Mister, we could use a man like WHO again?

All right, dummy up, all ‘o youz!

Here’s the story of the other U.S. presidential campaign scandal from 1972, though this one really was nothing more than third-rate.

And it’s about a transgression not by that bigoted vindictive liar Richard Nixon, who had treasonously sabotaged a peace agreement in 1968 to get in the White House in the first place, then obstructed justice four years later to stay there. Nope, this lapse in integrity was by the progressive George McGovern.

It was so tiny a lapse it is historically irrelevant -- forgotten by all but the most hardcore political history wonks. Which is why I am the person writing about it.

If a burglary and cover-up didn’t prevent President Nixon from trouncing the liberal senator from South Dakota by 22 percentage points in the popular vote, a little identity sleight of hand by a popular actor on behalf of the McGovern campaign didn’t stave off the resounding 1972 landslide loss either.

For context, consider the landscape of McGovern’s race in the autumn of that year: much of his own Democratic party is not with him, the AFL-CIO under the powerful George Meany has declined to endorse him, his central issue the Vietnam War has been wound down (and the Nixon campaign’s 1968 sabotage is still secret).

                                     
The '72 Race on the Airwaves: Each side defines Senator McGovern: He says he will make things fairer for the average American. Nixon says he would leave us defenseless.

As though his problems weren't enough, McGovern had to eat an unprecedented amount of crow days after the Democratic Convention by replacing his vice-presidential running mate Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. As the fall campaign went on, the voters were not terribly concerned about the Watergate break-in, instead fearing McGovern’s perceived “radicalism.”

Now, addressing this r-word label, comes perhaps candidate George McGovern’s last hope: a TV ad featuring the very face of meat-and-potatoes American conservatism.

The ad opens with Carroll O’Connor striking exactly the seated pose of his signature character Archie Bunker when Archie would be in his iconic living room chair, the spot from which he would launch brusque and uninformed conservative salvos weekly to TV audiences.

In this ad for McGovern, O’Connor decries, “the radicalism of the present administration.”

Nothing misleading about that. But O’Connor then says:

 

“Radicalism is what any conservative must try to remove from authority, and that is why I, as a conservative man, am going to vote with confidence for Senator George McGovern.”

 

Calling Nixon radical makes perfect sense; his war on drugs is a radical right purge of minorities, his invasion of Cambodia opened the way for Pol Pot, and his agricultural policies would soon enable corporations to obliterate the small family farm. That’s the stuff of Juan Peron or Mussolini.

Whereas the “radicalism” label is correct, just who is the labeler? Carroll O’Connor is recognized on sight as the snarling bigot Archie, but off the set of the wildly popular and influential CBS show “All in the Family,” he is an eclectic and educated liberal.

O’Connor, who would go on to do TV ads for Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 runs in presidential primaries, is not the man who continually lauded “Richard E. Nixon,” in debates with his “pinko” and “Polack” son-in-law Mike. That was Archie Bunker.

It wasn’t O’Connor who tore into his wife’s cousin Maude’s pieties by declaring, “This country was ruined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” – or, for that matter, who started each show by harmonizing that, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!”

All that, as well, was Archie.

So just who is it who is telling the voters he is “a conservative man” in this ad for the most liberal Democrat to run for president?

Deceptive, or at least pandering though it may have been to represent Carroll O’Connor to the voters as Archie Bunker, the normally hyper-ethical Senator McGovern could read his dismal poll numbers during the fall of 1972. After the ad ran, McGovern talked it up, and did nothing to disabuse viewers who weren’t up on the fact that O’Connor was no Archie Bunker.

In a broadcast appearance by the candidate in Los Angeles featuring live phone calls from average voters, McGovern, as reported by the L.A. Times, said:

 

“I want to thank Carroll O’Connor for his endorsement…. Carroll O’Connor is known to most of you as Archie Bunker. The only thing we ask is that all of you who like Archie Bunker vote for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.”

 

Those who liked Archie Bunker were in large part what demographers would shortly call “Nixon-crats.” These were blue collar working families who celebrated the clichéd social conservatism trumpeted each Saturday evening by the fictional Queens loading dock worker. Archie’s full-voiced pronouncements demonstrated no awareness of how his family’s comfortable life at 704 Houser St. was possible because of FHA mortgage guarantees, the G.I. Bill, minimum wage laws, farm subsidies, and the right to form unions – all given to him by the FDR he calls the ruin of America.

This array of once cherished New Deal reforms, obscure to the voting public by the 1970s, wasn’t working as a rallying call any longer for the Democratic Party. The liberal O’Connor seemed to realize this, never alluding in the ad to the traditional Democrat economic egalitarian ideal, content to fashion himself a conservative.

And George McGovern, for all his idealism and 2 am-acceptance-speech devotion to principle, also was a politician. Playing to that tendency of the American public (or as his endorser might call them, “dingbats”) to confuse TV actors with their characters is the kind of thing to which politicians will resort when they’re down by 22 points.

