MORGANTOWN – When most of us think of Bob Denver, we think of the bumbling, good-hearted sailor whose lovable ineptitude kept him and his fellow castaways stranded on a tropical island week after week for three years in the 1960s.
What most of us don’t know is the sharp-minded family man who moved with his Bluefield-native wife to West Virginia, where they gave up their acting careers to devote their lives to caring for their autistic son.
Bob’s widow, Dreama Denver, recounts their story of life and love, sacrifice and hope, in the recent re-release of her book, revised and updated, Gilligan’s Dreams: The Other Side of the Island. Originally published in 2012, it was reissued this year by Terra Alta-based Headline Books.
The title is a play on Bob’s nickname for his wife. The Dominion Post talked with Dreama about the book, her life with Bob, raising their son, and the life she’s made for herself since Bob passed away in 2005.
The beginning of a love affair
They met in Florida in 1977, long after “Dobie Gillis” (pre-Gilligan, where Bob played beatnik Maynard G. Krebs), “Gilligan” and several other short-lived TV series Bob had starred in – and after three failed marriages for Bob.
Bob was traveling the country then, doing local theater, and they were to play the leads in a production of “Play It Again, Sam.”
She writes, “I thought to myself with a giggle, ‘I’m going to be kissing and hugging on Gilligan.’ I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around that.”
“As an actress at the time, I had worked with a lot of celebrities prior to Bob,” she told The Dominion Post. “So I realized that the human being isn’t necessarily what you’re seeing on screen.” And he wasn’t. The sparks flew.
“He took my hand and it was just – it was just something that was instantaneous. The cast around us felt it. … It was something that was very real and ended up lasting through almost 30 years, with a lot of ups and downs.”
When people asked, she would say, “I fell in love with his brain. It was an amazing brain, unlike any I had run across. … Bob challenged me and I found that I loved being challenged.”
Early on, one challenge almost ended the relationship before it could fully blossom.
“He did have a drinking problem”, she said, though she never thought of him as an alcoholic. He could go months, years, without a drink. “When it wasn’t there, he was fine.” But if alcohol was present, he couldn’t stop at one, he’d get sloppy drunk.
It kept her on edge pretty often, she said, but after a year, one last angry confrontation opened Bob’s eyes and he stopped.
Dreama said she debated including that segment on Bob’s dark side, but he had told her that whenever she wrote the story of their lives, she should be real, and that was part of who he was. The book was meant to be inspirational and she knows she’s not the only person to have to deal with that. “It touches so many.”
They married in Las Vegas in 1979 and spent six years touring the country together, acting together, enjoying each other. During that period came the three “Gilligan’s Island” TV movies (Dreama had a part in the final one) and a pilot for a TV show called “Scamps,” in which they shared the leads. (It wasn’t picked up, but you can see Bob promoting the pilot on the David Letterman show on YouTube.)
And baby makes three
In 1983 – Bob was 48, Dreama was 33 – they decided to pursue having a child together (Bob had three others fro his prior marriages) after Bob completed one more non-Gilligan TV movie commitment. Colin was born in January 1984. His umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and he was blue, but after he was freed he was in otherwise good shape and they were looking forward to parenting together.
Colin grew but he didn’t develop. In January 1986, the day after the shuttle Challenger explosion, a doctor at UCLA Medical Center told them Colin was “retarded” and for his good and theirs, they should institutionalize him. But that wasn’t an option.
For four grueling years, they participated in The Program, run by a doctor who had written a book about “brain-injured” children and ran the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. Brain-injured was the doctor’s term; Dreama doesn’t use the word autism until near the end of the book. Colin learned to walk during that time, but Bob persuaded Dreama that The Program was otherwise not helping them and they should move on.
Colin was nonverbal, could not take care of himself, had no regular sleep pattern and required 24-hour attention. Dreama says in the book, “It’s hard to explain how Colin took over our lives to the point we really had no life except the one that revolved around him and his needs, but he did.”
His own world
The core of their devotion to Colin and each other is summed up in a scene in the last third of the memoir, when Bob raises the idea that when they both die, Colin wouldn’t notice. “When he said that I was so indignant,” she said when asked about it.
But Bob wasn’t being cruel and she recalls his words in the book.
“We did all of that because we loved him. We feel the love. We know why we sacrificed. Because of us, Colin feels safe and loved. All the time we devoted to him wasn’t for nothing, not when it gave him a sense of self.”
You can’t picture Gilligan saying that. But Bob Denver said it.
