Lassie Stays Home With Nick

Lassie must be the most well-adjusted dog in canine history. Some pooches end up at the doggie psychiatrist every time their owners change their brand of kibble or leave them with the vet during vacation. In the past five decades, Lassie has gone from owner to owner with nary a woof of complaint.

In the movies, Lassie’s masters included Roddy McDowall (“Lassie Come Home”) and Peter Lawford (“Son of Lassie”). During her initial 20-year run on TV, the collie extraordinaire lived with three different families and three forest rangers.

All this upheaval in her life came on top of the fact that “she” was always played by a “he.” Yet Lassie always managed to retain her telepathic powers and her ability to understand everything humans told her, as well as to single-handedly capture criminals.

Lassie is alive and well on the airwaves every day thanks to Nickelodeon. Every day Nick repeats the best-known episodes, featuring Jon Provost as Lassie’s little owner Timmy. And the cable network recently began airing episodes from the first three seasons of the series, calling it “Jeff’s Collie.”

Lassie premiered on CBS on Sept. 12, 1954. Tommy Rettig, fresh from his success in the Dr. Seuss fantasy film “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T,” starred as Jeff Miller, an 11-year-old boy who lived on a small farm in the fictitious Midwestern town of Calverton, with his widowed mother Ellen (Jan Clayton, who had starred on Broadway in “Carousel”), his “Gramps” (George Cleveland) and, of course, Lassie.

In the spring of 1957, Jon Provost joined the cast as Timmy, a runaway orphan boy who was taken in by the Millers. When Gramps died that fall, Ellen Miller discovered she couldn’t operate the farm by herself and sold the spread to a childless couple, the Martins (Cloris Leachman and Jon Shepodd). Jeff and his mom moved to the “big city” and Timmy and Lassie stayed on with the Martins. The following season, June Lockhart, who had appeared in “Son of Lassie,” and Hugh Reilly took over as Ruth and Paul Martin.

Rettig’s career went into a tailspin after he left the series, but he now owns and operates a successful computer company in Los Angeles. He reprised his role as Jeff last year for a guest shot on the syndicated series, “The New Lassie.”

“Jeff’s Collie” airs Mondays-Fridays at 2:30 p.m. on Nickelodeon. “Lassie” airs Mondays-Fridays at 9 a.m. and Saturdays-Sundays at 6 a.m.