I think we might reasonably surmise that Doc is a bit afraid of them. Also, I think it's not necessarily clear how often they hang out there.
I think it's also quite possible that he saw most of them regularly in the store when they were kids, and he may have had fondness for most or all of them from that time. And it seems that the Jets may have seemed fairly harmless until pretty recently.
I think we may also be able to read a bit into Doc clearly have been written as Jewish. The role was created by an actor who had been blacklisted. Not that the audience would have necessarily known the latter, and that actor didn't stay with the show all that long, but I think we can perhaps glean from these things that Doc was meant to be seen as someone who leans left, that he is what Archie Bunker would have called a bleeding heart liberal, and he may even have hoped he might have a positive influence on them when he saw them starting to go in a violent, borderline criminal direction. And then he saw he was wrong.
I think all of these things, or some combination, might be part of an actor's choices, but his being a bit (or more than a bit) afraid of them by itself is quite enough. |
