American Top 40 PastBlast, 6/21/75: Mike Post, “The Rockford Files”

Dad watched a lot of television in his later years. Much of it was sports, especially University of Kentucky men’s basketball and the Cincinnati Reds. But he also loved crime dramas, and reruns of shows spanning the decades from Perry Mason to Law and Order filled his hours on many days. One from between those temporal extremes, The Rockford Files, was among his very favorites.

Somewhere toward the end of my high school years I stopped paying too much attention to network television, but I believe I spent a decent number of Friday evenings in the mid-to-late 70s tuned into NBC alongside my father to watch Jim, Rocky, Angel, Sgt. Becker, and Beth Davenport do their thing. It’s probably one show I wouldn’t mind binge-watching at some point.

In the 90s and 00s Dad videotaped lots of movies and TV shows, so that he could run his own personal on-demand service. There were several boxes of such tapes to go through after he and Mom were gone. I kept a very few as mementos, including one with a couple of old westerns (he also enjoyed those immensely), and another with Perry Mason episodes. I may well have run across some with Rockford shows on them—I don’t recall now. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Mike Post, that master of the TV theme tune, is debuting this week at #39 with “The Rockford Files.” It would reach #10.

Oh, and just for kicks, here’s a collection of the answering machine messages that played during the intros of the show’s second season.