Fun Finds: Who's Who in TV, 1968-1969

This is a pretty big Fun Find. Picked up at an antique show in Burlington, Kentucky, it's a publication that was printed annually to profile the stars of new and returning television shows. We used to live for the annual TV Guide fall preview issue, but this goes even further with its coverage (though sadly, except for its cover, not in color) and tidbits of trivia. The 70-page volume contained no advertisements and is chock-full of mini-bios of all the stars of TV from that era. Thus, you're sure to find a favorite or two (or ten) contained within its pages. I've scanned practically the whole thing and may not comment on each and every page. We'll see how chatty I am as it goes along. This (the mid-to-late '60s) is my favorite time period for the way TV and its inhabitants looked. That said, Judy Carne looks downright deranged on the cover...! Love The Landaus, Kirk & Spock and Miss Carol Burnett.

A section devoted solely to TV specials and their stars gets underway with Sinatra...

The magazine balances a positively exhaustive list of upcoming specials with bios of the stars who will be headlining some of them.

Marvelous Mitzi Gaynor is still going at age eighty-six while Dick Van Dyke has a cameo in the new Mary Poppins Returns (2018) at age ninety-two!

Now moving on to new shows that season. The Name of the Game revolved around magazine publishing and its three stars took turns being featured in episodes (with occasional crossover appearances in each others', though Robert Stack and Tony Franciosa never appeared together) while Susan St. James provided the glue by portraying a secretary in many installments.

Surprising that delightful comedic actress Reta Shaw has her name misspelled here. Edward Mulhare, described as a "real ladies man" never married and died at age seventy-four a bachelor. 

Little Marc Copage of Julia did some acting after that show's three-year run, but wasn't able to sustain a significant, lasting career. His father, John Copage, was a bit player in movies and on TV and didn't manage his son's income from the show particularly well.

As most of her fans know, Miss Day's husband hornswaggled her into this TV series without her knowledge before he passed away. She was miserable until tinkering with the format and making it work for three seasons. Day is now ninety-five and never really acted again once the series had run its course.

Blondie only aired for 13 episodes before being yanked. Peter Robbins of the show was the voice of Charlie Brown in about 8 iconic Peanuts specials, but the wheels came off several years ago and he in in prison as of this writing! I never knew that Will Hutchins was once the brother-in-law of Carol Burnett. Herb Edelman of The Good Guys would later play Stan in a recurring role on The Golden Girls.

In the late-1960s/early-'70s, it seemed as if Wayne Maunder would achieve a notable TV career, but it wound up not to be. He sort of eked along until 1980 loomed and then appeared in Porky's (1981), which was his last credited on-screen acting project. He is eighty now. Ken Berry is eighty-four and has been retired for about a dozen years.

Robert Morse is a show business survivor. Now eighty-six, he was still acting as recently as a year or two ago (portraying Dominick Dunne in the first season of American Crime Story (The People v. O.J. Simpson.)

I can remember coming home from school as a preteen to reruns of Here Come the Brides and being faced with the trio of David Soul, Robert Brown and Bobby Sherman, then unable to figure out exactly why they gave me a thrill. LOL Soul and Sherman are both seventy-four while Brown is an amazing ninety-one at present!

When I was a waiter (at Red Lobster!) in the mid-'80s, my manager would forever go on about Land of the Giants and I thought I'd never get to see it. Finally, the earliest incarnation of The Sci-Fi Channel ran it and I was able to. Gary Conway was a cutie. Amazingly, series notable Kurt Kasznar is not profiled or even mentioned!

When Otis Young's acting career began to fall off, he went into teaching, passing away of a stroke at age sixty-nine. Don Murray, his costar in The Outcasts, is another star with life longevity from this Fun Find who is still with us at eighty-eight.

Tiny Tim always creeped me out in any way possible. I do love Ruth Buzzi's hair in this pic.

