Dreaming Out Loud

Charles Lauck (Actor)

Norris Goff (Actor) .. Abner Peabody

Born: January 01, 1905
Died: January 01, 1978

Frances Langford (Actor) .. Alice

Born: April 04, 1914
Died: July 11, 2005

Trivia: Actress and band singer Frances Langford began her movie career in 1935, playing part of a singing-sister act (with Alice Faye and Patsy Kelly) in Every Night at Eight. She flourished in the 1940s as a vocalist on Bob Hope's radio program and with her own weekly series. Never a brilliant actress, Langford was often a very good one: her better films include Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which she played turn-of-the-century entertainer Nora Bayes, and The Bamboo Blonde (1945), a fanciful reenactment of her many wartime USO tours. Collectors of comedy record albums will fondly recall Langford for her many co-starring stints with Don Ameche as the battling Bickersons. Frances Langford ended her show-business career in the early 1960s, opting for retirement with her third husband, the owner of Evinrude Motors.

Bobs Watson (Actor) .. Jimmy

Born: November 16, 1930
Died: June 26, 1999

Trivia: American actor Bobs Watson was born into a family of show people in Hollywood, CA. He made his film debut as an infant and later became a popular child star in Fox and MGM films during the '30s. He was notable for his ability to cry on cue and is perhaps best remembered as little Pee Wee in Boys Town (1938). Watson left films in the early '40s. He later infrequently returned to play character roles until 1967 when he became an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church.

Frank Craven (Actor) .. Dr. `Doc Walt' Walter Barnes

Born: August 24, 1875
Died: September 01, 1945

Trivia: American actor/playwright Frank Craven enjoyed a long stage career as both performer and writer. As an actor, he specialized in wry middle-aged small-town types. As a writer, he favored domestic comedies, usually centered around the tribulations of "normal" family life. Craven was so firmly locked into his particular style that he felt lost doing anything else. For several years during the silent film era, Craven had begged Harold Lloyd to allow him to sit in on the "gag sessions" for Lloyd's films, in order to contribute comedy ideas; after a particularly harrowing session with Lloyd's writers, who tossed gag ideas about at the tops of their voices, Craven admitted that slapstick wasn't his brand of humor and returned to the stage. Craven made his film bow in the 1928 "ethnic melting pot" drama We Americans, but when he was finally brought to Hollywood under contract to Fox in 1932, it was as a writer. One of Craven's best-known screenplays was for the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert (1933), one of the comedy team's few feature films with a solid plot structure. Concentrating mainly on performing for most of his film career, Craven returned to Broadway in 1939 to play the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town. The actor was called upon to repeat the role in the 1940 film version, and thereafter most of his film roles were variations of the Stage Manager, complete with his ubiquitous pipe. Craven died in 1945 at age 70, shortly after completing his role in Colonel Effingham's Raid (1945).

Irving Bacon (Actor) .. Wes Stillman

Born: September 06, 1893
Died: February 05, 1965

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

Clara Blandick (Actor) .. Jessica Spence

Born: June 04, 1880
Died: April 15, 1962

Trivia: Diminutive actress Clara Blandick was technically a U.S. citizen, since she was born aboard an American ship docked in the harbor of Hong Kong. She remained in Hong Kong with her family, making her stage debut in Richard Lovelace with visiting actor E. H. Sothern. Blandick made her first film in 1910, but she preferred the theatre, where she could count on being cast in leading roles. Nearly fifty when talkies came in, Blandick slipped easily into such character roles as Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer (1930) and Huckleberry Finn (1931). By the mid 1930s she was a day player, appearing in unbilled bits and supporting parts in a number of top productions including A Star is Born (1937). In 1939, she was cast in her most memorable role, as Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ironically, many Wizard of Oz fans of the 1950s and 1960s didn't know the real name of the actress portraying Auntie Em; Ms. Blandick's name does not appear in the opening credits, while the film's closing cast list (in which she is billed last, below Pat Walshe as the head flying monkey) was never telecast during the ten years that CBS owned the TV rights to Wizard. After her week's work as Auntie Em, Blandick went back to playing tiny uncredited roles in "A" pictures like One Foot in Heaven (1941) and The Big Store (1941), as well as good supporting parts in such "B" efforts as Pillow of Death (1945) and Philo Vance Returns (1947) -- playing a cold-blooded killer in the latter film. Clara Blandick retired in 1950; 12 years later, suffering from arthritis and encroaching blindness, she committed suicide in her modest Hollywood apartment.

Robert Wilcox (Actor) .. Dr. Kenneth Barnes

Born: May 19, 1910
Died: June 11, 1955

Trivia: The son of a Rochester, NY, physician, debonair leading man Robert Wilcox entered films in 1936 after being spotted in a summer-stock production of The Petrified Forest. In 1937, he married MGM starlet Florence Rice (the daughter of sportswriter Grantland Rice) , divorcing her two years later. Wilcox' notorious second marriage, to the troubled Diana Barrymore, created headlines for years due to the couple's rather public battle with alcoholism, an affliction which shortened the actor's screen career -- and life -- considerably. Barrymore's autobiography, Too Much Too Soon, published two years after his death, was dedicated to Wilcox.