Brian Arbenz enthusiastically backed George McGovern in 1972, even to the point of welcoming the endorsement of "a conservative man" who appeared to be named Archie. Hey, in elections ya do what ya gotta do. 

Tom Snyder's Tomorrow -- A Breakthrough in the Night

 

Tom Snyder's classic grasp of viewers'

First World problems

 Not just cursing the darkness, but lighting a candle.

 

In 1973, American TV was three networks, half-hour newscasts, the polite comedy of Carol Burnett and a long procession of strong-jawed cops named Kojak, Banacek, McCloud and Harry O.

All in the Family was past its peak, the cynicism of St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues was yet to come, Letterman was still in Indy and Donahue in Dayton, and Walter Cronkite could not have imagined Colbert and Stewart’s live audiences.

Television was an industry resting comfortably, its finances and ratings still unchallenged by cable or the Internet. And though Richard Nixon was falling before their eyes, newscasters, actors and producers felt the American system overall was legitimate, so TV programs were deferential to the power structure.

But in late 1973, the staid institution of television was about to get a little cooler. NBC quietly gave a few intrepid viewers a more edgy and street-smart talk show than the straight up Mike Douglass, the glittering Merv Griffin, or the iconic and aloof Johnny Carson.

Tom Snyder began hosting “Tomorrow” on NBC after Carson’s Tonight Show, at a weeknight time slot drawing 2nd shift workers, insomniacs or school kids planning to play hooky. In other words, people just a little off the mainstream.

Immediately, the deep-voiced brawny Milwaukee native with the big smile and even bigger eyebrows began appealing to such viewers, cutting through the formality of network TV with a fun rebelliousness. Snyder often would turn to an unseen stage person for a little on-air banter. Sometimes he’d ask them how that night’s intro’s special effect was done, using the unscripted spontaneity of today’s in-home YouTubes, though the voice and delivery of the longtime news anchorman were fully professional.

Though respectful and engaging toward his guests, Tom Snyder would frequently rag on the layers of phoniness of his industry -- even his own employer.

“A man coming back from Disneyland asked a gas station employee where he could buy his kid a Mickey Mouse outfit. The employee responded, ‘Why don’t you buy him NBC?’ “

A booming laugh, or a sly grin would follow such comments, then Snyder would glide to the next segment or guest, always while wielding his cigarette and seated so laidback he could have been in a beanbag chair.

 John Lennon in 1975 on the music world,

 and the "bed in" for peace. 

Watching Tomorrow was like dropping in at your fav used bookstore to exchange observations with the bohemian owner. The TV screen disappeared, as though you were there with Tom Snyder and his guests. You weren’t confused or put off by his constantly talking to some off-camera person you never knew.

That device wasn’t Snyder’s only breaking of TV protocol. There was also his light regard for the powerful.

This reached a then-shocking high point in 1976 when he read before the nation a brief letter from President Ford’s re-election committee asking him to endorse the president. Snyder read it politely and professionally then, saying nothing, vigorously crumpled the letter up and thrust it toward the floor, smiling all the way as he casually segued to the next segment.

Tom Snyder’s politics weren’t left or right, but anti-orthodoxy, whether that meant hammering the hypocrisy of anti-communist bombast Billy James Hargis in 1977, or the next year reading a news story about an Inspector General report alleging that $6 billion was misspent by the department of Health, Education and Welfare.

“This isn’t six million. This is six with nine zeros after it,” Snyder said. “Bureaucracy in action, and you can depend on it!”

 

In New York, Tom shows how to start a show. The buzz eases you into watching.

 

                        ...And those effortless Segues
                                  He seemed to be at leisure rather than at work 
 

The more political Tomorrow interviews were with guests ranging from Huey Newton lauding the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, to Ayn Rand lauding, well, very different ideas.

Snyder’s quintessential interviews were with stars and fringe characters from pop culture, such as grown up Our Gang actors, original Star Trek cast members; Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones 10 years after The Monkees TV show peaked; and a group of sidekick announcers including George Fenneman of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life and Don Wilson, the second banana to Jack Benny.

                 Tom and Trekkies: a natural combo

 

Tomorrow underwent changes to try to reverse a drop in ratings in the early ‘80s, including the addition of a live audience and a nightly segment with Rona Barrett. NBC cancelled Tomorrow in 1982, but Tom Snyder reprised the show’s format twice in the ‘90s, on a cable show, then on CBS’ The Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder, which ended in 1999. Six years later Snyder announced he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, from which he died in 2007 at 71. 

As for me, I loved the no-audience, Snyder-and-guest centered years of Tomorrow. Though I was always a devoted and contented viewer of the NBC show, I sometimes bristled at Snyder’s giving undeserved attention to the outlandish, a trend epitomized by his prison interview with Charles Manson, the racist, murderous, sex offender who used media to steal a mystique.

