Trivia: Following World War II, California native Jack Webb planned to renew the art studies that he'd abandoned for the military. Instead, he turned to acting, appearing on various San Francisco-based radio programs. He briefly hosted his own satirical comedy series before finding his true metier in detective melodramas. In collaboration with future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard L. Breen (who remained a Webb associate until his death in 1967), Webb concocted a hard-boiled private eye show entitled Pat Novak for Hire. The popularity he gained from this effort enabled Webb to secure small film roles -- one of these was as a police lab technician in the 1948 film noir He Walked by Night (1948). Intrigued by the police procedure he'd learned while preparing for the role, Webb immersed himself in the subject until he felt ready to launch what many observers still consider the first realistic radio cop show: Dragnet, which premiered June 3, 1949. Webb carried over his terse characterization of L.A. police sergeant Joe Friday into the Dragnet TV series (which he also directed) beginning in 1952. Armed with a bottomless reserve of police terminology and a colorful repertoire of catchphrases, the laconic, ferret-faced Webb became one of the most successful -- and most widely imitated -- TV personalities of the 1950s; almost always in the Top Ten, Dragnet, produced by Webb's own Mark VII Productions, ran until 1959. Webb's newfound industry clout permitted him to direct for the big screen as well -- his 1950s movie credits (outside of such pre-star efforts as The Men, Sunset Boulevard, and Halls of Montezuma) include the 1954 feature version of Dragnet, 1955's Pete Kelly's Blues (based on another of Webb's radio series), 1957's The D.I., and 1959's 30. In addition, Webb's Mark VII produced such TV series as Noah's Ark, The D.A.'s Man, and the video version of Pete Kelly's Blues. Webb kicked off the 1960s with a rare attempt at directing comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). From 1962 through 1964, he was in charge of Warner Bros.' television division, an assignment which came to an end as a result of several failed TV ventures. A 1966 TV-movie version of Dragnet kicked off Webb's second career. He went on to star in a successful weekly Dragnet revival, which ran from 1967 through 1970, while his Mark VII outfit was responsible for a score of TV series, the most successful of which were Emergency and Adam 12. Regarded as something of a relic by the "hipper" viewers, Jack Webb nonetheless remained profitably active in television until the late '70s; he might have continued into the 1980s had not his drinking and smoking habits accelerated his death at the age of 62. Married three times, Jack Webb's first wife was singing star Julie London, whom he'd first met when he was 21 and she was 15.

Trivia: A favorite of producer/director Jack Webb, character actor Ralph Moody was a familiar face to viewers of Dragnet in both its 1950s and 1960s incarnations -- but that would be an unfair (as well as inaccurate) way to describe an actor who amassed hundreds of film and television appearances in barely 20 years of movie and television work. Born in St. Louis, MO, in 1886, Moody didn't make his screen debut until 1948, with a small role in Man Eaters of Kumaon. Already in his sixties, he always looked older than he was, and his craggy features could also impart a fierceness that made him threatening. Although Moody was known for playing kindly or crotchety old men, he occasionally brought that fierceness to bear, as in the Adventures of Superman episode "Test of a Warrior", in which he played the sinister medicine man Okatee. But in between that and dozens of other one-off television assignments, Moody also managed to work in scenes as the coffin-boat skipper in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street and one of the rescue workers in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Moody was one of those actors who could work quickly and milk a line or a scene for all its emotional worth. What's more, he could do it without over-emoting. He was the kind of character player that directors and producers in budget-conscious television of the 1950s needed. In an episode of Circus Boy, he played a touching scene with a young Micky Dolenz, as an aging railroad engineer introducing the boy to the world of locomotives and trains. After that, Moody got called back to do three more episodes. But it was Jack Webb who really put him to work in Dragnet and many of his other productions, in radio and feature films as well as television. His more memorable appearances on Dragnet included "The Big Producer", as a once-famous movie producer who is reduced to selling pornographic pictures to high-school students, and "The Hammer", from the 1967 revival of the series, in which he portrayed the neighbor of a murder victim. Moody continued working regularly in television until a year before his death in 1971, at age 84. His final appearance was in the Night Gallery episode "The Little Black Bag".