Donald Briggs (Actor) .. Will Danielson

Born: January 01, 1910
Died: January 01, 1986

Trivia: American actor Donald Briggs began his career on the radio in Chicago. He received national attention when he played the radio hero "Frank Merriwell" in California. During the mid-1930s he began appearing in films.

Bob McKenzie (Actor) .. Caleb Wehunt

Born: September 22, 1883
Died: July 08, 1949

Trivia: Irish-born Robert McKenzie was already a theatrical showman of some renown by the time he made his first film appearance in 1921. The barrel-chested, snaggle-toothed McKenzie appeared in dozens of westerns and comedies, usually as a bombastic lawman or backwoods con artist. Even when he played bits (which was often), his raspy voice and hyena-like laugh always identified him. His more memorable feature-film roles included W. C. Fields' drinking buddy Charlie Bogle in You're Telling Me (1934), larcenous Judge Roy Dean in Gene Autry's Sing, Cowboy, Sing (1937), and the jolly captain who rents Laurel & Hardy a broken-down boat in Saps at Sea (1940). In addition, he appeared in hundreds of short subjects, playing opposite the likes of Our Gang, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase and the Three Stooges. In 1927, McKenzie tried his hand at screenwriting with the low-budget western The White Outlaw. Robert McKenzie and his actress-wife Eva had three daughters, all of whom acted in films at one time or another; their daughter Ella was the wife of comedian Billy Gilbert.

Phil Harris (Actor) .. Peter Atkinson

Born: June 24, 1904
Died: August 11, 1995

Trivia: When drummer/bandleader Phil Harris made his screen debut in the RKO short So This is Harris (1933), his screen image was that of a wavy-haired Lothario, utterly irresistible to women. When Harris became a regular on Jack Benny's radio broadcasts of the 1930s and 1940s, his persona began taking on elements of self-parody, with a reputation for heavy imbibing thrown in for comic effect. Both the womanizing and drinking aspects of the "public" Harris were allowed to lapse on his own radio series, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, in which he co-starred from 1946 to 1954 with his second wife, screen star Alice Faye. Now Harris was depicted as a rumbly-voiced, good-natured schmo, who was easily outclassed intellectually by his wife and his two daughters. During this period, Harris, whose previous song hits included the rapid-fire "That's What I Like About the South," began making such child-oriented recordings as "The Thing" and "I Know an Old Lady." This aspect of Harris' career proved a logical lead-in to his later voiceover assignments in such Disney feature-length cartoons as The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973). While Phil Harris' off-screen personality was very much like his laid-back, genial stage character, he was a man of definite likes and dislikes: one of the latter was the Broadway musical The Music Man, which was written for Harris but which he turned down flat, steadfastly refusing to appear even in road-company or revival stagings.

Sheila Sheldon (Actor) .. Effie Stillman

Troy Brown Jr. (Actor) .. Washington

Chester Lauck (Actor) .. Lum

Born: January 01, 1900
Died: January 01, 1980

Bobby Watson (Actor) .. Jimmy

Born: January 01, 1888
Died: May 22, 1965

Trivia: Not to be confused with lachrymose child actor Bobs Watson (1931-1999), Robert "Bobby" Watson was a musical comedy actor who came to films in 1925. At the advent of talkies, the short, ebullient Watson played a few leads in such musicals as Syncopation (1929), then spent the 1930s essaying bit roles as glib reporters and fey "pansy" types. For a while, he emulated Broadway star Bobby Clark, adopting horn-rimmed glasses, a wide-brimmed hat, and a perpetual air of bug-eyed lechery. Watson found his true niche in the 1940s, when his startling resemblance to Adolf Hitler assured him plenty of screen work. He alternately portrayed Der Führer as a raving madman in such serious films as The Hitler Gang (1942) and as a slapsticky buffoon in such comedies as The Devil With Hitler (1942) and That Nazty Nuisance (1943). Legend has it that he faced so much hostility on the set while made up as Hitler that he had to remain locked in his dressing room between takes. After the war, Watson fell from prominence, playing a few sizeable character roles in films like The Paleface (1948) and Red, Hot and Blue (1949) before settling into such uncredited minor parts as the voice coach ("Moses supposes his toeses are roses") in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Until the end of his life, Bobby Watson remained "on call" for one-scene appearances as Hitler in films ranging from The Story of Mankind (1957) to Danny Kaye's On the Double (1961).

06:00 am - 08:00 am, Sunday, July 12 on WNYN AMG TV HDTV (39.1)