On the sillier but still dangerous side, Tomorrow gave time in the early 1980s to the ridiculous pseudo-philosophy of "Breatharianism," interviewing Wiley Brooks, the founder who claimed he had not eaten in 17 years and that with the right spiritual mindset, all anyone needs is air and sunlight, instead of solid food. (Don't try this at home; witnesses years later said Brooks frequented restaurants and food marts for regular grub while insisting Breatharian followers need not do so.)

Happier memories are of John Lennon on Tomorrow in 1975, acclaimed news anchor Douglas Edwards in 1980, and a group of rising yet obscure TV personalities to keep an eye on for the future whom Snyder interviewed circa 1977 – one was a bit part actor and game show panelist named David Letterman. 

But night in and night out, Tomorrow guests were grass roots figures who exuded innocent quirkiness to end the day with – a woman found to have the world’s loudest laugh, a man who claimed to have been cognizant of his own birth (hard to disprove, really), and two atheists from Madison, Wisc.

I remember them for the way they raised my civic hackles by asking, “If we’re controversial in a liberal place like Madison, imagine how people would feel about us in Louisville?”

“I don’t know,” a pensive Snyder responded. “I’ve never been to Louisville.” At least he reserved judgment on our underrated liberal city, but the exchange still tarred us as the definition of a town time forgot.

 

      In 1977, Tomorrow's Visual Art 

  

Professor Abe Rezny and filmmaker Steve Cohen demonstrate a hologram

 

And of course, what anti-orthodoxy show could go nine seasons without an entire week of guests on the theme “The Business of Sex in America.” That was on Tomorrow in 1976.

And in nine years, any big star is going to have a celebrity feud or two, and Tom Snyder had one each of three varieties: the quickly settled, the drawn out, and the put on.

Rob Reiner, while guest hosting The Tonight Show, was reading a quick promo for Tom’s guests coming up and he thoughtlessly started it off by saying, “Most of you probably don’t stay up for Tomorrow, but…”

An incensed Tom Snyder on the air blasted Reiner’s dismissive line, and Reiner apologized in a letter which Tom read the next night. The All in the Family star said that intro was spoken unintentionally, and he realized how unfair it was. Tom accepted, saluted Reiner for his class and all was fine between them from then on.

But not necessarily with Edwin Newman, who called Tom Snyder “an incompetent” in news. The great upholder of standards said NBC should not have let Snyder anchor a primetime news special on rising health care costs (yep, that long ago; it’s the permanent American issue). Whether or not the two ever spoke about Newman’s criticisms isn’t clear, but when Edwin Newman was the host of Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, Joe Piscopo played Snyder in a skit chatting with the real Newman.

Then there was the mutually beneficial “feud” that started in 1977 when Tom Snyder gave his opinion of the new Fernwood 2 Night, a parody of talk shows, by moving his thumb downward and making the sound of a bomb descending and exploding.

Fernwood star Martin Mull, in character as host Barth Gimble, jumped at the opportunity to get talked about among the more recognized shows, and explained to the Fernwood 2 Night audience that disparaging remarks from a person like Snyder could be expected “when you’re as old as he is and still haven’t made primetime.”

Tom Snyder played a clip of that remark on Tomorrow, then let out a resounding laugh, his oversized eyebrows flailing, baritone voice booming and cigarette smoke dancing in approval.

 

                 ____________

Brian Arbenz passed judgement nightly on "Tomorrow With Tom Snyder" during his college years in the late 1970s watching on WAVE-TV, Channel 3, in Louisville. 

The Amazing Contradiction -- What did and didn't upset Americans

One night in 2013, TV viewers of CBS’ Amazing Race saw a few minutes of the reality show’s contestants on a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam searching for clues that had been placed around a memorial to Vietnamese who died from U.S. bombing during the war four decades earlier.

The memorial was fashioned from wreckage of a downed American B-52 bomber, which was primarily what sparked an instant online protest, including the comment: "My father's friend was on that plane…. (I)t glorifies the death and killing of our men."

The VFW’s national commander wrote to CBS President Les Moonves charging that "the B-52 scene, as well as the young people singing a propaganda song, was totally unnecessary to the show's plot, which speaks volumes about naïve producers who think they're in charge when they are not."

Amazing Race contestants in Hanoi in 2013.

CBS, at the start of the next Amazing Race episode, apologized “to veterans, particularly those who served in Vietnam, as well as to their families and any viewers who were offended by the broadcast."

This single scene on CBS in 2013 brought forth from the grass roots of America what 168 half-hour shows on that network from 1965 to 1971 could not prompt.

Hogan’s Heroes, a CBS sitcom about American, British and French World War II Prisoners of War in the fictional German camp Stalag 13, was a huge hit during a period when TV comedies were silly escapism (talking horses, flying nuns).

