Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Actress Carmen Mathews's long career encompassed stage, screen and television. Unlike many performers of her era who began their careers when they were quite young, Mathews did not take her first acting bows on stage until 1943 when she was in her early '30s. Prior to her American stage debut, Mathews had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and had honed her skills in Shakespearean plays. Her more famous Broadway efforts include A Holiday for Lovers, Dear World and David Copperfield. Mathews made her film debut with an uncredited role in The Butterfield 8 (1960). Her television appearances include M*A*S*H (1972) and in the television movies The Last Best Years of My Life. When not working, Mathews ran a residential summer camp for underprivileged kids. She started the camp on her 100-acre West Redding, CT farm in 1975. A decade later, she set up an education center there. Just prior to her death in 1995, Mathews donated a significant amount of her land to the Redding Land Trust to insure that it will remain undeveloped. She was named one of Connecticut's Outstanding Women of 1987 by the United Nations.

Trivia: Brusque character actor Dana Elcar was usually assigned roles calling for blunt imperiousness. He became especially handy in films and TV shows of the 1970s, portraying curt, dour, meticulously groomed authority figures at odds with dishevelled "hippie" and "gonzo" types. Elcar's first film after many years' stage work was 1968's Pendulum; other film credits include Soldier Blue (1969), W.C.Fields and Me (1976), and The Nude Bomb (1980). In 1985, Dana Elcar was cast as Peter Thornton, boss of troubleshooting Richard Dean Anderson, on the TV series MacGiver; Elcar continued playing the role into the 1990s, at which time the actor's real-life blindness required him to incorporate dark glasses and a cane into his characterization.