Settling in Almost Heaven
About 1991, they decided they wanted to settle in one place, and it was Bob’s idea to choose West Virginia. They found a house at the top of a hill, at the end of a quiet road outside Princeton, and settled in to care for Colin.
In 1993, Bob launched the Denver Foundation to help parents caring for children like Colin. In 2000 they launched Little Buddy Radio, a nonprofit to raise money for the foundation, and in 2003 hired a part-time caretaker for Colin, granting them some freedom to run the radio station.
Then, in 2005, with Bob’s health noticeably declining, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. A weak heart necessitated a delay in the surgery that would take out his voice box. Over the next six months, he underwent radiation therapy and Dreama suffered a heart attack while Bob was in the hospital. The cancer, the radiation and Bob’s weak heart all took its toll and Bob passed in September, four days before their 28th anniversary.
Asked about that conversation with Bob, that Colin wouldn’t notice if they were gone, she said, “When Bob passed away, and I say this with love, it was basically true. The three of us had been joined at the hip for more than 20 years. Colin’s little life just went on.”
Colin’s caregivers told her afterward that when they were first gone to North Carolina for Bob’s surgery and treatment, Colin would drag them from room to room in the house. They felt like he was looking for them.
Appreciating what is
Now, knowing she’s set everything up for him to the best of her ability – he has three caretakers now and lives in own house with them across the road — “There’s some consolation in knowing that he just lives in a different world than we do.”
One time, she had shared with Bob that they would never experience Colin’s first day of school, his first date and all those things, and regretted that Colin would miss those things. But Bob, always practical, told her, “Honey, he doesn’t know about those things. … It’s not even on his radar. So he doesn’t know he’s missing those things.”
After Bob’s passing and a long and difficult grieving period, Dreama began building a new life. She kept the foundation and Little Buddy Radio going. In 2010-11 she helped create the Always Free Honor Flight Program – the West Virginia chapter of the national Honor Flight program that transports veterans to memorials in Washington, D.C. (The pandemic disrupted the program last year and this, but she’s looking forward to resuming in 2022.)
And in 2014 she led the effort to have the West Virginia Legislature adopt John Denver’s song “Country Roads” as the state song. (John is no relation; his Denver was a stage name.) “It was just one of the best days of my life when that was adopted,” she said.
Asked why so many West Virginians have embraced the song, she said, “ I think because it puts West Virginia in a really positive light. This is a much-maligned state.” But West Virginians have told her stories of where they were in the world when someone sang the song to them. A news crew even flew in from Amsterdam to interview her on Little Buddy Radio about the song.
She’s made a successful plunge into the world of children’s book author with Four Bears in a Box – inspired by Bob – that’s won several awards. It’s also published by Headline Books.
The greater good
Her current project is raising money for the renovation of a 1911 theater in Princeton, now to be named the Renaissance Theater. It will house a Bob Denver museum and she’s combing through memorabilia to display there.
She quotes a bit of wisdom she learned from others: “Doing something for the greater good takes you out of that woe-is-me place.”
And her story of survival and going on to create a fulfilling life, she hopes, can serve as an inspiration for others who are struggling.
In the final few pages of the book, she briefly describes how her rebuilding her life put her on her first steps of her journey of faith. She expanded on it with The Dominion Post.
In 2015, after her diagnosis of breast cancer, she had been doing what’s called “practicing gratitude,” thanking the universe for all the good things.
But on this morning, while walking her dog, she unexpectedly fell to her knees and thanked God instead. “I think of that day as surrender.”
She’s grown up in church, she said, attended Sunday school and church camp, but like so many others had strayed from the path.
But that day changed her. “This came out nowhere, I still don’t quite understand. I realized, in that moment somehow, that everything that had happened to me … had led me to that moment, on the side of the road, on my knees, crying like a baby.
“I was thanking God for all the hard parts of my life. Somehow, I understood in that moment that all of those hard parts had formed me, and all of those valleys I had been in, He had been with me although I didn’t realize it or acknowledge it at the time, He had been there.”
She developed a hunger for God’s word, she said. “On that day, it just changed me. It changed me from the inside out. … It’s not about religion. It’s really about relationship.”
She closed the interview with the same words she closes her book: “I choose hope.”
Gilligan’s Dreams: The Other Side of the Island and Four Bears in a Box are both available at Amazon and at the Denver Foundation website, bobdenver.com, under Gilligan’s Gift Gallery. The Denver Foundation copies are autographed by Dreama.
TWEET David Beard @dbeardtdp EMAIL dbeard@dominionpost.com
