Trivia: Born Krekor Ohanian, American actor Mike Connors was born and raised in the heavily Armenian community of Fresno, California. He studied law at UCLA, but distinguished himself in sports (he'd gotten in on a basketball scholarship). While in the Air Force, Connors switched his career goals to acting on the advice of producer/director William Wellman, who'd remembered Connors' college athletic activities. Hollywood changed young Mr. Ohanian's last name to Connors, and since this was the era of "Rocks" and "Tabs" it was decided that the actor needed a suitably rugged first name. So Connors spent his first few acting years as Touch Connors, a nickname he'd gotten while playing college football. His first picture was the Joan Crawford vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) but handsome hunks were a glut on the market in the early '50s, so Connors found himself in "B" pictures, mostly at bargain-basement American International studios. Renaming himself "Mike," Connors was able to secure the lead role as an undercover agent on the 1959 detective series Tightrope. The series was a hit but was dropped from the network due to complaints about excessive violence, though it cleaned up in syndication for years afterward. After a few strong but non-starring roles in such films as Good Neighbor Sam (1963) and Where Love Has Gone (1964), Connors landed the title role in Mannix (1967), a weekly TV actioner about a trouble-prone private eye. For the next eight high-rated seasons, Connors' Joe Mannix was beaten up, shot at, cold-cocked and nearly run over in those ubiquitous underground parking lots each and every week. The series ran in over 70 foreign countries, allowing Connors a generous chunk of profits percentages in addition to his lofty weekly salary-- which became loftier each time that the actor announced plans to retire. Mike Connors has starred in the 1981 series Today's FBI and filmed a cop-show pilot titled Ohanian (playing a character with his own real name), but nothing has quite captured the public's fancy, or been as lucrative in reruns, as Connors' chef d'ouevre series Mannix.

Trivia: American actress Joanna Barnes went from Southern-belle complacency to a contract with Warner Bros. studios. Joanna was generally cast as steely-eyed, truculent blondes in such films as Home Before Dark (1958) and (freelancing for director Stanley Kubrick) Spartacus (1960). She also held the dubious distinction of being the latest in a long line of "Janes" in the 1959 cheapie Tarzan of the Apes. Barnes worked a great deal on television in the 1950s and 1960s: she was detective Dennis Morgan's girl Friday on 1959's 21 Beacon Street; the ex-wife of pennyante attorney Peter Falk in the 1965 weekly drama The Trials of O'Brien; and the hostess of the 5-minute ABC gossipfest Dateline Hollywood. In 1973, Joanna gave up acting to pursue a career as a novelist, and to that end took a room in a Los Angeles office building leased exclusively to professional writers. While Joanna Barnes might not be remembered for her writings, she made an indelible impression as Vassar-educated socialite Gloria Upson, who spoke as though she had novacaine in her upper lip (the playwrights' description of the character) in the 1958 film comedy Auntie Mame.