an emphatic belief that Jim Anderson was the sole possessor of knowledge and child-rearing acumen. Although the original head writer, Roswell Rogers, remained with the program, most of the radio scripts had to be rewritten or completely scrapped for the visual television medium. With the exception of Robert Young, the Anderson family was completely recast, with Jane Wyatt signing on after a yearlong search. Many of the episodes were based on the real­ life exploits of Young's daughter Kathy, while Wyatt was described as an amalgamation of the wives of Young. Rodney, and Rogers.

     The program was heralded by the popular press and audiences alike as a refreshing change from "dumb Dad" shows. With near-irritating consistency. Jim An­derson resolved his family's dilemmas through a pattern of psychic intimidation, guilt, and manipulation, causing the errant family member to recant his or her selfish desires and put the good of the community, family, and society ahead of personal pleasure. The wife and the three children, played by Elinor Donahue, Billy Gray, and Laurin Chapin, were lectured with equal severity by the highly exalted father, whose virtues were often the focus for episodic tribute.

     The program won numerous awards and spawned a host of domestic melodramas  that  were  to  dominate the television schedule (including The  Donna  Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver). So popular was the program and so powerful its verisimilitude that viewers came to believe the Anderson family really existed. Women wrote to star Jane Wyatt with questions about cooking and advice about home decorating or child rearing. Young was named Mount Sinai "father of the year" and gathered similar honors throughout the series' run. In one of the stranger blends of fact and fiction, the producers were approached to do a  U.S. Savings Bond benefit for the American Federation of Labor and the Treasury Department.  ''Twenty-four Hours in Tyrant Land" depicted the Andersons  fictional Springfield community  caught  in  the clutches of a tyrannical despot. Never aired on television, the episode toured the country's town halls and churches. By 1960 the personal difficulties of both Young and the teenage cast members, and the creative fatigue of Rogers, prompted the producers to cease first-run production, although reruns continued to air in prime time on ABC for two more years.

     Despite a couple of television films, Young's career was basically dormant during the 1960s until the highly  acclaimed   television   movie,  Marcus Welby, M.D. The  pilot  film, revolving around  the heroic ef­forts of a kindly general practitioner and his anti-establishment” young assistant (played by James Brolin), became a hit television series that was to air on ABC for the next seven years. Each phenomenally slow-moving episode featured Welby, his partner, Dr. Steven Kiley, and the friendly (but usually confused) nurse, Consuella, treating a single patient whose disease functioned as some sort of personal or familial catastrophe. Even for the 1970s, the program was anachronistic-Welby practiced out of his well­ appointed Brentwood home, and both he and Kiley made house calls. Significantly, the show did try to bring public attention to current health crises or recent medical discoveries. Thus, episodes dealt with Tay­ Sach's disease, amniocentesis, and abortion rights (when abortion was still illegal). With kindly didacticism, Welby would lecture the guest star (and the television viewer) on the importance of consistent medical care, early detection, immunization, and the like.

     By the mid- 1970s, Young grew weary of the program, and this along with  Brolin's career ambitions and a post-Watergate viewership hostile toward elderly male authority figures contributed to the program's demise. With the end of the program, Young continued to work in television, starring in a couple of Welby movies and a Father Knows Best reunion. He gained critical acclaim in a television film dealing with Alzheimer's disease and euthanasia. His bitterness toward Hollywood casting practices never diminished, however, and in the early 1990s Young attempted sui­cide, revealing a vulnerability and despair  totally  at odds with  his carefully  constructed  patriarchal persona.