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: The son of a real-estate man, blonde, athletic John Charles Andes became Keith Andes when signed to a contract by David O. Selznick in the 1940s. At that time, Andes, a recent Temple University graduate, was a member of the Army Air Force, touring in the all-serviceman stage production Winged Victory. His stage reputation rested on his rich baritone singing voice, which he seldom got to utilize in his film and TV work. After several failed pilot films, Andes was given his own starring series in 1959: the syndicated This Man Dawson, in which he played an ex-military man hired to clean up a corrupt police department in a unnamed city. To bone up on his role, Andes was permitted to sit in on the LAPD three-man board which determined who would be selected as police officers--and became so adept at his "job" that he ended up rejecting a few candidates! Andes' later TV work included a 13-week stint as Glynis Johns' long-suffering husband on the 1963 sitcom Glynis. Never completely abandoning the stage, Keith Andes co-starred with Lucille Ball in the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat, and later in the decade headlined a touring company of Man of La Mancha.