Trivia: Tousle-haired child actor Jay North was the son of the West Coast regional director for AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), a performer's union. He began showing up on TV in 1958 and in films the following year. Selected from a group of 500 possibilities, he landed the title role in the TV series Dennis the Menace, which ran from 1959 to 1963. He went on to star in the single-season adventure weekly Maya (1966) and in such family oriented films as Zebra in the Kitchen. Reportedly mistreated and abused by his on-set guardians, North's career as a child star was less than pleasant; nor did he make a successful transition to adult roles in such trash as Teacher Teacher (1974). Eventually overcoming his past, he vowed to prevent others in his situation from suffering similar humiliations, and later spent much of his time offering advice, counsel, and moral support to preteen professional actors. Among Jay North's later acting appearances was the 1980 TV movie Scout's Honor, which featured several other former child TV performers in the cast.

Trivia: Perhaps best remembered for playing Henry Mitchell, the father of an energetic tow-headed boy in the popular television sitcom Dennis the Menace (1959-1963), tall, slender, and bespectacled character actor Herbert Anderson's career encompassed extensive experience on Broadway and in Hollywood films. Contracted to Warner Bros. around 1940, he made his film debut in Meet the Fleet (1940). His first two years were quite busy, but by mid-decade he was landing fewer roles. On stage, he appeared with Henry Fonda in a 1953 production of Caine Mutiny Court Martial. After the cancellation of Dennis the Menace, Anderson's film appearances became quite rare, though he made frequent guest appearances on other television shows, including Batman, Bewitched, and Dragnet. Heart trouble in the early '80s forced Anderson to retire.

Trivia: Actress Gloria Henry was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1923, and joined the roster of Columbia Pictures in the mid-1940s. She generally appeared in the studio's B-movie output, such as Sport of Kings (1947) and Rusty Saves A Life (1949), in the latter playing a key role in the plot. Her most widely seen screen work was in Fritz Lang's offbeat 1952 western Rancho Notorious -- her murder at the beginning of the movie propels the plot of the noir-ish western to its grim end. In 1958, Henry was chosen to play Alice Mitchell, the mother to Jay North's Dennis Mitchell in the sitcom Dennis The Menace, a role she portrayed until 1963 -- she worked opposite the slightly older Herbert Anderson, playing her husband Henry Mitchell. Although her lines were usually limited to expressions of joy or exasperation (TV moms were usually depicted in a simple way in those days . . . ), and all of the adults in the series were essentially second fiddle to North's Dennis and Joseph Kearns' Mr. Wilson, she did at least get to wear more attractive hair-styles and clothes as the series wore on. At the start of the 1960s, Henry also suggested to her gardener, a young man named Todd Armstrong, that he might consider doing a screen test for Columbia Pictures -- he agreed and she arranged it, and Armstrong ended up playing the hero in the classic Ray Harryhausen-produced fantasy film Jason And The Argonauts. Henry's own acting career resumed at a slower pace after the cancellation of Dennis The Menace, and she had pretty much retired by the 1970s.

Trivia: Sylvia Field's several-decades-long career encompassed performances on stage, screen, and television, where she was best known for playing the kindhearted Mrs. Wilson opposite crotchety Joseph Kearns and mischievous towhead Jay North on Dennis the Menace between 1959 and 1962. Born and raised in Boston, Field was 17 when she launched her professional career in a Broadway production of The Bluebird. She entered films in The Exalted Flapper (1929) and would appear in eight more features before retiring from movies in 1958 after appearing in Annette. Married to comedian Ernest Truex since the 1940s, she made her television debut along with him in Mr. Peepers. The show was produced in New York and ran three years before Field and her family decided to quit the show and move to Southern California. Following her departure from Dennis the Menace (which was precipitated by the death of Kearns), Field continued to appear as a television guest star on series such as Perry Mason and Father Knows Best.

Trivia: Character actor Hal Baylor made a career out of pummeling (or being pummeled by) heroes ranging from John Wayne to Montgomery Clift. The 6'3", 210-pound Baylor, born Hal Fieberling, was an athlete in school and did a hitch in the United States Marines before embarking on a boxing career. He moved into acting in the late '40s, initially by way of one of the most acclaimed boxing films ever made in Hollywood, Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949), playing Tiger Nelson, the young fighter in the film, whose fresh good looks stood out from the pug-worn visages of most of the men around him. His first released film, however -- a short feature done after The Set-Up but released first -- was a very different kind of boxing movie, Joe Palooka in Winner Take All. He also appeared in Allan Dwan's 1949 The Sands of Iwo Jima, playing Private "Sky" Choyuski, which was where he first began working with John Wayne. All of those early appearances were credited under his real name, Hal Fieberling (sometimes spelled "Feiberling"), but by 1950 the actor had changed his name to Hal Baylor. Whether in Westerns, period dramas, or war movies, Baylor usually played tough guys, and as soon as John Wayne began producing movies, he started using him, in Big Jim McLain (1952), in which Baylor played one of the two principal villains, a tough, burly Communist (just to show, from the movie's point of view, that they weren't all slimy-mannered, smooth-talking intellectuals) who is always getting in the face of Wayne's two-fisted investigator, and who is bounced all over the set in the film's climactic punch-up; and in Island in the Sky (1953), as Stankowski the engineer. As with any working character actor, his films ranged in quality from John Ford's exquisite period drama The Sun Shines Bright (1953) to Lee Sholem's juvenile science fiction-adventure Tobor the Great (1954), and every class of picture in between. If anything, he was even busier on television; beginning in 1949 with an appearance on The Lone Ranger, Baylor was a fixture on the small screen in villainous parts. He was downright ubiquitous in Westerns during the 1950s and early '60s, working regularly in Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, 26 Men, The Californians, Maverick, and The Alaskans; Rawhide, The Virginian, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Bat Masterson, The Big Valley, and Temple Houston (the latter allowing him to hook up with actor/producer Jack Webb, who would become one of his regular employers in the mid- to late '60s). During the mid-'60s, as Westerns faded from the home screen, Baylor got more work in crime shows, sometimes as police officers but more often as criminals, including a notably violent 1967 episode of Dragnet entitled "The Shooting," in which he and diminutive character actor Dick Miller played a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of would-be cop killers. He also played a brief comic-relief role in the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," as a 1930s police officer who confronts a time-transported Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock stealing clothes. Baylor's career was similar to that of his fellow tough-guy actors Leo Gordon, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef, almost always centered on heavies, and, like Gordon, on those rare occasions when he didn't play a villain, Baylor stood out -- in Joseph Pevney's Away All Boats (1956), he proved that he could act without his fists or his muscle, with a memorable portrayal of the chaplain of the attack transport Belinda; but it was his heavies that stood out, none more so than his portrayal of the anti-Semitic Private Burnecker in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions, tormenting and then beating Jewish draftee Montgomery Clift to a bloody pulp, before being similarly pummeled himself. During the later '60s, he acquired the nickname around the industry as "the Last of the Bigtime Bad Guys," with 500 television shows and 70 movies to credit and still working, in everything from Disney comedies (The Barefoot Executive, Herbie Rides Again) to cutting-edge science fiction (A Boy and His Dog). At the end of his career, he returned to Westerns in The Macahans, the two-hour made-for-television feature starring James Arness (who had used Baylor numerous times on Gunsmoke, and had known him at least since they both worked in Big Jim McLain) that served as the pilot for the series How the West Was Won.