My schlumpy raincoat inspired Columbo

Now that the official eulogies have been paid to the late actor Peter Falk, it’s time to clear up one serious matter: the signature schlumpy raincoat he wore when playing the off-beat detective, Columbo.In the past few years I have heard several people claim it was their raincoat that inspired him to adopt it as his never-ending article of clothing when tracking down bad guys — and an occasional female.Not true. As anyone who knows me can testify, I am a paragon of un-neatness.I wear sneakers that are two decades old with holes in the front; my pants rarely fit my expanding tum tum; I get a haircut every six months whether I need it or not.But this is about raincoats. Let’s cut to the quick.Many years ago, give or take 60, after college and the Army, I got a job as a reporter on the late lamented Hartford Times, at the time the biggest and most important newspaper in Connecticut.But in my last year at the University of Michigan I took a course in playwriting—and got an A! That set me thinking that maybe dramatics, not newspapering, should and/or would become my life’s work.But I married a beautiful freckled-faced co-ed with auburn hair after I returned to Ann Arbor on the GI Bill. When we graduated together, sitting in a garret writing a Tony Award-winning play wasn’t going to feed my new wife.I put off playwriting for the nonce but not my interest in the live theater. In an abandoned building in Hartford a lively group of actors had formed the Mark Twain Masquers. (Why not Mark Twain? When he came to live in Hartford, he called it “The most beautiful city I have ever seen.”)I joined the Masquers and while I was never chosen for the lead role, I and a worker in the state capitol who was managing the finances had fun playing character roles.My salary at the Times is not worth discussing. After all I was a reporter; I had a glamour job.But there was hardly enough extra money to buy clothes. So I worked the schlumpy raincoat I had brought back with me from Ann Arbor.Aha, are you getting the message? I wore that raincoat to the Mark Twain Masquers as a raincoat, but just as often as my topcoat.One of the most memorable plays I appeared in was Thornton Wilders’ “Our Town,” later made into a movie and still staged annually throughout the country by amateur groups like the Masquers.In “Our Town,” I played the drunken Methodist minister. I forget Peter Falk’s role, but he sat next to me in the final cemetery scene, a scene that to this day brings tears to my eyes.Falk acted in a number of other important plays we put on, “The Caine Mutiny,” the “Crucible” et al. Then he left Hartford and started acting in theaters in Fairfield County which segued to New York and then Hollywood and the TV show, “Columbo,” the detective with the schlumpy raincoat that ran for 30 years plus or minus.I contend to his dying day he would agree that the inspiration for his famous raincoat, which should be hung in the Smithsonian Museum, was inspired by the old rag that I wore to the popular Masquer’s group that has passed into oblivion. Prove me wrong. Freelance writer Barnett Laschever lives in Simsbury and is working on a play about Joshua and the walls of Jericho.