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: A bad heart and bad luck cost character actor Barton Yarborough a shot at pop-culture immortality on television, after two decades in radio. He also led an early life colorful enough to have been made into a movie. Born in the small central Texas town of Goldthwaite, Yarborough was bitten by the performing bug as a young teenager and ran away from home to pursue work in vaudeville. With the advent of radio in the 1920s, he turned his efforts to the new medium, and in 1932 debuted in the role of Cliff Barbour on the series One Man's Family -- a series on which he continued working right up to his death nearly two decades later. He became a fixture on radio in a multitude of roles, one the advantages of that medium being that a truly versatile actor could handle all the work for which they could physically get to the studio. In 1938, he debuted as Doc Long, the physician partner to the hero in the series I Love A Mystery. Two years later, he made his big-screen debut in the "Dr. Christian" film series entry They Meet Again (1941), in a cast that included Jean Hersholt and Neil Hamilton, playing the central role of accused bank embezzler Bob Webster. That same year he showed up in the Universal "B" comedy Let's Go Collegiate, starring Frankie Darro, Mantan Moreland, and Gale Storm, and a year after that was back at Universal in The Ghost of Frankenstein as Dr. Kettering, the kindly physician whose death at the hands of the Frankenstein monster sets in motion the plot. He shows up as an FBI man in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), and then left pictures for the next three years. In 1945, Yarborough returned to movies when I Love A Mystery made the leap to the big-screen, in the part of Doc Long in I Love A Mystery, teamed with Jim Bannon. He did two more films in the series, in between other roles, and continued in radio, where he also began appearing on Dragnet in the role of Sgt. Ben Romero, the partner to Jack Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. Webb, who created, produced, and directed the series, kept Yarborough as his on-air partner when the series made the jump to television in late 1951. Alas, Yarborough became ill during the shooting of the second episode, and died less than a week later of a heart attack. His character was written out of the show with the same cause of death. The year after he passed away, Yarborough was seen in his final film role, a small, uncredited part as a secretary in Richard Brooks' Deadline -- USA (1952), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ethel Barrymore.

Trivia: Trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, Texas-born Carolyn Jones supported herself as a radio disk jockey when acting jobs were scarce. She entered films as a bit player in 1952, attaining prominence for a role in which (for the most part) she neither moved nor spoke: the waxwork Joan of Arc -- actually one of mad sculptor Vincent Price's many murder victims -- in 1953's House of Wax. In 1957, Jones was Oscar-nominated for her five-minute role as a pathetic "good time girl" in The Bachelor Party; two years later, she stole the show in Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head as Frank Sinatra's bongo-playing girlfriend. During the early 1960s, Jones was married to producer Aaron Spelling, who frequently cast her on such TV series as The Dick Powell Show and Burke's Law. In 1964, Jones achieved TV sitcom immortality as the ghoulishly sexy Morticia Addams on the popular series The Addams Family. Though her TV and movie activities were curtailed by illness in her last decade (she died of cancer in 1983), Carolyn Jones continued making occasional appearances, notably a return engagement as Morticia in a 1978 Addams Family reunion special.

Trivia: Fans of the 1950s TV series Dragnet were usually taken aback to discover that Jack Webb's co-star, the rumpled, balding Ben Alexander, had once been a golden-haired child actor. Born in Nevada and raised in California, Alexander made his screen debut at age 5 in Every Pearl a Tear. He went on to portray Lillian Gish's young brother in D.W. Griffith's World War I epic Hearts of the World. It was in another WW I classic, the early-talkie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), that Alexander made his first positive impression as an adult actor in the role of Kemmerick, the tragic amputation victim. Closing out his movie career in 1940, Alexander became a busy radio actor and announcer, returning to on-camera work with his six-year (1953-1959) stint on TV's Dragnet. As Officer Frank Smith, Alexander helped popularized Jack Webb's laconic "Just the facts, ma'am" style. Occasionally permitted to improvise his dialogue, Alexander once sent the usually stone-faced Webb into convulsions by beginning a conversation with "Joe? Joe? My hair hurts, Joe." Following the cancellation of Dragnet, Alexander briefly emceed the daytime TV game show About Faces. In 1966, Ben Alexander returned to police work as Sergeant Dan Briggs on the weekly ABC cop series Felony Squad.

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.