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: A football star in his high school and college days, Donald Barry forsook an advertising career in favor of a stage acting job with a stock company. This barnstorming work led to movie bit parts, the first of which was in RKO's Night Waitress (1936). Barry's short stature, athletic build and pugnacious facial features made him a natural for bad guy parts in Westerns, but he was lucky enough to star in the 1940 Republic serial The Adventures of Red Ryder; this and subsequent appearance as "Lone Ranger" clone Red Ryder earned the actor the permanent sobriquet Donald "Red" Barry. Republic promoted the actor to bigger-budget features in the 1940s, casting him in the sort of roles James Cagney might have played had the studio been able to afford Cagney. Barry produced as well as starred in a number of Westerns, but this venture ultimately failed, and the actor, whose private life was tempestuous in the best of times, was consigned to supporting roles before the 1950s were over. By the late 1960s, Barry was compelled to publicly entreat his fans to contribute one dollar apiece for a new series of Westerns. Saving the actor from further self-humiliation were such Barry aficionados as actor Burt Reynolds and director Don Siegel, who saw to it that Don was cast in prominent supporting roles during the 1970s, notably a telling role in Hustle (1976). In 1980, Don "Red" Barry killed himself -- a sad end to an erratic life and career.

Trivia: To help support his large family, American actor Jimmy Lydon was forced along with his eight siblings to seek out work at an early age. The boy began picking up acting jobs, appearing in such plays as Western Waters and The Happiest Days. Lydon's first film was Back Door to Heaven, after which he appeared as the title character of Tom Brown's School Days (1940). The essential seriousness with which he tackled his work may have stemmed from Lydon's dislike of the demeaning audition process and the callous manner in which child actors were treated by many adult directors. When Jackie Cooper balked at continuing the role of Henry Aldrich in a series of Paramount B-pictures, Lydon was assigned to the part, ultimately appearing in nine Henry Aldrich films. The adenoidal, trouble-prone Henry was a hard image for Lydon to shake, but he did his best with polished performances in such films as Strange Illusion (1945) (a bizarre "B"-film based on Hamlet), and Life with Father (1947), in which Lydon was paired with Elizabeth Taylor. Finding film work sparse in the '50s, Lydon began doing commercial voiceovers and acting in television: he played a newlywed in the 1952 daytime serial The First Hundred Years, a benign space alien on the syndicated 1953 sci-fier Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, an actor's agent on So This is Hollywood (1955), and Anne Jeffreys' secretary in the 1958 sitcom Love That Jill. From 1956 onward, Lydon, wearying of the headaches and heartaches of an acting career (though he'd still accept a part if he liked it), began training for production work behind the cameras. He worked on the producer's staff of such series as Wagon Train and 77 Sunset Strip, and on occasion (notably the 1965 TV version of Mister Roberts) directed as well as produced. Lydon also functioned as producer on several films, such as the Sean Connery vehicle Chubasco (1968). Frequently, Lydon used his production clout to secure work for his ailing father-in-law, veteran movie villain Bernard Nedell. But while he was willing to help an older relative, James Lydon, still smarting from losing out on a normal childhood, actively discouraged his children from entering show business -- at least until they were grown up.

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.

Trivia: Starting his Hollywood career in or around 1951, American actor Robert Foulk was alternately passive and authoritative in such westerns as Last of the Badmen (1957), The Tall Stranger (1957), The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Cast a Long Shadow (1958). He remained a frontiersmen for his year-long stint as bartender Joe Kingston on the Joel McCrea TV shoot-em-up Wichita Town (1959) (though he reverted to modern garb as the Anderson family's next-door neighbor in the '50s sitcom Father Knows Best). In non-westerns, Foulk usually played professional men, often uniformed. Some of his parts were fleeting enough not to have any designation but "character bit" (vide The Love Bug [1968]), but otherwise there was no question Foulk was in charge: as a doctor in Tammy and the Doctor (1963), a police official in Bunny O'Hare (1971) or a railroad conductor in Emperor of the North (1973). Robert Foulk was given extensive screen time in the Bowery Boys' Hold That Hypnotist (1957), as the title character; and in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), playing straight as Sheriff Glick opposite such "Merrie Men" as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin Sammy Davis Jr. and Bing Crosby.