At first, Hogan’s Heroes did draw criticism from reviewers and commentators for trivializing the suffering of prisoners of war and American World War II veterans overall. But from millions of people whose fathers really did endure the misery of fighting the Nazis – like, for instance me – came not a complaint. At least not enough to stop the show from being a ratings smash hit, and winning two Emmys during its six seasons.

In my childhood, I chuckled along with America at the hijinks of the good guy-ish American Colonel Hogan, the ineptitude of the unwittingly usurped Col. Klink, and the oafishness of the huggy rotund Sgt. Schultz, whose hilarious catch phrase was, “I know nothing, I see nothing.”

Beyond my knowledge back then was that Schultz’ constant repeating of this was his preparation for war crimes trials, and his fixation on their likelihood meant he was conceding the war, which he had no interest in waging in the first place.

John Banner, who played Schultz the harmless Nazi, was in real life almost killed by Nazis, who were anything but harmless, as European Jews such as him knew at the core of their souls.

Banner, an Austrian-born actor, by luck happened to be performing in Switzerland when the Anschluss, or forced annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany happened in 1938.

From Geneva, the place his theatrical troupe was staying, Banner applied for refugee status and was accepted by the United States.

Commenting on the contradiction between this personal history and his comedic portrayal of a Nazi soldier, Banner told the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s: “Some people ask me how we can be funny about a prison camp in the war. And I say to them, how was it possible to write about two little old ladies who killed twelve men and buried them in the basement and make it funny. Well, somebody did, and it was called Arsenic and Old Lace.”

That’s a somewhat fair comparison, because that 1941 Broadway hit was in fact inspired by a real-life couple in Connecticut who in 1917 were found to have fatally poisoned and buried male residents in their home for the elderly. And the story went from unspeakable atrocity to side-splitting comedy in a quarter century.

That’s the same elapsed time between the horrors of World War II and Americans tuning in to Col. Hogan outwitting Klink interspersed with laugh tracks and tooth paste commercials. It was as though being a POW in a German stalag was a rollicking week at summer camp.

It wasn't. "Rations were meagre. The men -- but not officers -- had to work, often at heavy labour," the website of the British Imperial War Museum said of German treatment of allied POWs. "(T)he days dragged and there was a constant battle against boredom. Prisoners tried to overcome this by staging entertainments and educating themselves. Contrary to the popular myth, most men were too weak from hunger and work to escape."

That site also said something that clashes with the one tasteful feature on Hogan's Heroes -- the progressive racial breakthrough role of actor Ivan Dixon. He played a black American POW named Kinchloe, who did secret radio surveillance for the allies, a role that launched Dixon on an acclaimed career as a director and actor. If the U.S. Army during the real World War II would not have treated an African-American fairly, the Nazis, or course, would have oppressed Kinchloe vastly worse.

The Museum's site said allied POWs from groups Nazi ideology considered "racially and politically inferior" were often starved and brutalized. 

In an American online remembrance of POWs, the National World War II Museum’s site said:

“In one of the coldest winters on record -- 23 December 1944 at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, temperatures hovered just below 0°F -- 80,000 Allied POWs were evacuated from camps on the eastern edge of German territory and forced, mainly on foot, to camps further away from the advancing Russians.”

I remember an adult leader in our Boy Scout troop, himself a World War II veteran (though not a POW), telling us circa 1970 about this brutal march of allied POWs in the snow. Yet he did not mention Hogan’s Heroes, apparently never regarding the then hit show’s lighthearted portrayal of the harsh life of POWs as a controversy.

Across America, there were no reports of angry letters to CBS about the nature of the show, no advertiser nervousness about supporting it, and very few if any complaints from Jewish or holocaust survivor organizations. Of course, POW camps, where prisoners got Red Cross packages and could write letters home, were not the same things as Hitler’s concentration camps, which were created to exterminate an entire people.

Yet, the reality of the holocaust was anything but removed from the set of this sitcom. Hogan’s Heroes cast member Robert Clary, a French-born Jew who played POW LeBeau, was a real-life survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp – a striking fact that serves both to dampen and inflame criticism of Hogan’s Heroes.

Adding to this elephant in the living room, actor Leon Askin, whose recurring role was no Schultz or Klink, but a real Nazi Gen. Burkhalter, was Jewish and a refugee from Vienna; and Werner Klemperer, who played Klink, was European-born to a Jewish father and gentile mother.

In the last 40 years, Clary has spoken about the holocaust on tours organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, appeared as himself in a 1982 movie about survivors gathering in Israel, and worked with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation archiving recordings of survivors’ recollections.

“Inevitably, at his lectures someone would ask Clary how he could work on Hogan’s Heroes after what he went through during World War II,” entertainment writer Brenda Scott Royce said in her book, Hogan’s Heroes – Behind the Scenes at Stalag 13. “He is weary of repeating himself.”

