Trivia: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: Supporting actor Kent McCord is best known for co-starring in the long-running series Adam-12 (1968-1975). McCord made his film debut in the made-for-television movie The Outsider (1967). Following the demise of Adam-12, McCord continued appearing in TV films and in low-budget features such as Unsub (1985) and Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993).

Trivia: The Crown Prince of TV sitcom dads, American actor Ozzie Nelson was famous as a bandleader long before television had established itself. Married to actress/singer Harriet Hilliard, Ozzie Nelson guided his orchestra through nightclub dates, radio programs, and minor films on the order of Sweethearts of the Campus (1941). He'd had speaking parts on Red Skelton's program and other radio series of the '40s, wherein he displayed a hitherto untapped gift for comic delivery. This led to the Nelsons' own weekly radio starrer in 1944, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which related the humorously fictionalized home life of a popular bandleader, his wife, and their two very young sons (Ozzie's own kids Ricky and David were impersonated by professional child actors in the first few years of the program, but eventually strong-armed Ozzie into letting them play themselves). Typical of the era were the radio show's wisecracking dialogue and musical interludes; but when Ozzie and Harriet entered television in 1952 (with the whole family along for the ride), the series opted for gentler, more realistic comedy. The year prior to the TV show's debut, Ozzie and entourage appeared in a Universal-International picture, Here Come the Nelsons, which is worth noting if only for the presence in the cast of Rock Hudson and the fact that it was directed by future Tonight Show mainstay Fred De Cordova. Here Come the Nelsons was only a modest success, but the Ozzie and Harriet TV series was an unadulterated hit, running 14 seasons (a record still unbroken for a sitcom). Though there were endless joking speculations as to what TV's Ozzie Nelson did for a living on a series, the "real" Ozzie produced, directed, edited the stories, chose the wardrobe, supervised the casting, and even designed the main "home" set to look like the real Nelson living room. Unlike his stammering, scatterbrained TV image, Ozzie was a stern and well-organized taskmaster, seeing to it that Ozzie and Harriet conformed to his image of what a good TV show should be, rather than the usual TV status quo. One of the byproducts of Ozzie and Harriet was the spectacular singing career of son Ricky Nelson, and the less spectacular but prolific directing career of Rick's brother David. By the time Ozzie and Harriet entered the '60s, Rick's then-wife Kris Nelson (daughter of sports great Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox, and brother of film star Mark Harmon) had joined the cast...as Rick's wife Kris. The series finally breathed its last in 1966, but workaholic Ozzie stayed busy with stage appearances and a supporting role in the very non-Ozzie and Harriet sexy film comedy The Impossible Years (1968). Cashing in on the nostalgia craze of the early '70s, Ozzie revived his series with a new title: Ozzie's Girls had Ozzie and Harriet renting out Ricky and David's old rooms to a pair of nubile female college students. Squeezed off the network schedules at the last minute, Ozzie's Girls was syndicated to local stations in 1973, but lasted only one season, as much the victim of changing tastes as inaccessible timeslots. Shortly before his death, Ozzie Nelson published his autobiography, in which he shocked many of his Bible-belt fans by revealing that he was a lifelong atheist.

Trivia: Born into a circus family, Florence Lake and her younger brother Arthur Lake (later the star of the Blondie films) were performing on-stage before they knew how to read or write. Florence Lake began playing juvenile roles in films as early as 1916, occasionally appearing with Arthur in the Fox Kiddies series. She made her talkie debut in 1929, at first receiving sizeable supporting roles in such features as The Rogue Song (1930). By 1932, however, she was firmly established in two-reel comedies, appearing as the birdbrained, garrulous wife of Edgar Kennedy in a series of RKO Radio shorts which lasted until 1948. During this period she also essayed innumerable uncredited bits in features, usually playing a woebegone wallflower or motor-mouthed "best friend." In the early '50s, she could occasionally be seen in villainous roles on such TV series as The Lone Ranger. Active until the 1970s, Florence Lake made an unforgettable appearance as the octogenarian blind date of newly divorced Lou Grant (Edward Asner) on a 1973 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Trivia: Wiry character actor Paul Gleason attended Florida State University before making his first off-Broadway appearance in a 1973 revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Gleason's inaugural movie role was Long Tom in Doc Savage (1975), after which he worked extensively in Roger Corman productions. He is best known for his scowling, obstreperous portrayals of minor authority figures: the principal in The Breakfast Club (1985), the police chief in Die Hard (1988), and so on. He was at his most abrasive--and his funniest--as FBI agent Clarence Beeks in Trading Places (1982). A familiar TV presence since his days as David Thornton on the ABC serial All My Children, Paul Gleason has had recurring roles on such nighttimers as Spooner, Supercarrier and One West Waikiki. Throughout the '90s Gleason continued to work steadily as a character actor appearing in films as diverse as National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, Running Cool, Maniac Cop 3, and Nothing to Lose. Like his Breakfast Club co-star Molly Ringwald, Gleason willingly spoofed his most iconic performance in the 2001 comedy Not Another Teen Movie. In May of 2006, at the age of 67, Gleason perished from mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer often suffered by people exposed to asbestos.