Steeply's father consumed by "M*A*S*H"; the madness and the death

pivotal · B.S. era – B.S. 1983 (Troy NY)

• When: Steeply's childhood into college years; the father's slow decline through the B.S. '70s–'80s, death B.S. 1983 (late autumn, just after the program's final episode)
• What: Steeply's father — a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher at Cheery Oil, Troy NY — was gradually consumed by an obsessive attachment to the broadcast television program "MAS*H": the secret notebooks, the theory-laden "book" cross-referencing world military/medical/religious history to hidden codes in the show, the savage undelivered letters to the character "Major Burns" (portrayed by 20th-Century-Fox actor Maury Linville) addressed with a Seoul routing code, the retreat into his den (renamed "the Swamp"), sleeping in his recliner viewing magnetic tapes all night. CBS/Fox attorneys wrote of "grave concern." He died in his easy chair of a transmural infarction just before his birthday, watching a rerun; his wife ("Mummykins") never complained. Steeply was at college / on an ROTC trip during the crucial collapse and reconstructs it partly from his kid sister. He offers the whole thing to Marathe as the mirror of the Entertainment's obsessive, self-erasing pull — and admits he sometimes half-pictures the Entertainment's victim Hank Hoyne in his father's old recliner.