Are You a Whit Spotter? Viewers of TV and movies from the 1950s through the '70s probably are

An ambassador in Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the technocrat who ran The Time Tunnel, a conniving U.S. senator in the tense political movie, “7 Days in May” – all these screen roles highlighted the tightly wired officiousness yet lilting voice that were hallmarks of the man who played them.

Whit Bissell was one of the most prolific character actors, those performers you recognize, yet don’t. Bissell preferred the term “supporting player,” to “character actor,” but either way, he excelled at projecting his own mellow and soothing qualities into a scene, then practicing that courtesy of a character actor by bowing out to let the big stars, or younger hot-shots do the iconic parts that made their names household words.

But then if you were born Whitner Nutting Bissell, vocal and facial gifts, rather than your name, likely would be your performing strengths.

An awkward moniker and intense administrator roles belie Whit Bissell’s real-life relaxed, charming and well-read nature. Still, friend Bernie Shine wrote on Leonard Maltin’s entertainment web site that it took some tenacity by Bissell, the son of a New York City physician, to break into the business.

"He told me that when he was starting out he found himself on the opposite side of the desk of a famous Hollywood mogul who bluntly told him that he didn’t have what it takes to be a leading man, stating, ‘I don’t see any women burning with desire when they see you,’ “ Shine wrote. “Whit responded, ‘Perhaps not, but I do think I could make them feel other emotions, such as laughing, crying, or caring.’ ”

Indeed, character actors may be told early in their careers they don’t have the sizzle or the physical stature to be heartthrobs or heroes. But after years of frequent, often brief appearances, the masterful facial skills and appealing voices of the most successful make them recognized, or even craved.

A character actor’s constant moving from one production to another to play unrelated roles makes casting and filming for TV and movies less costly, and it makes the actor something of a rolling stone.

But they can gather the moss of recognition if they achieve long professional life. Many character actors, or supporting players, have sub-cultures of close followers and appreciation of their skills has grown due to the Internet. 

                      2 scenes of Whit in charge of "The Time Tunnel," 1966:

  

A certain studious air helped land the bespectacled Bissell parts as scientists in many of the best sci-fi movies of the 1950s through the early ‘70s, including “I was a Teenage Frankenstein,” “Soylent Green,” “I was a Teenage Werewolf,” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He also had roles in “The Magnificent Seven” and “Pete ‘n’ Tillie,” and appeared in such stalwart TV series as McCloud, Land of the Giants, Here’s Lucy, Gomer Pyle: USMC, Kojak, Cannon, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Ben Casey, generally playing trusted figures like doctors, chaplains and professors.

                                 On the witness stand in The Cain Mutiny, 1954:

 Of Whit Bissell, a post on Silverscreenoasis.com said:

“I've often thought of Whit as something of a second-tier Hume Cronyn. I've always liked his speaking voice, which I think very rich, mellow, and distinctive.”

Another on that site summed up the value of the supporting player genre to which Whit Bissell devoted his life:

“ ‘Character actor' isn't a good enough term to describe Whit’s talents, so, for many years now, I have referred to any reliable character actor that happens to pop up as a ‘Whit.’ It’s an honorific term, meant to notice and celebrate his and other actors' contributions as support in countless films…. One of the pleasures of watching TV with friends in the 70s was to do ‘Whit-spotting’ and point him out to others. 'Oh yeah! I've seen that guy before!' was the usual response.”

                                              __________________________

Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA has been spotting Whit all his life, but has been aware of it only since becoming fascinated with the movie "7 Days in May" in the 1990s. 

 

Bonus footage: Whit Bissell in a 1965 Profiles in Courage re-enactment of President Woodrow Wilson appointing Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's rather high school civics tame, but displays Whit's skills:

 

4 Realities in Kentucky that have kept Democrats from Beating McConnell

Aside from the classic advantages of an incumbent and his crushing of campaign finance reform efforts, four problems endemic to Kentucky have for the last 30 years made the nationally despised Mitch McConnell unbeatable in The Bluegrass State.

1. Lousy challengers

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes excited the nation with charisma, sharpness, and energy, as well as a small poll lead over McConnell in the early stages of the 2014 campaign. And idealistic people poured into Kentucky to join progressives here to work for her election.

