Tommy Rettig
Tommy Rettig
Thomas Noel Rettig, known as Tommy Rettig, was an American child actor, computer software engineer, and author. Rettig is remembered for portraying the character "Jeff Miller" in the first three seasons of CBS's Lassie television series, from 1954 to 1957, later seen in syndicated re-runs as Jeff's Collie. He also co-starred with another former child actor, Tony Dow, in the mid-1960s television teen soap opera Never Too Young and recorded the song by that title with the group The TR-4...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth10 December 1941
CountryUnited States of America
I had always turned it down-to me, smoking pot was absolutely the worst thing in the world. I thought of it as an addiction, and all my friends who smoked it, I felt they really needed help.
Yeah, dog was this man's best friend, for sure.
I was totally devastated for four years in the mid '60s when l tried to buck the tide.
Marijuana. Boy, I thought that was just terrible. How could this great man do this to his life?
I wanted to go to regular high school- it looked like a lot of fun.
There's a big difference between somebody who does acid on weekends and somebody who takes downers every day.
Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.
Well, I went to school with Jan and Dean, Ryan O'Neal, some of the Beach Boys we all use to party together.
There was this little shaggy dog on it, and Frank Weatherwax was working the dog. One day we were all sitting around, and Frank said, listen, my brother Rudd just got the rights back from MGM for Lassie, and said have your agent check into it. I did, and I went for a screen test.
We each had to spend a week out at Lassie's ranch, and whoever got along best with the dog got the part.
It was the worst period of my life. I had all this gigantic acceptance as a kid, and all of a sudden there was this monumental rejection.
I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships.
Acid wasn't getting a whole lot of bad press at the time, and as I saw the whole bad-press thing happen, I became aware that the government had done a whole lie on all the other benign drugs as well. It became clear to me that the government wanted no real drug education.