The Slice: Can you connect the dots in today’s column?

Here’s a couple seemingly random recollections about my late father.

I say “seemingly” because both memories actually relate, peripherally at least, to items elsewhere in this column.

See if you can make the connections.

Before I was around, my family was at a drive-in movie. The film was something starring Jack Palance. At some point, my father mentioned he had been fairly well acquainted with Palance while they were at the same military base for a time during the war.

And my sister, just a little pepper pot with curly black hair at the time, all but called him a liar.

I’m sure it sounded sweet, coming from a young girl and likely prefaced with an exasperated “Oh, Daddy.” But she wasn’t buying it. Not for a second.

Her skepticism apparently cracked my father up.

The second story is from when I was a freshly minted teenager. My father and I would watch “Hawaii Five-O” together.

Nothing remarkable about that. It was a popular show and had arguably the best theme music ever.

You might recall an actor named Jack Lord was the star. He played a hippies-disdaining cop named Steve McGarrett.

But for some unknown reason, my father always called him McGarretty.

Of course, he also called Johnny Carson “Jimmy.”

I wish I could take back some of my eye-rolling.

Slice answer: “You asked what long-ago TV show did I watch when 13,” wrote Lillian Lind of Coeur d’Alene.

She said, back on the farm in Wisconsin in 1937, people had not heard of television. Radio ruled the roost as an entertainment medium.

“The entire family sat in the living room after supper and listened.”

Everyone laughed and shared their delight through eloquent eye contact and say-it-all smiles.

“It was a nice time of life. No school shootings.”

As an alternative to Talk Like a Pirate Day: A reader over in Rathdrum suggested Talk Like a Mountain Man Day.

That would be fine except I keep hearing certain troubling lines from a malevolent backwoodsman in “Deliverance.”

But the same reader also offered Talk Like a Cowboy Day.

Maybe that’s the way to go. Then we just have to decide if we are thinking of real cowboys or movie cowboys. If it’s the latter, there is plenty of material from which to choose. This classic exchange from “Shane,” for instance.

Wilson: “What have you heard, Shane?”

Shane: “I hear you’re a low-down Yankee liar.”

Today’s Slice question: How long does that new-car smell last if you have children?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Air Force families used to move more often.