Trivia: A Chicagoan from head to toe, American comedian Bob Newhart started his workaday life as a certified public accountant after flunking out of law school. As a means of breaking his job's monotony, Newhart would call his friend Ed Gallagher, and improvise low-key comedy sketches. A mutual friend of Newhart and Gallagher's, Chicago deejay Dan Sorkin, tape-recorded some of these off-the-cuff routines and played them for Warner Bros. records. Newhart suddenly found himself booked into a Houston nightclub -- his first-ever public appearance. Armed with telephone-conversation routines which delineated how Abe Lincoln would be handled by a publicity agent, or how Abner Doubleday would have fared trying to sell baseball to a modern-day novelty firm, Newhart recorded his first comedy album in 1960 -- which evidently struck a nerve with fellow white-collar workers, since it sold 1,500,000 copies. The hottest young comic on the club-and-TV circuit, Newhart was offered starring roles in situation comedies, but felt he wasn't a good enough actor to make a single character interesting week after week. Instead, he signed in 1961 for NBC's The Bob Newhart Show, a comedy-variety series which nosedived in the ratings but won an Emmy. Fearing that TV would eat up all his material within a year or so, Newhart went back to nightclubs after his one-season series was cancelled. Sharpening his acting skills in TV guest spots and in several films (his first, 1962's Hell is For Heroes, was so unnerving an experience that Bob repeatedly begged the producers to kill his character off before the fadeout), Newhart felt emboldened enough to attempt a regular TV series again in 1972. This Bob Newhart Show cast the comedian as psychologist Bob Hartley - an ideal outlet for his "button-down" style of dry humor. Six seasons and several awards later, Newhart was firmly established as a television superstar; this time around he wasn't cancelled, but ended the series on his own volition, feeling the series had exhausted its bag of tricks. Most popular sitcom personalities had come acropper trying to repeat their first success with a second series, but Newhart broke the jinx with Newhart in 1982, wherein Bob played author Dick Loudon, who on a whim decided to open a New England colonial inn. Newhart was every bit as popular as his earlier sitcom, and, like the previous show, the series ended (in 1990) principally because Newhart chose to end it. This he did with panache: Newhart's final scene suggested the entire series had been a bad dream experienced by Bob Newhart Show's Bob Hartley! A third starring sitcom, 1992's Bob, found Newhart playing a cult-figure comic book artist; alas, despite excellent scriptwork and the usual polished Newhart performance, this new series fell victim to format tinkering and poor timeslots. Over teh course of the next few decades, Newhart would frequently turn up in guest roles on shows like Murphy Brown, ER, and Desperate Housewives, and though his 1997 odd couple sitcom George & Leo failed to find its footing, he did appear in all three installments of TNT's popular fantasy trilogy The Librarian, starring Noah Wyle. Meanwhile, cameos in such films as Elf and Horrible Bosses continually offered a gentle reminder that comedy's nicest funnyman could still crack us up.

Trivia: Actress Mary Frann (born Mary Frances Luecke), is best remembered for playing the skeptical but loyal wife of Bob Newhart in Newhart (1982-1990). Between 1974 and 1979, Frann was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives and also was a co-star on the short-lived nighttime soap King's Crossing (1982). Since the demise of Newhart, Frann appeared regularly in made-for-television movies, as a guest star in series, and in miniseries.A native of St. Louis, MO, Frann started out as a child model and in high school appeared in local television commercials. After high school she studied drama at Northwestern University. She supported herself working as a weather person on a St. Louis NBC affiliate. Following graduation she was hired to host a Chicago morning television show. As an actress, Frann debuted on the ABC series My Friend Tony. When not acting, Frann was involved in various charitable organizations. The night before she passed away from undisclosed causes, she had been working on a volunteer committee with the Los Angeles Mission on a project to help homeless women.

Trivia: Stocky comedic actor Jerry Van Dyke -- the younger brother by several years of actor Dick Van Dyke -- achieved some of the success of his older sibling, albeit with a somewhat lower profile and his own distinct persona. Time and again, Jerry specialized in portrayals of flustered, befuddled, and slightly klutzy goofballs who projected grating angst. (His typical characterizations could be contrasted with the "laid-back everyman" qualities and smoothness required by many of Dick's roles.) Raised in Danville, IL -- a community about 130 miles south of Chicago -- Van Dyke evinced a flair for comedic buffoonery and loved to entertain audiences as early as high school, then spent several years touring the country and performing in every comedy club he could find that agreed to book him. His career only began to take off, however, following his decision to join the Air Force Special Services in 1952 (during the Korean War) -- which, in turn, provided him with the opportunity to travel around the world and entertain the troops. His act soon caught the eye of Ed Sullivan, who booked Jerry for two popular engagements on his iconic variety series, and in the mid-'60s he began appearing alongside his brother on The Dick Van Dyke Show (conveniently playing Rob Petrie's brother, Stacey Petrie). In the years that followed, Jerry Van Dyke began associations with two key television producers -- relationships that would serve him well in the years to come. The first -- a collaboration with Grant Tinker (off-camera husband of Mary Tyler Moore from The Dick Van Dyke Show) led to Van Dyke's starring role in the 1965 fantasy-tinged sitcom My Mother the Car, which cast him as Dave Crabtree, a fellow revisited by his deceased mother -- in the form of an automobile. That program failed within a year, but the actor and producer would team up again nearly a decade later when Tinker and Co. cast Van Dyke in a brief multi-episode stretch of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Wes Callison, an ex-boyfriend of Mary Richards who is plagued by complications when he happens to take a job in the same newsroom as Mary. During the same decade, Van Dyke also turned up as a guest star on series including That Girl, Love, American Style, and Fantasy Island. Van Dyke then tried out for the role of dim-witted Vermont handyman George Utley on the seminal '80s sitcom Newhart. Producer/creator Barry Kemp felt that the actor would be the wrong choice for the part (and eventually handed it to Tom Poston instead), but also felt so impressed by Van Dyke's talents that he both cast the actor in a guest-starring role on a season-one episode of that series (he played a flustered travel agent named Roy Herzog), and promised Van Dyke a more substantial recurring assignment on a sitcom. Kemp realized that promise five years later, by enlisting Van Dyke to play spaced-out assistant football coach Luther Van Dam on the top-tiered sitcom Coach (1989-1997). For that portrayal, the actor received numerous Emmy nominations. In subsequent years, Van Dyke continued his television work (he enjoyed a lengthy run on the sitcom Yes, Dear as Big Jimmy Hughes), did standup comedy bookings around the country, and emceed advertisements for various brands, products, and companies, including Big Lots.