What if she had accomplished the glorious victory over Senator McConnell? Well, since 2014, Lundergan Grimes – momentarily the hope of progressives -- has been accused of receiving illegal campaign money from her father, who is a longtime Democratic fundraiser; misusing data from the Secretary of State office for her partisan career ends; and riding in a state police car at 100 mph for the not-exactly emergency purpose of getting to the Kentucky Derby quickly. 

The previous Democrat challenger was Bruce Lunsford, who in the banner anti-Republican year of 2008 looked strong early against McConnell. Lunsford dripped with Kentucky credentials – he had played high school basketball, cut tobacco and owned a thoroughbred horse. But left and right soured on him as the word got around that the massive health care company Lunsford ran had been fined over alleged dumping of Medicare patients in favor of more profitable cases, and that investors in the firm had accused him of leaving them high and dry.

In the ’08 race, Lunsford had consistently maintained a small lead, but sputtered in the final weeks to a 6 percentage point loss.

In 1990, McConnell was opposed for a second Senate term by the once polished and assertive two-term Louisville mayor Harvey Sloane, a physician, Great Society veteran and Peace Corps volunteer. His lightning-like first mayoral term of 1973 to ’77 had brought the long stagnating city better mass transit, expanded minority business opportunities, EMS services, superb architectural preservation and a fine science museum.

That was then. In 1990, Senate-candidate Sloane was cited by police for open alcohol on his boat, received a letter of criticism from the AMA for the frowned-on practice of prescribing himself sleeping pills, and appeared in his own ads with a sallow face and lethargic voice.

And during a stint in the ‘80s as head of Jefferson County government (McConnell’s former position) Sloane took in campaign contributions from companies which received county contracts. Sounds more like Mitch than the solution to him.

In the 1990 Senatorial election, Harvey Sloane – who as mayor in the ‘70s had been chosen one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Americans -- failed to excite the electorate and lost by eight points.

There have been other flops by McConnell opponents, but that’s enough pain.

2. Unbelievably low voter turnout

I bristled in 1975 when a high school civics textbook comparing attitudes about voting among actual Americans quoted a woman described as a waitress in a diner in Louisville saying, “I don’t have no dealings in politics.”

What an awful image for our community, but then and now, there’s no denying its authenticity – diner workers in this city 45 years ago were basically rural Kentucky transplants (today, they’re immigrants and tattooed undergrads), and looking at voter turnout numbers in the Eastern and Southern Kentucky counties denoted by the above dialect produces some shockers.

In the 2019 primary, Laurel County had an 18 percent turnout, Wayne County had a 15 percent turnout, and Casey County (the home of a recent governor, no less) had an 11 percent turnout. One county’s name may evoke the “of the people, by the people, for the people” oratory, but where were the people of Lincoln County in June 2019? – just 17 percent of them voted. Now you see why those poor counties keep going Republican; voting is overwhelmingly done by the propertied residents and unionized coal miners made scared of climate action by one-sided pundits.  

Statewide, the 2019 primary voter turnout was 19.3 percent, way up from the projected 12.5 percent. Yes, 19 percent was an unexpected surge! And 92 percent of Kentucky’s 3.4 million voter registrations are with the Democrats or Republicans, so the fact that independents can’t vote in party primaries is not a major cause of low turnout.

When the Hillary Clinton v. Bernie Sanders ’16 primary race had passions at an all-time high that produced gigantic crowds in Louisville and elsewhere, the statewide primary turnout was 20.6 percent. (Caveat: the Secretary of State website says voters who had died or moved out of state were not subtracted from the eligible numbers, so turnout may actually have been more like 25 percent, but whoop-e-de-do.)

What about general elections? In 2015, Republican Matt Bevin, a vehement right-winger, won the governorship with a general election turnout of 30 percent. His “mandate” came from 16 out of 100 registered voters.

Mitch owes the power he has amassed in the last 34 years to Kentuckians staying at home the first Tuesday of every sixth November. He has driven the GOP’s nationwide voter suppression crusade because he appreciates the weapon of non-voting.  

There have been some recent positive counter-trends. In the 2018 mid-term general election, the number of people in Louisville/Jefferson County who turned out was about 290,000; that's up from about 255,000 in the 2014 mid-terms. And that increase came in a year with no U.S. Senate race or governor’s race statewide, indicating a big anti-Trump sentiment. (UPDATE: The strongly Trump-endorsed Bevin was narrowly beaten in November 2019 by Democrat Andy Beshear in a clear rejection of Bevin's confrontational method of governing; but all other Republicans won their statewide races that election.)

