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Love of dogs continues for iconic star of Lassie TV show

Nikki Silverstein

Sep 26, 2023

Love of dogs continues for iconic star of Lassie TV show

What does a tiny toothless senior pooch living out his golden years in Santa Rosa have in common with Lassie, the most famous Hollywood dog of all time?

Both canines captured the heart of Jon Provost, the actor who played young Timmy Martin on the Lassie television series from 1957 to 1964. Provost was already a veteran actor when, at the age of seven, he began working side-by-side with Lassie, the majestic rough collie.

Actually, Provost co-starred with three different Lassies during his seven-year tenure on the top-rated CBS program. Like all the dogs who played the role of the female Lassie, Timmy’s three faithful companions were males.

“We only had one Lassie at a time,” Provost, 73, told me during an interview earlier this month. “The last dog [Baby], I worked with for five years, so he and I bonded like crazy. I loved that dog. He loved me. But if I told him to do something, give him a command, he’d look at me and say, ‘You’re my buddy, not my trainer.’”

Today, Provost’s love affair with dogs continues. He and his wife, Laurie Jacobson, recently adopted Casper, a 12-year-old Maltese, who had been surrendered to a shelter. The family of three resides in Santa Rosa, where Casper is settling into a new routine filled with affection, lots of treats and leisurely strolls.

**RESCUED** Jon Provost and Laurie Jacobson recently adopted Casper, a 12-year-old Maltese. Photo courtesy of Jon Provost.

That’s how I had occasion to chat with Provost and Jacobson. Casper came from Muttville, the Bay Area’s senior dog rescue, where I’ve volunteered for years.

Casper’s story certainly pulls on heartstrings. But I couldn’t resist learning more about the fictional little boy, Timmy, and his dog, Lassie. Fortunately, Provost was happy to reminisce about Lassie and his days as a child actor.

His acting career began when he was two years old, while his family was living in Pasadena. Provost’s mother responded to a newspaper ad placed by Warner Brothers. The studio was seeking a two- to three-year-old boy for a film, So Big, starring Jane Wyman and Sterling Hayden.

“My parents were not show business people,” Provost said. “My mother grew up on a farm in Texas, and her idol was Jane Wyman, the actress. Mom took me to the audition because she wanted to meet Jane Wyman and get an autograph. I got the job and then a contract with RKO.”

Before landing the role of Timmy in Lassie, Provost appeared in about 10 movies. He acted alongside Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby in the 1954 film, The Country Girl, and with Rod Steiger and Anita Ekberg in the 1956 film, Back from Eternity. There were also parts in early live television programs.

Then came the role of a lifetime, Timmy Martin. Provost remembers the seven years on Lassie with great fondness, especially his TV mom, June Lockhart. It was Lockhart who instilled in him that although he was a little boy, he was still a professional actor on the same playing field as the adults.

“June is still with us,” Provost said. “She’s 98 years old. We are the only living members from the series and have kept in touch over the years. Every birthday, every Christmas.”

Lassie’s owner and trainer, Rudd Weatherwax, also played a pivotal role in Provost’s life. Weatherwax, a surrogate grandfather to Provost, wasn’t above bribing the young actor.

“Rudd sat me down when we first started shooting, and said, ‘Look, if you don’t bug Lassie—don’t pull his tail, don’t ride him, don’t sit on him—for your eighth birthday, I will give you a Lassie puppy.’ I worked very hard that first year to do everything I was supposed to do,” Provost said.

True to his word, Weatherwax presented Provost with a male rough collie puppy. Provost named him Rudd, to honor Weatherwax.

“That was the only collie I ever owned,” Provost said. “Collies are a lot of maintenance. Lassie was constantly groomed—24/7.”

Provost starred in 249 episodes of Lassie. Week after week, Timmy and Lassie embarked on adventures. Lassie pulled Timmy’s loose tooth, freed him from quicksand and helped him bring an escaped baby circus elephant out of the woods. However, Lassie never rescued Timmy from a well.

“Timmy never fell in the well,” Provost said. “My mother saved every script. Somebody fell into the well, and Timmy and Lassie saved him.”

Jacobson, who helped write her husband’s autobiography, concurs. Although most Americans have heard the “Timmy fell down the well” tale, it never happened.

“We don’t really know where it came from,” Jacobson said. “We know everybody uses it. They use it when their dogs bark. Stephen Colbert on The Late Show uses it once a month. It’s everywhere.”

While Provost still accepts the occasional acting role, he and Jacobson are currently focusing their energy on helping Casper, their senior Maltese, adjust to his new digs.

“Casper has pretty severe separation anxiety,” Jacobson said. “He went through a lot before we got him.”

Indeed, he did. The adorable little Maltese lived with the same person for most of his 12 years, until she was forced to give him up because of a change in her housing situation. After that, Casper went to two different shelters before ending up at Muttville, the senior dog rescue. Along the way, he was diagnosed with severe dental disease.

“Casper lost his original owner and all his teeth within a matter of weeks,” Jacobson said. “It’s no wonder he has separation anxiety.”

Still, Casper captivated Provost and Jacobson when they met him at Muttville, and they instantly knew he was the perfect dog for their family. Coincidentally, the couple has just launched Spray, Mix ’n Go!, a calming CBD product for dogs who suffer from separation anxiety, a condition that causes distress for canines when they’re apart from their humans.

From Lassie to Casper, Provost has provided friendship to famous dogs and dogs in need. And he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

“Dogs and Timmy are synonymous,” Provost said. “I learned a lot from Rudd [Lassie’s trainer], his philosophy. Lassie was treated like royalty. All the training was through rewards and respect. That’s what I learned from Rudd—respect. I saw the benefit of what canines can do for people. The rest is history.”

