Who Does He Think He Is — Grandpa?  

    Traditionally — or, at least, since the advent of the comic strip — the most maligned member of the American family unit is the mother-in-law.

    It is ritual in our native humor to caricature her as a huge-busted troublemaker with a built-in sneer who is meddlesome, argumentative and overprotective of her own offspring.

    To make her and her bustle the butt of such angry comedy is not only unfair, it isn't even accurate.

    Take my own mother-in-law, for instance.  (As a matter of fact, you wouldn't, would you?)

    Anyway, she has never said a word against me, to my face.  I've heard that she knocks me pretty good behind my back, but I attribute that to neighborhood gossip.  How, for example, could a man in my position believe the rumors that his own mother-in-law is telling people on the block that he'd still be a bum, if it wasn't that her daughter had nagged him on to greater things?

     And then I offer you another woman who legally qualifies as a mother-in-law.  My own, dear, sweet, white-haired, Clairol-tinted mother.

    Of course, I don't actually "offer" her to you.  This is no Spring Clearance Sale, buddy.  It's just a figure of speech.

    Years ago, my mother told me: "No sensible woman would ever come between her son and his wife."

    Then, cradling my head in her arms, she assured me:  "No matter what she does to you, I'll stay out of it."

    This made me immediately leery of what my wife was planning to do to me.  But I'll say one thing for mother, she never interfered.

    All she ever did was write letters that she caught me on TV, that I looked wan, and that she wondered if I was being systematically starved to death.  And, you know?  It makes you think.  I carry quite a bit of insurance.

    But that isn't why I asked you all to be here.  Today, I want to take up the little discussion problem of father-in-laws.  Or, fathers-in-law.  Or, to simplify things, my father-in-law.

    He, without running the risk of ever becoming a cartoon character, manages to be just as insidious as a mother-in-law.

    If the kids hit me for a half dollar to go to the movies, he clucks sadly, and murmurs: "When I was a youngster, I was glad to get a nickel for a picture show."

    If I let them stay up past bedtime to watch such educational television as Jack Paar, he shakes his head and warns that I am spoiling them rotten.  If they don't hang up their clothes or make their beds (and they don't), he mutters about the dangers of today's inadequate parental supervision.

     Oddly enough, the kids have the delusion that they like him.  He has a reputation for being "handy."  He can attach a remote control box to  a set of electric trains, put together a kite, blow up a football and mend a broken spoke in the wheel of a bike.  As you know,  I have more important things on my mind.

    Consequently, he has sneakily replaced me as a father image to my own, fickle children.  And it's gone right to his head.

    He is clearly convinced that my interference in their upbringing is bound to turn them into latter-day Dalton Boys.

    And while I wouldn't mention it to him, I'll tell you.  I'd like to know what he's got to be proud about.

    I mean, a man who raised a daughter so emotionally mixed-up that she would try to systematically starve her husband to death.