Trivia: Following World War II, California native Jack Webb planned to renew the art studies that he'd abandoned for the military. Instead, he turned to acting, appearing on various San Francisco-based radio programs. He briefly hosted his own satirical comedy series before finding his true metier in detective melodramas. In collaboration with future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard L. Breen (who remained a Webb associate until his death in 1967), Webb concocted a hard-boiled private eye show entitled Pat Novak for Hire. The popularity he gained from this effort enabled Webb to secure small film roles -- one of these was as a police lab technician in the 1948 film noir He Walked by Night (1948). Intrigued by the police procedure he'd learned while preparing for the role, Webb immersed himself in the subject until he felt ready to launch what many observers still consider the first realistic radio cop show: Dragnet, which premiered June 3, 1949. Webb carried over his terse characterization of L.A. police sergeant Joe Friday into the Dragnet TV series (which he also directed) beginning in 1952. Armed with a bottomless reserve of police terminology and a colorful repertoire of catchphrases, the laconic, ferret-faced Webb became one of the most successful -- and most widely imitated -- TV personalities of the 1950s; almost always in the Top Ten, Dragnet, produced by Webb's own Mark VII Productions, ran until 1959. Webb's newfound industry clout permitted him to direct for the big screen as well -- his 1950s movie credits (outside of such pre-star efforts as The Men, Sunset Boulevard, and Halls of Montezuma) include the 1954 feature version of Dragnet, 1955's Pete Kelly's Blues (based on another of Webb's radio series), 1957's The D.I., and 1959's 30. In addition, Webb's Mark VII produced such TV series as Noah's Ark, The D.A.'s Man, and the video version of Pete Kelly's Blues. Webb kicked off the 1960s with a rare attempt at directing comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). From 1962 through 1964, he was in charge of Warner Bros.' television division, an assignment which came to an end as a result of several failed TV ventures. A 1966 TV-movie version of Dragnet kicked off Webb's second career. He went on to star in a successful weekly Dragnet revival, which ran from 1967 through 1970, while his Mark VII outfit was responsible for a score of TV series, the most successful of which were Emergency and Adam 12. Regarded as something of a relic by the "hipper" viewers, Jack Webb nonetheless remained profitably active in television until the late '70s; he might have continued into the 1980s had not his drinking and smoking habits accelerated his death at the age of 62. Married three times, Jack Webb's first wife was singing star Julie London, whom he'd first met when he was 21 and she was 15.

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: Character actor Hal Baylor made a career out of pummeling (or being pummeled by) heroes ranging from John Wayne to Montgomery Clift. The 6'3", 210-pound Baylor, born Hal Fieberling, was an athlete in school and did a hitch in the United States Marines before embarking on a boxing career. He moved into acting in the late '40s, initially by way of one of the most acclaimed boxing films ever made in Hollywood, Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949), playing Tiger Nelson, the young fighter in the film, whose fresh good looks stood out from the pug-worn visages of most of the men around him. His first released film, however -- a short feature done after The Set-Up but released first -- was a very different kind of boxing movie, Joe Palooka in Winner Take All. He also appeared in Allan Dwan's 1949 The Sands of Iwo Jima, playing Private "Sky" Choyuski, which was where he first began working with John Wayne. All of those early appearances were credited under his real name, Hal Fieberling (sometimes spelled "Feiberling"), but by 1950 the actor had changed his name to Hal Baylor. Whether in Westerns, period dramas, or war movies, Baylor usually played tough guys, and as soon as John Wayne began producing movies, he started using him, in Big Jim McLain (1952), in which Baylor played one of the two principal villains, a tough, burly Communist (just to show, from the movie's point of view, that they weren't all slimy-mannered, smooth-talking intellectuals) who is always getting in the face of Wayne's two-fisted investigator, and who is bounced all over the set in the film's climactic punch-up; and in Island in the Sky (1953), as Stankowski the engineer. As with any working character actor, his films ranged in quality from John Ford's exquisite period drama The Sun Shines Bright (1953) to Lee Sholem's juvenile science fiction-adventure Tobor the Great (1954), and every class of picture in between. If anything, he was even busier on television; beginning in 1949 with an appearance on The Lone Ranger, Baylor was a fixture on the small screen in villainous parts. He was downright ubiquitous in Westerns during the 1950s and early '60s, working regularly in Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, 26 Men, The Californians, Maverick, and The Alaskans; Rawhide, The Virginian, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Bat Masterson, The Big Valley, and Temple Houston (the latter allowing him to hook up with actor/producer Jack Webb, who would become one of his regular employers in the mid- to late '60s). During the mid-'60s, as Westerns faded from the home screen, Baylor got more work in crime shows, sometimes as police officers but more often as criminals, including a notably violent 1967 episode of Dragnet entitled "The Shooting," in which he and diminutive character actor Dick Miller played a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of would-be cop killers. He also played a brief comic-relief role in the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," as a 1930s police officer who confronts a time-transported Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock stealing clothes. Baylor's career was similar to that of his fellow tough-guy actors Leo Gordon, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef, almost always centered on heavies, and, like Gordon, on those rare occasions when he didn't play a villain, Baylor stood out -- in Joseph Pevney's Away All Boats (1956), he proved that he could act without his fists or his muscle, with a memorable portrayal of the chaplain of the attack transport Belinda; but it was his heavies that stood out, none more so than his portrayal of the anti-Semitic Private Burnecker in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions, tormenting and then beating Jewish draftee Montgomery Clift to a bloody pulp, before being similarly pummeled himself. During the later '60s, he acquired the nickname around the industry as "the Last of the Bigtime Bad Guys," with 500 television shows and 70 movies to credit and still working, in everything from Disney comedies (The Barefoot Executive, Herbie Rides Again) to cutting-edge science fiction (A Boy and His Dog). At the end of his career, he returned to Westerns in The Macahans, the two-hour made-for-television feature starring James Arness (who had used Baylor numerous times on Gunsmoke, and had known him at least since they both worked in Big Jim McLain) that served as the pilot for the series How the West Was Won.