Regulator announces plan to fix California’s insurance crisis. Who will benefit?

Ben Christopher

Sep 25, 2023

Regulator announces plan to fix California’s insurance crisis. Who will benefit?

A week after negotiations to rescue California’s floundering home insurance market stalled out in the Legislature, the state’s top insurance regulator put out his own rescue plan that effectively amounts to a trade for the state’s major insurers.

Under proposed regulations, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced last week, major insurers will be required to cover a certain share of homeowners in the state’s most wildfire-prone areas. In exchange, the Department of Insurance will allow companies to charge more to cover the rising costs of doing business in a fire-ravaged state.

Lara called the package of new proposed regulations “the largest insurance reform” since 1988, the year California voters passed a proposition requiring insurance companies to get prior approval before raising premiums.

The plan is meant to reverse what has amounted to a slow-motion exodus of private home insurers from the state. In the last year and a half, seven of the top 12 property insurers operating in California have either placed new restrictions on where they do business or stopped selling new policies here entirely.

The biggest player of all, State Farm, announced a freeze on new policies in May, kicking off a fresh round of panic among homeowners scrambling to find affordable insurance policies and lawmakers eager to tackle the crisis.

For years, insurance companies have complained that current rates and the existing regulatory process don’t allow them to recoup the cost of doing business in the state’s most at-risk regions. By easing some of those restrictions, while requiring the companies to expand their coverage, “it’s the department calling the bluff of insurers,” said Rex Frazier, president of Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group.

In principle, that’s a trade-off insurers are willing to make, he added, though it will ultimately depend on how the specific regulations are crafted in the coming months.

Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer group United Policyholders, struck a similar note.

Lara “did not sell out to the industry here, in my opinion; he struck a deal,” she said. “Whether it’s going to manifest positively overall…the proof will be in the premiums.”

But Consumer Watchdog—an advocacy group that Lara all but called out by name during his presentation as “bombastic” and a group “materially benefiting” from the current regulatory system—came away with a difficult conclusion.

“He’s basically capitulated to the industry,” Jamie Court, the group’s president, said of Lara. “There’s not really much coming back for the consumer in here.”

Picking Up Where Legislators Left Off

Despite mounting public angst and calls for action from top lawmakers, the politics of addressing the problem in the Legislature proved too thorny this year.

In the final weeks of the legislative session that ended on Sept. 14, lawmakers scrambled to bridge the demands of insurers—who called for higher premiums to cover more of their costs and for a more flexible rate-setting process—and those of consumer groups, who resisted calls to add to the financial burdens of homeowners. After negotiations floundered, Gov. Gavin Newsom hinted that his administration and Lara’s Department of Insurance might be willing to act on their own.

In a statement, Sen. Bill Dodd, a Napa politician involved in the unsuccessful negotiations, cheered Lara’s announcement. “Given that the Legislature is not in session right now, utilizing the commissioner’s regulatory authority makes good sense,” he said. “I know there is work that still needs to be done and I’ll be supporting these efforts any way I can.”

Insurance companies have pointed to three main reasons that doing business in California is increasingly a losing proposition: Escalating wildfire risk, ever-rising construction costs and the global price of reinsurance—insurance policies that insurance companies, themselves, take out.

While costs have increased, the amount the companies are allowed to charge homeowners is tightly capped and closely regulated in California, making home insurance policies relatively cheap by national standards. In order to raise rates, major insurers need a sign-off from the Department of Insurance.

Currently, insurance companies are not allowed to factor in the cost of reinsurance into those applications. They are also prohibited from using forward-looking models to predict future costs—something insurers say they desperately need as a warming climate and residential development encroaching into fire-prone areas results in fire seasons that are longer and more catastrophic than they have been in the past.

Lara proposed giving companies both of those tools, though they will apparently only be allowed to itemize the cost of reinsurance as it pertains to California. It’s unclear how this calculation will be made.

Bach, with United Policyholders, said allowing companies to use predictive models isn’t inherently a bad idea—“Are these models nefarious tools of Satan? No,” she said—but hopes there will be transparency about which models are used and how they work.

In exchange for these new tools, companies will be required to cover homeowners in wildfire-prone parts of the state at 85% of their statewide coverage. For example, if a company provides 10% of the homeowner policies across California, they would be required to provide 8.5% of the coverage in areas deemed “at-risk.”

Court, with Consumer Watchdog, said 85% is 15% too little. “It’s a really sh—y deal,” he said.

California homeowners currently unable to get insurance on the private market can turn to the FAIR Plan, a last resort issuer of fire coverage backstopped through a levy on regulated insurers. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of homeowners covered by the FAIR Plan more than doubled to roughly 3% of all homeowners.

But the FAIR Plan policies are expensive and limited. And if the FAIR Plan runs out of money, it’s legally required to refill its coffers by levying a surcharge on major insurers. The prospect of the FAIR Plan running out of cash and slapping the industry with the bill has also encouraged insurance companies to scale back their coverage.

Consumer Watchdog regularly challenges the applications for higher premiums that insurance companies submit to the state, an intervention allowed for under the 1988 ballot measure. Today, Lara also said he wants to make it easier for the public to see who intervenes and how much they are compensated for doing so.

“One entity is involved in nearly 75% of all interventions for rate approvals, materially benefiting from a process that is meant for a broader public participation,” he said, referring to the nonprofit.

Lara also said that “throwing bombs is easy, and putting out bombastic statements from entrenched interest groups doesn’t benefit anyone.”

Court said his organization would continue to fight back as the department drafts the detailed regulations. “We’ll be battling over this stuff for many months to come,” he added.