I never write about Carol Burnett, though her show was an outright staple in my house growing up. We adored her and her costars and guests. What many people may not realize is that the rerun versions of her highly-popular show eliminate most of the songs by guest performers along with the usually-elaborate musical finales which the performers mounted each week (and often some skits are left on the cutting room floor as well.)

Longtime friends Jack Benny and George Burns were comic royalty. When Benny fell ill from cancer just before filming The Sunshine Boys (1975), Burns was called upon to take his place and was granted an Oscar for his trouble, reigniting his movie career in the process.

I've recently been enjoying Johnny Carson's 1950s & early-'60s appearances on To Tell the Truth. He was an impishly funny devil then.

Fans of The Lawrence Welk Show rejoice! Here we have a two-page spread with info on many of his stable of performers and plenty of pics. Tanya Falan (Welk) looks like she's performing in The Bad Seed!

Love the little cut-outs of the folks on the top. Along the bottom, you may find it interesting to know that Andra Willis later provided Olivia Hussey's singing voice in Lost Horizon (1973.) I love Sandi Jensen's mod hairstyle. Her duet partner Salli later married handsome Welk Show country crooner Clay Hart.

Our addiction to all-star line-ups always means we enjoy organized collections of faces and names such as those that appear on the next three pages. I love watching Nancy Ames on old variety shows and on Password. She is eighty now. John Davidson (seventy-six) has been touring in Finding Neverland and recently visited Cincinnati for the first time since the fateful Beverly Hills Supper Club fire on the other side of the river.

Bobbie Gentry seemed to just utterly disappear at the dawn of the 1980s. She hasn't performed since, but lives a quiet life at age seventy-three. This is a great photo of Liza (and her earrings!)

Ted Bessell, as Marlo Thomas' fiance on That Girl, was taken far to early at age fifty-seven from a brain aneurysm. Thomas is now eighty (say it ain't so!)

The Flying Nun's Shelley Morrison hit a late-career high when she was cast as Megan Mullally's sassy housekeeper-companion on Will & Grace. Needless to say, Sally Field's career took off, so to speak, considerably after this series' demise, too!

Two enduring fantasy-based sitcoms share a page here. While the blonde gals both possessed magical abilities, they really were different enough to sustain their respective runs, with Bewitched running longer and producing more episodes than Jeannie.

Though few could ever compare to the staggering superstardom of Lucille Ball, Lucie Arnaz did ultimately carve out a considerable career of her own, including the Broadway stage, and is a very bright and insightful person. I don't know how I got this far along without knowing that her middle name is Desiree! As for My Three Sons, we dearly love the hunky Don Grady most of all (and his TV wife Tina Cole of The King Family, too!)

The Mothers-in-Law has a cult camp following thanks to its colorful, brash leading ladies and gay-ish sensibilities. Costar Herb Rudley lived to be ninety-six. One of my more enduring posts here is about pint-sized, but tragic, charmer Anissa Jones of Family Affair.

Hogan's Heroes is a show I have never been able to get into, either as a child or an adult. It's just always left me completely disinterested for some reason! Get Smart is another one I never had any interest in, but I did watch season one not long ago and found it surprisingly captivating and clever.

All of these shows were in afternoon reruns on a local channel when I was a kid, though I wasn't slavishly devoted to them. I was petrified of the domineering Frank Sutton and, though I found Eva Gabor enthralling, the rustic setting and bumpkin inhabitants of Green Acres were abhorrent to me. Ha ha!

Again, I was an adult before I understood any of the charms of The Beverly Hillbillies. I did like Petticoat Junction, though the first two seasons were rarely, if ever, shown in my neck of the woods. I finally watched season one a couple of years ago and it was gently charming.

The opening credits of Perry Mason scared the bejesus out of me as a kid, thus I was also averse to Ironside. Later I began to enjoy the show in its early seasons to a degree.

These are two shows that I have seen precious little of. Any time I've caught It Takes a Thief, the lady guest stars have looked spectacular! I've never seen a black & white episode of Felony Squad, but any time I've caught a color one (in which Dennis Cole's hair is its customary blond) they are gorgeous and the women look amazing.

