Beginning to Date (1953)
An anxious teenage boy nervous about asking out a girl a foot taller than him is coached by his swim instructor, played by Studs Terkel, who compares gathering the courage to ask for a date to working up the nerve to dive off a board — a skill built only through practice.
Produced by Milan Herzog for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Beginning to Date is chiefly remembered today for casting a young Studs Terkel — later a Pulitzer-winning oral historian and broadcaster — as the reassuring swim coach, a small curiosity that outlived the film’s otherwise standard dating-anxiety formula.
Background
Beginning to Date was produced for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films by Milan Herzog, who joined the company in 1946 and over the following decades produced roughly 400 educational shorts there before retiring in 1973. The film belongs to the social-guidance genre that filled American classrooms through the 1950s, built around a staged scenario: an anxious teenage boy, too nervous to ask out a girl a foot taller than him, is coached toward working up the nerve to ask for a date. The device at its center, comparing romantic courage to diving off a board, a skill built only through repeated practice, is typical of the genre’s habit of reducing social anxiety to a teachable technique.
What to watch for
The film is remembered today chiefly for its swim coach, played by a young Studs Terkel decades before he became known as a Pulitzer-winning oral historian and radio broadcaster. Terkel’s performance is understated against the stilted dialogue typical of the genre, and the diving analogy he delivers, framing a request for a date as a skill perfected only through practice and repeated failure, gives the film its one memorable idea. Beyond that curiosity, the short otherwise follows the standard social-guidance template: a narrated problem, a patient adult authority figure, and a tidy resolution meant to reassure anxious teenage viewers that their embarrassment was normal and fixable.