Clary told Royce: “Really, with the students, it’s the first  question they ask."  Royce's book says that among Clary’s responses are: POW camps were not death camps, the character Louis LeBeau was not Jewish, and most overridingly: “I’m an actor.”

Clary does not try to frame Hogan’s Heroes as anti-fascist commentary, or poetic justice by a troupe of European Jewish performers.

“We did not deal, really, with Nazism…. As a comedy, you cannot do that,” he said in Royce’s book. “I played Louis LeBeau… and I enjoyed it.”

And so did we, for six years.

Yet flashforward to our era, and a few minutes in Hanoi is widely condemned as cold disregard for the sufferings of POWs four decades earlier.

What explains this drastic difference in the public’s perceptions? Are we wiser? Hypersensitive? Oversaturated with 24-hour opportunities to crusade instantly with the clicking of a key? We used to leave that letter of protest sitting overnight by the car keys, enabling us to reconsider our visceral reactions before mailing it in the morning.

Today, we are lumped into algorithms and echo chambers to make online marketing more precise, and we are inflamed with catchphrases of fury to make partisan fundraisers produce more cash. Paul Ryan lied repeatedly during his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention and both parties watched and learned as Ipad and laptop money donations surged with each false incendiary statement about President Obama.

In 2018, spending for those crucial midterm elections, CNN reported, tallied $5.7 billion. Compare to 1966’s midterms, when war, racial equality, immigration policy, and a backlash against a president drove donors to give $24.5 million. (Adjusted for inflation and population size, that’s about 5 percent as much.)

The 24.5 million figure was considered alarmingly high back then, but in 1966 when we got all worked up about largely the same issues as today, we still had the time – or was it the callousness – to laugh it up over POWs.

Allan Melvin - Always in Character, Often in Uniform

 

Rob Petrie had four old Army pals who were tall, had deep voices and wavy blonde hair.

Three were shown in flashbacks (a Dick Van Dyke Show innovation) and were perhaps the same person – the trio were named Sam Pomerantz, Sam Pomeroy, and Sol Pomerantz, depending on the episode. (The blog Toobworld calls them the "Pom-Poms.")

The fourth, a distinctly different character who visits Rob and Laura's New Rochelle home in the present, was an immaculately dressed, pleasant but mysterious jeweler named Harrison B. Harding.

All four (or both, if the Pom-Poms are to be regarded as one fellow) were played by the same person – the consummate TV character actor Allan Melvin.

Melvin also played a prison guard in a Dick Dan Dyke episode, and in another, a gun salesman in the old west in a dream Rob has (dream sequences were another Van Dyke Show innovation).

To further complicate the Pom-Pom legacy, another actor also played an Army buddy of Rob’s named Sam Pomerantz, proving that no one in the ‘60s foresaw home video or the Internet someday enabling sitcom devotees to quibble.

To clear up which Pom is Allan Melvin, behold his familiar face and voice in this Dick Van Dyke Show link as Sol Pomerantz:

As Sgt. Charlie Hacker on Gomer Pyle USMC:

.
And, in one of a series of Liquid Plumber ads he did in the 1970s and ‘80s:

(as though plumbers wear their uniforms to parties)

Now  you know who Allan Melvin was -- if telling Sam from Sol is still a little tricky. Melvin was born in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a New York City-based distributor of silent films to amusement arcades in the Midwest. A young Allan moved with his family to New York City, where he grew up, then was educated at Columbia University.

Before the Dick Van Dyke or Gomer Pyle series, Melvin donned a military uniform as Army Corporal Steve Henshaw in The Phil Silvers Show in the 1950s. But he wasn’t just a screen serviceman; Melvin joined the Navy during World War II, helping build naval vessels at the Port Newark Shipyard in New Jersey, the website philsilversshow.com said.

But entertainment was Melvin's avocation during the war.

"He learned to do voices and he practiced doing impressions of all kinds of people and things," The Phil Silvers website said. "Some College acting friends, Frank Campanella, Thomas McDermott and a young actress called Amalia Sestero had started a theatrical group, The Unicorn Players. Frank invited Allan to one of their meetings -- the die was cast. Allan and Amalia started dating, fell in love..."

In 1944 Allan John Melvin and Amalia Faustina Sestero wed in New York City.  In a pattern of stability that seems to typify character actors, they stayed married until Allan Melvin died in 2008 at age 84. They had two daughters.

        Allan Melvin's debt to the great Phil Silvers:

 

Before going into television, Melvin did superb voice impressions of legends like James Stewart and Cary Grant while he performed with stage comedy ensembles, and won acclaim for his role in the Broadway play "Stalag 17" as an American POW who amid the misery of the camp entertains co-prisoners using similar talents.