Dragnet, despite being based on actual cases, just never came off as authentic to me, perhaps because of the type of acting employed by its guest actors and the artificial looking settings, especially in the later color eps. I've never seen N.Y.P.D. at all.

The F.B.I. was such a hit and had those wonderful Quinn Martin-esque titles which showed the guest stars up front. William Reynolds, an underrated looker, has his own profile here in The Underworld. He's still alive today at eighty-six! Love you, William. I have never seen a full episode of The Avengers... Truth.

Mannix ran forever, but I must say it never really grabbed me. Sadly, I've never seen any of Judd for the Defense. Carl Betz has a considerable following even now among daddy lovers (for his work on The Donna Reed Show) and Stephen Young, who I don't know, is still with us today at seventy-eight.

Now we're talking. I loved the sleek, elegant feel of Mission: Impossible, especially early on, though I enjoy it in all its incarnations (apart from the comparatively recent movies!) The show, Bain and Laundau have all received attention here.

So has Peter Graves. And Star Trek (later dubbed TOS for The Original Series...) was another huge fave of mine. I still like it when I stumble across an episode being shown. It's interesting how virtually all the bios in this mag note whether a person is single or wed. I can see mentioning wives and kids, but if there weren't any they felt the need to denote that the person was single.

Even thought Dorothy Malone had departed by now, Peyton Place still seemed to have a foothold in the public consciousness considering the pictures and two-page spread it gets here.

I just love the way people looked at this time, though I'm sure it was torturesome to always have on a jacket or suit and tie or have one's hair teased and styled to the nth degree. I've got a couple of DVD sets of Peyton Place in black & white, but I imagine the color ones are more garishly giddy.

I was in my forties before I ever saw a frame of Daniel Boone. Darby Hinton figured into a post here to good effect once.

I was afraid (Jesus Christ, I was afraid of everything as a kid!) of Daktari and never saw Gentle Ben. I did used to be a devotee of Captain Kangaroo as a child. The hoot with that was that I was convinced that costar Cosmo Allegretti and George Maharis were one and the same man....!

Henry Darrow is now eighty-four. You may recall he played the Lothario Fidel Santiago on a key episode of The Golden Girls. That was thirty (!) years ago when he was but fifty-four!

All pictures of Michael Landon from Bonanza ought to have him standing up with his pants drawn close... LOL!

The Virginian was a very popular western and James Drury, who played the title character is still alive (and acting!) at eighty-four. Good for him. Done Quine is seventy-eight. Sara Lane, who is in her late-seventies, was one of the teen girl stars of Joan Crawford's I Saw What You Did (1965) the year before she joined The Virginian.

Gunsmoke, which holds only moderate appeal for me, was the longest-running TV western and had begun prior to that on radio! (With rotund William Conrad playing the role of Matt Dillon.) Dack Rambo is a lifelong crush of ours.

One of my favorite westerns, or series period, is The Big Valley. Linda Evans's Disney film was just Those Calloways, no "Crazy." On The Wild Wild West, Robert Conrad was about as good looking and humpy as a person is capable of being, especially in color.

My mother was an Another World fanatic when I was a baby. As I was born in 1967 and this magazine is from about a year later, I can see now what people she was looking at then. Robin Strasser was, to her, "Rachel" for the rest of her career, long after another actress assumed the part for decades and Strasser moved on! She'd always say, when watching something, "Oh, look, there's Rachel!" LOL

Help me, Jesus! Look at all the faces. Helen Wagner of As the World Turns was an extraordinary person and I have a couple of handwritten letters from her that I treasure. Dark Shadows was noted for having lots of gay men in the cast, two of which are depicted here.

Note Judy Lewis in The Secret Storm. She was Loretta Young's (and, suspected but not known at the time, Clark Gable's) daughter. This is the soap that Joan Crawford's daughter Christina was also on, but - strangely - Christina worked on the show during a period when Judy had temporarily exited, so I don't believe they shared many - or any - scenes together! I recently got hooked on some vintage episodes of The Doctors only to have the local channel who was running it suddenly disappear...

