Trivia: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: Supporting actor Kent McCord is best known for co-starring in the long-running series Adam-12 (1968-1975). McCord made his film debut in the made-for-television movie The Outsider (1967). Following the demise of Adam-12, McCord continued appearing in TV films and in low-budget features such as Unsub (1985) and Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993).

Trivia: Ben Frommer was the epitome of the successful character actor. Across a screen career totaling more than 40 years, he worked in over 100 film roles and possibly twice as many parts on television, ranging from just a few seconds of screen time in feature films to regular work on one of the more popular western series of the mid-1960s. And in virtually all of it, as with so many of the best people in his profession, he melted so well into the parts he played that audiences were seldom possessed to even ask his name. Ironically, it was in one of the cheapest -- and perhaps THE cheapest -- production on which he ever worked, in a part scarcely larger, or of longer duration than his typical background and supporting role, that Frommer earned his lingering name recognition. Born in Poland in 1913, Frommer arrived in Hollywood as an actor in the early 1940s, making his screen bow with an uncredited appearance in the 1943 Olsen & Johnson vehicle Crazy House. He next showed up in a bit part in the Laurence Tierney-starring film noir Born To Kill (1947). Frommer's short stature and fireplug-like physique, coupled with his rough-hewn features, made him ideal for playing working-class background parts such as deliverymen and taxi drivers. Most of his work was in lower-budgeted films, including exploitation fare such as Sid Melton's Bad Girls Do Cry (shot in the mid-1950s but not issued till much later). And it was in low-budget films -- some of the lowest budgeted ever made, in fact -- that Frommer would achieve a form of immortality as an actor.It was writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who gave Frommer the opportunity to play a slightly wider range of parts. In Bride Of the Monster, Frommer was cast as a surly drunk, while in Wood's magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, he is the mourner who is charged by the script with providing the explanation as to why the old man (played by Bela Lugosi in footage shot for a movie that was never made) is buried in a crypt, while his wife (Maila "Vampira" Nurmi) is buried in the ground. The dialogue is as awkward as anything else in the notoriously poorly made (but thoroughly entertaining) movie, but Frommer does his best to deliver it convincingly, in what was almost certainly one very rushed take. Around this time, Frommer also showed up in the horror film Cult of the Cobra and the outsized production of Around The World In 80 Days, and a lot more television as well -- he also began providing voices for animated productions, a professional activity that would occupy ever more of his time later in his career. He worked in pictures by John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain), and Mervyn LeRoy (Gypsy), but it was during this same period, from 1965 through 1967, that Frommer achieved his widest weekly exposure on television, when he was cast in the comedic western series F-Troop in the role of Smokey Bear, the squat, chunky (and uncredited) member of the Hekawi Indian tribe. He usually did little more than hold the reigns of the horses ridden by Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch's characters, but he was impossible to miss in a shot.Frommer remained a very busy character actor and voice-actor over the next two decades, and only slowed down during his final years in the profession. During that time, he took on the new profession of publicist for his fellow actors. He died in 1992 at the age of 78.

Trivia: Racking up a staggering number of small-screen credits over the course of his impressive 50-year career, Stacy Keach Sr. also appeared in countless television commercials in addition to feature roles in The Parallax View (1974), Pretty Woman (1990), and Cobb (1994), among many others. Born Walter Stacy Keach in Chicago, IL, in May of 1914, the future star earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern and impressed teachers so much that he was appointed a Dramatic Arts instructor as a graduate student. Keach would subsequently teach at Armstrong College and founded the Savannah Playhouse, later relocating to the West Coast for a stint at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was there that Keach was signed by Universal Studios as an actor/director/writer, and though he would stay there for nearly five years he would eventually relocate to RKO as a producer. During his stint at RKO, Keach would produce and direct the popular radio series Tales of the Texas Rangers. Keach was widely recognized for his roles on such popular television series as The Lone Ranger, Mannix, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In addition to his work in the entertainment industry, Keach also founded Kayden Records, an award-winning education company, and proved an early developer of industrial films. The father of actors Stacy and James, Keach married Mary Cain Peckham in June of 1937 and remained wed until his death resulting from heart failure in early 2003. He was 88.

