Trivia: The son of a circuit-riding Methodist minister, American actor Pat Buttram led a hand-to-mouth existence as a child. He managed to get a scholarship to study theology at Birmingham Southern College, where amateur theatricals captured his enthusiasm. Buttram's first professional job was as a morning announcer at a Birmingham station, bringing home a lofty six dollars per week. Heading for Chicago to see the 1933 World's Fair, Buttram began picking up comedy relief work on radio station WLS's National Barn Dance, where he worked with such stars-to-be as Homer & Jethro and teenaged George Gobel (who would later cite Buttram as his principal comic influence). One of the Barn Dance headliners was singing cowboy Gene Autry, and when Autry inaugurated his starring radio series Melody Ranch in the 1940s, Buttram came aboard as comedy relief. Together, Autry and Buttram would make several pictures at both Republic and Columbia studios (Buttram's first was The Strawberry Roan [1948]); the two also co-starred on Autry's TV show, which ran for 91 episodes in the early '50s. Fast friends but not bosom buddies, Autry and Buttram became a little closer in 1950 when Pat was severely injured in an on-set accident and Gene gave him the encouragement to hang in there even when the doctors had given up hope. Autry retired from acting a multimillionaire in 1956; Buttram, while well off, still had to keep working, so after vetoing the notion of hitting the nightclub trail, he became an immensely popular after-dinner speaker at show-business functions. His subsequent TV roles were in a comical vein, but Buttram made an excellent impression in a feverishly dramatic part in "The Jar," one of the eeriest episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. In 1965, Buttram was cast as duplicitous peddler Mr. Haney on Green Acres, and for the next five seasons kept audiences in stitches as he sold "Mis-ter Douglas" (Eddie Albert) one useless item after another, delivering his laconic sales pitch in his inimitable singsong voice. Off-camera, Buttram was a successful rancher and stock market speculator, as well as a Civil War buff; he was happily married for many years to one-time Western leading lady Sheila Ryan, who left Pat a widower in 1975. Semi-retired by the 1980s, Pat Buttram made a few welcome appearances on TV (guesting on a Green Acres retrospective special on cable television, and providing a voice for the cartoon series Garfield and Friends) and movies (Back to the Future III [1989]).

Trivia: Veteran movie villain Kenne Duncan began plying his wicked trade in 1933. He hit his stride in the 1940s, when he was under contract to Republic Pictures. Duncan sneered and skulked his way through scores of westerns and serials, usually as the raffish aide-de-camp of the principal heavy (as in the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel). When Republic slowed down production in the mid-1950s, Duncan reluctantly found himself in the circle of Hollywood "fringies" who populated the films of immortal bad-movie maven Ed Wood Jr. One of Kenne Duncan's final screen appearances was as phony mystic and erstwhile vampire Dr. Acula in Wood's Night of the Ghouls

Trivia: Actor Harry Harvey Sr. started out in minstrel shows and burlesque. His prolific work in Midwestern stock companies led to film assignments, beginning at RKO in 1934. Harvey's avuncular appearance (he looked like every stage doorman named Pop who ever existed) won him featured roles in mainstream films and comic-relief and sheriff parts in B-westerns. His best known "prestige" film assignment was the role of New York Yankees manager Joe McCarthy in the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic Pride of the Yankees. Remaining active into the TV era, Harry Harvey Sr. had continuing roles on two series, The Roy Rogers Show and It's a Man's World, and showed up with regularity on such video sagebrushers as Cheyenne and Bonanza.

Trivia: Hollywood's quintessential low-budget film noir hero Tom Neal earned some notoriety at an early age when his banker father persuaded him to drop the idea of eloping with Inez Martin, a buxom former Follies girl and the mistress of slain mobster Arnold Rothstein. A former college athlete, the handsome, mustachioed Neal entered the theatrical profession playing summer stock at West Falmouth, MA, and went on to make his Broadway debut in the short-lived anti-war melodrama If This Be Treason (1935). He later performed opposite Maria Ouspenskaya in Daughters of Artreus, but although critically acclaimed, the play was yet another box-office failure and Neal hightailed it to Sunny California. Contracted by MGM, who obviously saw him as another Clark Gable, Neal bided his time in secondary assignments and loan-outs to other studios for such fare as the 1941 serial Jungle Girl. In 1943, a now freelancing Tom earned some recognition for playing a U.S.-educated Japanese in the propaganda film Behind the Rising Sun, but lasting fame had to wait until Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer's cult classic. Although dismissed when the cheaply made drama was released in 1945, Neal and Ann Savage's fiery chemistry did much to earn Detour a lasting place as the quintessential low-budget film noir and remains one of the few memorable films to emerge from PRC, the now infamous Poverty Row company that otherwise more than lived up to its nickname of "Pretty Rotten Crud."Along with another well-remembered but poverty-stricken Ulmer production, Club Havana (1945), Detour marked a definite decline in the actor's cinematic fortunes and by the early '50s he had become better known for his offscreen escapades. A very public brawl with actor Franchot Tone over the dubious charms of starlet Barbara Payton left Tone hospitalized with a fractured cheekbone, a broken nose, and brain concussion, and made Neal all but unemployable. He later worked as night manager of a restaurant in Palm Springs, CA, and for a while operated a landscaping business, but in 1965 he was arrested and charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of his second wife. A jury returned a verdict of involuntary manslaughter and Neal served a six-year prison term. Sadly, the former actor suffered a fatal heart attack a little more than eight months after being paroled in late 1971. His son, Tom Neal Jr. (born 1957), starred in a 1992 remake of Detour.