3. Kentucky Democrats don’t innovate
As said, Alison Lundergan Grimes is the daughter of a well-connected political fundraiser. The 2019 Democrat governor-elect Andy Beshear is the son of the last Democratic governor Steve Beshear. The chairmanship of the state's largest Fortune 500 icon Humana Inc. was handed to David Jones Jr., son of the retiring chairman David Jones Sr. The nine-time Pulitzer wining newspaper the Louisville Courier-Journal was made journalistically great and politically influential by Barry Bingham Sr., then Barry Bingham Jr.
In a state where the right last name and where you went to high school are everything, insularity and imitativeness are bred.
A glaring absence of fresh, original spin was displayed by Grimes in 2014 in a clunky flub that turned a tied race into a sure McConnell win. 
Grimes knew that during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board she’d be asked if she had voted for Barack Obama – McConnell had been asked in 2008 by the paper if he had voted for a George W. Bush who in that year was deeply unpopular. (The senator answered that he had voted for W.)

Imagine Lundergan Grimes had answered this way: “Having given President Obama my vote, and being in his party, I can bargain with him for Kentucky’s interests. Mitch McConnell can’t do that. Since Mitch automatically opposes everything the administration proposes, the White House has no incentive to try to compromise with him. So, Senator McConnell cannot negotiate for our interests. But I will.”  

Instead of confidently re-framing her vote for Obama as this tool of access to benefit the state, Lundergan Grimes dived under the table. She wouldn’t say for whom she had voted in 2012 or ’08, citing the “sanctity” of the secret ballot, adding that it was her right by law to keep her vote private, and an imperative of her Secretary of State position to do so.

 Her lame attempt to appear principled, instead of enabling Lundergan Grimes to sidestep Obama’s unpopularity in a coal and tobacco state, drew cynicism and ridicule. It focused far more attention on the clash between Obama’s climate action plan and the wishes of the coal industry.  Which brings us to…

4. Coal is an emperor with no clothes

The myth that coal jobs are endangered by environmentalism isn’t challenged widely because no leader in the state’s public or private sector will open a discussion about what really took the jobs away – overreliance on coal.

Coal employment in Kentucky had already been vanishing before Obama clean air rules – in 2001, Eastern Kentucky produced 110 million tons of coal, but just about 80 million tons in 2009. The drop has been to 20 million tons in 2017, and Western Kentucky’s surface coal mines have similarly lost business.

But the plummeting numbers are due to competition from natural gas and renewables, not Obama’s clean air plan. The U.S. Energy Information Agency said that 20-million-ton yearly amount in Eastern Kentucky is expected to stay steady through 2035, with or without the Obama climate action plan.

Switching to solar and wind -- and developing cultural resources in the manner of the coal-less and booming Appalachian city of Ashville, N.C. -- could bring jobs back to rural Kentucky, but no one in Kentucky’s power structure dares talk of converting the economy. Instead, the one-note economic strategy is, bring back coal jobs.
 But they aren’t retrievable. An Appalachian Regional Commission study found: “After aggressive mining in Central Appalachia for more than a century, the remaining coal is more expensive to extract, compared to other coal-producing regions, because it tends to be deeper in the ground and/or seams tend to be thinner.”

This is why the price of electricity from Eastern Kentucky coal will no longer be competitive with natural gas, solar and wind. But an isolated and predictable state polity keeps us from hearing this.

Kentucky sorely lacks visionary state legislators, progressive labor unions, a great university, or pluralism in media. The two metro daily newspapers, the Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, have reported about renewables and natural gas causing coal's decline, but out there among the party leaders, chambers of commerce, and the all-powerful political fundraisers, it's as though this has never been said.
Outside of Louisville, Kentucky is as socially conservative as Mississippi, but the state as a whole has an 8 percent black population (as opposed to Mississippi’s 37 percent).

The racial differential, combined with the one-note mythmaking on coal jobs explains why since Donald Trump became president the Kentucky Republican Party has added 72,000 registered voters, to just 1,100 by the Democrats.

Democrats must challenge the coal industry’s official line, or they will continue to inflict numbers like those on themselves.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA, the hometown of a Mitch McConnell known as - would you believe it - moderate and bi-partisan while the head of county government.