Melvin worked in NBC's sound effects department, creating radio show sounds using devices, recordings and sometimes his own voice.

The forceful yet soothing Allan Melvin vocal style had a career of its own, as he also did cartoon voices of Magilla Gorilla, Sergeant Snorkel, Bumbler, Barney Google and Bristol Hound.

Melvin had a small role in the 1968 Doris Day movie "With Six You Get Eggroll," in which he plays a police sergeant who is confronted by hippies played by future M*A*S*H cast members Jamie Farr and William Christopher (yep, the Father played a hippie)

                       Allan experiences the '60s,

                                                         but he "ain't groovy."

 

Other than being in that oddly cast scene, Melvin's on-screen work was entirely through television, unlike character actor icons such as Edward Andrews, Reta Shaw and Whit Bissell, who also intermittently acted in movies. That made Allan Melvin probably the top "Household Face," if not name, in TV.

And every generation of TV viewers has its Allan Melvin peg. For some, it’s Henshaw or Charlie Hacker. Seventies kids knew him as Sam the butcher, Alice’s love interest on The Brady Bunch. There was also Barney Hefner, the Bunkers’ neighbor on All in the Family who was just as blue-collar as Archie, but never expressed bigotry.

Published obituaries of Allan in 2008 tended to reveal the generation of the writer based on which of those characters he was described as "best known for playing."

In several of the obits, Amalia Sestero Melvin said her husband's favorite role had been in The Phil Silvers Show. "I think the camaraderie of all those guys made it such a pleasant way to work. They were so relaxed," said Amalia, who lived to age 100, dying in December 2020.

Just as with playing the rotating Army buddy of Rob, Melvin pulled off a switcheroo on All in the Family, too.

Before being the semi-regular Barney Hefner, he appeared as New York City police officer Pulaski in an episode’s final scene where Archie gets his comeuppance for his characteristic use of an anti-Polish slur:

 

One of the foundations of the character actor profession -- the subliminal semi-recognition viewers have of them – is what enabled Melvin to play two people in one program.

"I went in the same season from Pulaski to Barney Hefner. I think they make allowances for the fact that the audience will accept certain changes,” Melvin said in an early 1970s interview. “I guess they figure since it was a one-shot, I wasn't that established. I've been Barney ever since." This was from a British blog on Phil Silvers Show stars; that great 1950s military comedy had Melvin in the cast as Henshaw, an army cohort of the irrepressible Sgt. Ernie Bilko.

Melvin was recalled to duty as Marine Sergeant Charlie Hacker on Gomer Pyle USMC during the same decade he played the Army "Pom-Poms."

If playing two characters each in New Rochelle and Astoria, N.Y. was a task, Allan Melvin’s work in Mayberry, N.C, was a high-wire juggling act.

On The Andy Griffith Show, he played eight different people, reported the web site fans-pages.com, which labeled Melvin’s constant work on the show: “Mayberry’s Multiple Personality Disorder.”

Among his Andy Griffith Show roles were a jailed suspect whom Barney tries to trick into giving evidence, a roadside vendor who disses the deputy only to learn what authority really means, and a recruiting sergeant who struggles with the not-exactly G.I Ernest T. Bass.

In another roughneck role, Melvin played local bully Fred Plummer, who bedevils Deputy Fife. Barney is impersonated by his judo instructor who overpowers Plummer into respect for the undersized deputy he thinks has clobbered him.

Switching to the right side of the law, Melvin played an eagle-eyed hotel detective in an Andy Griffith Show episode in which Andy and Barney make an out-of-town trip.

Melvin described nearly every TV show he was in as fun more so than work. He regularly praised the entertainment stars he worked with, including Phil Silvers, Frank Sutton, Andy Griffith, and producer Aaron Ruben.

Particularly satisfying to Allan Melvin was the Dick Van Dyke Show:

"It was marvelous, exhilarating," he said. "It was so well written and conceived and the working conditions were so great, working with Carl Reiner and Dick and Mary and the whole crowd. And it was just a joy because it was a very creative show. It was an early kind of a watershed ensemble comedy show."

Those words were posted on Philsilversshow.com, on which Melvin also fondly recalled The Phil Silvers Show -- originally called "You'll Never Get Rich," and also often referred to as "Bilko" -- for timeless TV quality.

"A Bilko show could be funny 50 years from now. Funny is funny. It's as simple as that."

 

            __________________________________________

  

Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, has throughout his life loved watching Sams, Sols, Plumbers and Plummers, Marines and Soldiers, Barney adversaries and Barney Hefners named Allan Melvin.

 

And for a closing act, a few minutes of a rare suit-and-tie clad civilian Allan Melvin as the mysterious old friend (or crook?) Harrison B. Harding:

              --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For even more on Allan Melvin, CLICK HERE to go to KJ Ricardo's YouTube
      ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 supporting player/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.

A commenter on Silverscreenoasis.com said of Bissell:

“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.”