Trivia: Many of those viewers who admire her will tell you that Peggy Webber is almost too good an actress for her own good, at least in terms of getting recognition for herself. A chameleon-like presence on-screen, Webber melts into her roles so well that she can often be overlooked by less perceptive viewers, in terms of her range and depth. Webber was the daughter of a wildcat oil driller, born in Laredo, TX, and began her career at age two and a half, performing during intermissions in silent movie theaters in the second half of the 1920s. She broke into radio in 1936, at age 11, and became one of the busier actresses in the medium. It was partly because of her work in radio that Orson Welles chose Webber for the role of Lady McDuff in his film of Macbeth (1948). Film credits were rare and unusual for her, however, so busy was she in the new medium of television, where she became a writer and producer early on and won one of the earlier awards ever given in the small-screen medium, in 1947, for her anthology series Treasures of Literature. Jack Webb used her on the Dragnet radio show and she made the transition to television with him, remaining as part of his stock company right through the late-'60s incarnation of the series. Two of her finest performances were in the episodes "Homicide -- The Student" and "The Joyriders," in which she played a teacher and a harried mother. Webber was still doing voice work in the early twenty first century. She was married for many years to actor Sean McClory, who was just as busy a character actor on television and in movies as she was on radio and television. Her biggest movie role was in Jack Arnold's anti-war science fiction drama The Space Children (1958), as the mother of two children who have come into contact with an alien intelligence.

Trivia: Character and voice actor Bob Hastings is best known for his television work on series such as McHale's Navy and All in the Family, but he also appeared in some feature films. Born in New York in 1921, he was busy on the radio in his twenties, specializing in male ingenue and comedy roles, including portraying Archie Andrews in an NBC radio adaptations of Archie Comics in 1944. His first credited television appearance was in 1955, in the U.S. Steel Hour production of No Time for Sergeants. Hastings made his feature film debut in 1962 in the Disney production Moon Pilot, starring Tom Tryon, and that same year got his first regular series role as Lt. Elroy Carpenter, the obsequious aide to Joe Flynn's Captain Binghamton on McHale's Navy. He was with the series for four seasons, and it led to his subsequent big-screen work in the features McHale's Navy (1964) and McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force (1965). He also played Bert Ramsey on the daytime drama General Hospital and managed to work in occasional big-screen work, in pictures such as The Flim-Flam Man. In the 1970s, Hastings played the recurring character of Kelsey the tavern-keeper on All in the Family. Hastings' on-screen acting generally saw him cast as nervous, sycophantic mid-level bureaucrats, or, occasionally, as rough-hewn working-class types. But as a voice artist he has had a much wider range of portrayals, including heroes and authority figures, including the voice of Clark Kent in the 1960s Batman/Superman Hour and, in more recent decades, the voice of Commissioner Gordon on the animated Batman from Fox network. Bob Hastings is the older brother of actor Don Hastings, who is perhaps best remembered by viewers of one generation for his portrayal of the Video Ranger in Captain Video; Bob also appeared in the series, in a much less prominent role. He died in 2014, at age 89.

Trivia: Sad-eyed, mustachioed actor Hal K. Dawson appeared in several Broadway productions of the 1920s. During the run of Machinal, Dawson was the roommate of fellow actor Clark Gable; throughout his later Hollywood career, Gable saw to it that Dawson was given parts in such films as Libeled Lady (1936) and To Please a Lady (1951). Even without Gable's help, Dawson enjoyed a long and productive movie and TV career, usually playing long-suffering personal secretaries and officious desk clerks. Hal K. Dawson was a lifelong member of the Masquers Club, and, in the twilight of his life, was made an honorary member of the Pioneers of Radio Club.

Trivia: A one-time exotic dancer, buxom blonde actress Barbara Nichols more than once portrayed strippers during her film and TV career. But she also was a persuasive dramatic actress when the need arose, as well as an articulate, well-read young lady offscreen. When not removing her clothes on-camera, Nichols could be seen portraying a variety of dim-bulbed blondes, gun molls, and gold-diggers, imbuing each character with an expert sense of comic timing and subtle inner lining of pathos. She was a favorite foil for many of TV's top comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, notably Jack Benny, who frequently cast Ms. Nichols as his brash, gum-chewing steady date on his weekly TV series. A film actress since 1954, Barbara Nichols curtailed her screen appearances in her last years due to the liver disease that would take her life at the age of 46.

Trivia: Actor and stunt man Fred Stromsoe worked in both television and feature films. His television credits include a regular role as Officer Woods on Adam-12 between 1974 and 1975. He also appeared in segments of Wild, Wild West and Gunsmoke.