Trivia: Born Krekor Ohanian, American actor Mike Connors was born and raised in the heavily Armenian community of Fresno, California. He studied law at UCLA, but distinguished himself in sports (he'd gotten in on a basketball scholarship). While in the Air Force, Connors switched his career goals to acting on the advice of producer/director William Wellman, who'd remembered Connors' college athletic activities. Hollywood changed young Mr. Ohanian's last name to Connors, and since this was the era of "Rocks" and "Tabs" it was decided that the actor needed a suitably rugged first name. So Connors spent his first few acting years as Touch Connors, a nickname he'd gotten while playing college football. His first picture was the Joan Crawford vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) but handsome hunks were a glut on the market in the early '50s, so Connors found himself in "B" pictures, mostly at bargain-basement American International studios. Renaming himself "Mike," Connors was able to secure the lead role as an undercover agent on the 1959 detective series Tightrope. The series was a hit but was dropped from the network due to complaints about excessive violence, though it cleaned up in syndication for years afterward. After a few strong but non-starring roles in such films as Good Neighbor Sam (1963) and Where Love Has Gone (1964), Connors landed the title role in Mannix (1967), a weekly TV actioner about a trouble-prone private eye. For the next eight high-rated seasons, Connors' Joe Mannix was beaten up, shot at, cold-cocked and nearly run over in those ubiquitous underground parking lots each and every week. The series ran in over 70 foreign countries, allowing Connors a generous chunk of profits percentages in addition to his lofty weekly salary-- which became loftier each time that the actor announced plans to retire. Mike Connors has starred in the 1981 series Today's FBI and filmed a cop-show pilot titled Ohanian (playing a character with his own real name), but nothing has quite captured the public's fancy, or been as lucrative in reruns, as Connors' chef d'ouevre series Mannix.

Trivia: A third-generation actor, Harold J. Stone made his stage debut at age six with his father, Jacob Hochstein, in the Yiddish-language play White Slaves. Stone had one line--"Mama!"--which he managed to forget on opening night. He didn't act again until after his graduation from New York University. After gleaning valuable experience in radio, he returned to the stage in George Jessel's production of Little Old New York at the 1939 World's Fair. Stone made his Broadway bow shortly afterward in Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make, and thereafter was seldom unemployed. In 1952, he began the first of many TV-series gigs when he replaced Philip Loeb as Jake on The Goldbergs; within a decade, he was averaging 20 TV appearances per year. In films from 1956, the harsh-voiced, authoritative Stone was most often seen as big-city detective (as in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man), generals, and gangsters (he was Frank Nitti in 1967's St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually billed at the top of the supporting cast, Stone enjoyed a rare above-the-title starring assignment when he played investigator John Kennedy in the 1959 syndicated TV series Grand Jury. His other weekly-series roles included Hamilton Greeley (a character based on New Yorker maven Harold Ross) in My World and Welcome to It (1969) and Sam Steinberg in Bridget Loves Bernie (1972). In the latter stages of his career, Harold J. Stone unexpectedly found himself a favorite of Jerry Lewis, co-starring in Lewis' The Big Mouth (1967), Which Way to the Front? (1970) and Hardly Working (1980).