                      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:

Another post on Silverscreenoasis.com said Whit's first name has become a synonym for the supporting player genre to which he 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.”

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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:

 

Nurturing Children, Training a Voice, Roughing up a Barber -- Reta Shaw Could Do It All Convincingly

No two characters seen on The Andy Griffith Show were more different than Big Maude, the escaped convict who gleefully dominates Barney Fife, and Eleanora Poultice, the overly sentimental music teacher who wills herself to hear greatness in the deputy's awful singing voice.

One has no sensitivity; the other is overflowing with it. And devoted viewers of the show revel in the hilarious opposite extremes of both women – probably without even realizing they are watching the same performer.

That testifies to the greatness of Reta Shaw. The daughter of a New England orchestra leader, she was one of television’s best character actors – that breed of performer who takes home less money and far less name recognition than an Andy Griffith or a Hope Lang. But knowing you are indispensable to TV and movies is one of the satisfactions of the character actor craft.

"People love to laugh," Shaw said in a 1968 interview. "They love to be entertained. If I can bring a laugh, or please someone, I have accomplished something."

Shaw was deft at the routine of pouring her heart into a role, then moving on, making television programs and movies feasible by being dependable, then expendable. A character actor’s ability to focus like a laser on one or two scenes, then quickly move to another unrelated production also gives her or him a mobility that the wealthy screen idol can’t match.

Reta consoles Will Robinson in a Lost in Space episode that is lost in time, and Vermont's politics 

 

Shaw was famous, yet anonymous – always playing characters with delightfully overstated charm, enunciating each syllable with an evangelical passion. That may have been residual from her one-time aspiration of becoming a religious missionary.

Of playing TV and movie characters, she said: “It's different from feeding souls in one way, but it's feeding them in another way."

As with other successful character actors, viewers fleetingly recognize her, then return their attention to the plot.

 

     Spotting talent - that no one else in Mayberry does

 

 

 

        But as a convict, Reta dances to a different tune

 

 

Shaw’s persuasive, husky style, though never used to preach religious messages, proved perfect for playing people with connections to spirits of another sort. She is remembered as housekeeper Martha Grant on the 1968-70 sitcom The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, an acclaimed show based on the 1940s novel about a widow and her family who move into a seaside mansion which turned out to be haunted by the ghost of the sea captain who once owned it.

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Acne and house calls aren't what they seem to be in Rita's brief role in the 1971 made for TV movie "Murder Once Removed," a love triangle murder tale.

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Prior to Mrs. Muir having a TV house guest from the afterlife, Shaw played Mrs. Halcyon Maxwell in Alan Rafkin’s movie "The Ghost And Mr. Chicken." In Bewitched, she had a recurring role as Samantha’s Aunt Hagatha. One of Shaw's most beloved movie roles was in the 1957 musical "The Pajama Game."

On Andy Griffith, Shaw played those opposite personality types, but the roles were similar in that Big Maude was outside the bounds of the law and Eleanora Poultice was outside the bounds of common sense in seeing Barney Fife as musically talented, going with her heart instead of her ears.

And Shaw played in a chronologically confusing Lost in Space episode in the mid-1960s, which took place of course in the 90s, but with the unique setting of a tiny hamlet in Vermont.

Will Robinson is unintentionally whisked back to Earth, only to long to rejoin his family in the distant cosmos. Vermont is shown as a place of crank telephones, high water pants and backward bumpkins. In this anachronistic portrayal of the Green Mountain State, Reta Shaw plays a folksy, caring aunt-figure for the boy.

Had this Lost In Space episode's conception of 1990s Vermont included the true-to-life socialist in Congress, same-sex civil unions and -- especially -- Ben And Jerry's, what kid Will's age wouldn't have figured they'd landed in paradise? 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA... As a bonus, he links to Reta Shaw singing and dancing in the musical "The Pajama Game":

Edward Andrews: The Most Famous Person You've Never Heard Of

In the Twilight Zone, TV ads, and (below) the 1962 political movie "Advise and Consent," the bespectacled man either seems to know something you don't, or suspects you of hiding something. That's classic Edward Andrews.

 

You don’t know his name, but because he was everywhere on big and small screens, you know Edward Andrews.
“Oh yeah, that guy!” any longtime TV viewer or moviegoer from the ‘60s or ‘70s is provoked into saying upon seeing the gourmet in the Taster’s Choice ad, the father from “Tea and Sympathy,” the Illinois Senator from “Advise and Consent,” and dozens and dozens of other brief roles.

Andrews seemingly always played the quintessential well-groomed male of self-made substance, position, and stability.

Yet, he was never the squeaky-clean father knows best type; there was forever something cagey and unforthcoming about his characters. That’s what made Edward Andrews so appealing.