I love game shows, but I have to say I'm completely unfamiliar with both Dream House and Treasure Isle! Both shows were short-lived (especially Isle) and most of Dream House was "wiped" during an era when tapes were erased and reused...

These shows are more enduring (though Concentration, which was very popular then, seems to have less of a following now.) For just plain belly laughs, it's tough to beat Bob Eubanks' original The Newlywed Game (and there are bonus points for the way the ladies did their hair, makeup and clothing!)

Some of these venerable gentlemen of the airwaves are still among us, including Dick Cavett (eighty-one), Tom Kennedy (ninety-one), Peter Marshall (ninety-one) and Bob Barker (ninety-four!) Kudos, too, to Monty Hall who lived until last year and passed away at ninety-six.

Several of the newsmen shown here kept working for decades after. Note Peter Jennings and Harry Reasoner. And Roger Mudd, at ninety, is still with us today.

More newspeople of note. See Morley Safer and Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. That might be the youngest I ever saw Howard Cosell! You can see and read more about yummy Frank Gifford here. And, of course, Barbara Walters is still around at eighty-eight.

Many of us miss (and I think most of us could use) the old-fashioned style of talk shows in which pertinent issues were discussed or fantastic lives were examined instead of trying to figure out the daddy of some girl's baby or determine whether a person has been cheating with everyone in sight...

I had not heard of Alan Burke, but he was apparently one of the front-runners in the confrontational style of talk show hosts who would either insult or plant someone in the audience to insult guests who were appearing. Les Crane has a small post about him here! I like this (rare) photo of him.

I'm just not able to get on board with Woody Woodbury after For Those Who Think Young (1964), but Mike Douglas was pretty good and I adore Virginia Graham who has a tribute here.

Fascinating that they felt the need to list every movie that would be seen on network television in the coming season...! I hope no one tuned into CBS looking for Barbara Eden in Madison Avenue (1961) because she ain't in it... Eleanor Parker and Jeanne Crain were the leading ladies, however.

The rest of the issue is devoted to listing all the stars of movies who will be appearing on TV that season! Unreal. Among the stars on this page who've been featured here are Julie Andrews, Senta Berger, Stephen Boyd and Marlon Brando.

Underworld faves on this page include Sean Connery, Joan Crawford and Olivia de Havilland (who is at present an incredible one hundred-one years of age!)

Ava Gardner and Charlton Heston have been highlighted here.

Paul Newman is the only one in this grouping to have gotten a post about him thus far.

Eva Marie Saint (God love her presenting an Oscar at ninety-three recently without so much as a walking stick!) has a tribute here. Since I most often tend to highlight the lesser-known stars, it isn't surprising that so many of the people on these pages haven't gotten individual tributes. But their movies have received notice in most cases.

Rod Taylor and, to a lesser extent, Natalie Wood have been written about on my site. Strange that they would select perhaps the only instance in which Jean Simmons was ever blonde for her picture.

If you want to see how the schedule looked in those long-ago (mostly) three channels only days, here it is! (New shows in ALL CAPS.) I for one can never get used to the notion of hour-long shows beginning and ending on the half-hour!

The back cover features caricatures of Robert Wagner in It Takes a Thief, Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched (note that she's riding a vacuum cleaner, not a broom!), Marlo Thomas of That Girl, Otis Young and Don Murray of The Outcasts and Frank Converse, Jack Warden and Robert Hooks of N.Y.P.D.

Lastly was this curiosity found in the magazine. The original owner tore this photo out of the Columbus Dispatch and tucked it away. It made me both nostalgic and a little sentimental for, in those long, long years before computers were in our homes (and hands) one had to cling to any tangible photograph of a favorite celebrity if he or she wanted to be able to gaze upon him or her again. I know that up until the late-1980s, I clipped pictures of things I wanted to hang onto and kept them in a folder... Take care until next time!