Edward in a 1972 TV ad:

 

The classic Andrews character dazzled with his details. At first, you see a statuesque upper middle class white American male of the late 20^th century. Football fan, GI Bill, Rotarian -- rather plain, but not for long.
Quickly, Edward Andrews’ mellow voice, acrobatic eyes and instantly shifting mood give him a simply ethereal quality – as does his absence of name recognition. He’s seen and heard, then moves on -- to another short movie role (he was in three movies per year from the mid-1950s through the ‘60s), a TV plot (two Twilight Zones, three Love American Styles, two in Bewitched, to name a few) or a TV ad.

Even looking up through a glass table top for dramatic effect in the1960 Twilight Zone episode "3rd From The Sun," the viewer can clearly see Edward suspects his aerospace plant subordinates played by Fritz Weaver (left) and Joe Maross are plotting to escape the planet as nuclear war looms. 

 
In a 1985 obituary story the Los Angeles Times noted that Andrews' name anonymity was oddly coupled with his ubiquitous image. The Times recalled Andrews once saying: “They know you from somewhere but they don’t think of you as an actor. They stop and say, ‘Harry, how’s everything in Miami?’ I’ve learned by experience not to argue with them.”
Who this performer is remains a mystery to this day to many viewers of vintage TV and movies, but Edward Andrews' visual and vocal identities are embedded in our consciousness -- perhaps subliminally. Character actors like Andrews were sort of the bot personas before the internet. 

Love and the Character Actor 

Edward Andrews on Love American Style circa 1970:

 

Movies, stage plays, Television episodes, commercials, Edward Andrews was in every visual medium, over four decades.

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As a character actor, Andrews could play a different person two or three times a year without impeding the viewer’s ability to suspend belief and enjoy the show. That’s what a character actor does – they make movies and TV possible by being dependable, then expendable, with no complaints.

As such, Andrews' visits to movie sets were relatively brief, but each line he spoke could challenge him like a whole movie role does a major name star:

"I always figure any fool can learn lines, but what they pay you for is to say 'em better than anybody else can say 'em. I'm cocky enough, still, to say that the things I do best, there isn't anyone in the business that can do them better than I," Edward Andrews said in a 1984 feature in Starlog magazine. "There are roles that nobody can play better than I. It seems awfully immodest, but I have no doubt about it in the world."

 

Starlog’s Jim George added:
“Behind the ever-present trademark black frame glasses is a mischievous eye-twinkle which can shift from playful to nefarious literally in the bat of an eyelash. The slightest curling in the corners of one of those wonderfully wicked tight-lipped smiles can completely alter the tenor of a characterization…. One is never quite certain what is truly happening behind the sly smirk.”

 

Furthering Edward's title as a character actor icon is the fact that his two tries at starring roles were in forgotten TV shows that lasted about as long as one of those eye-twinkles of his:

 

             Edward conducts the off-the-rails Supertrain in 1979

 

         

          Fifteen years earlier, Edward delights us with his skills

                   in an otherwise awful show called Broadside

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     And, rescued from - DARN! then put back in - the dust bin:

In 1971, NBC passed on a ho-hum pilot with somebody named Ferra, or something like that. Six years later, they realized they had a gold mine. So, they aired a Farah Fawcett "special," by repurposing the pilot, called "Inside O.U.T." And Edward, of course, was there. But COPYRIGHT BLOCKED!  :( 

Fear not, though - here is a classic Edward Andrews "dad" role. He was ingrained so deeply in viewers' minds as a father figure, that Sears didn't care that by 1978, Edward looked like a grandpa to "son."

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On the Silver Screen, Edward's character acting thrived. From the 1964 comedy movie "Send Me No Flowers"

Andrews’ movie roles included Sixteen Candles, The Absent Minded Professor, Gremlins, Kisses for my President, Death of a Salesman, and Tora! Tora! Tora!

The son of a Georgia Episcopal minister, he began acting on stage at age 12 in 1926 after his family moved to Pittsburgh. Andrews also lived in Ohio and West Virginia during his youth. His early Broadway roles included performing in "Of Mice and Men."

His on-screen prowess at playing characters with something to hide is not unlike a real-life Andrews trait. He acknowledged to Starlog that he sometimes manipulated directors when he would tell them he had come up with an idea for a line. Before stating it, Andrews would say, “No, I’m not sure it would work” – a tactic to prime a director’s curiosity to make them more receptive to his suggestion. “It’s a terrible, childish device,” Andrews said, “but it works.”

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Whether at this point you are uplifted to finally know who that man you grew up watching really was, or if Edward Andrews is new to you, I'll leave you with two sign offs. First, Edward Andrews late in his life in an early 1980s ad for new high-tech phone services (I regret that it's a little stereotypical of the Japanese, whose technology we were told to envy then):

 

And, this terrific filmography, put together by Alan Heine on his YouTube channel:

Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, loves characters actors, along with all other things fringe.