Trivia: Intending to become a dentist like his father, American actor Edgar Buchanan wound up with grades so bad in college that he was compelled to take an "easy" course to improve his average. Buchanan chose a course in play interpretation, and after listening to a few recitations of Shakespeare he was stagestruck. After completing dental school, Buchanan plied his oral surgery skills in the summertime, devoting the fall, winter and spring months to acting in stock companies and at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was given a screen test by Warner Bros. studios in 1940, received several bit roles, then worked himself up to supporting parts upon transferring to Columbia Pictures. Though still comparatively youthful, Buchanan specialized in grizzled old westerners, with a propensity towards villainy or at least larceny. The actor worked at every major studio (and not a few minor ones) over the next few years, still holding onto his dentist's license just in case he needed something to fall back on. Though he preferred movie work to the hurried pace of TV filming, Buchanan was quite busy in television's first decade, costarring with William Boyd on the immensely popular Hopalong Cassidy series, then receiving a starring series of his own, Judge Roy Bean, in 1954. Buchanan became an international success in 1963 thanks to his regular role as the lovably lazy Uncle Joe Carson on the classic sitcom Petticoat Junction, which ran until 1970. After that, the actor experienced a considerably shorter run on the adventure series Cade's County, which starred Buchanan's close friend Glenn Ford. Buchanan's last movie role was in Benji (1974), which reunited him with the titular doggie star, who had first appeared as the family mutt on Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: Trained at the Goodman Theatre in his hometown of Chicago, the 6'4", 230-pound Barry Kelley made his professional stage bow in 1930. Seventeen years later, he appeared in his first film, director Elia Kazan's Boomerang. Kelley was most often found in crime yarns and westerns, often cast as a corrupt law officer, e.g. Lieutenant Ditrich in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. Barry Kelley's hundreds of TV credits include the recurring roles of city editor Charlie Anderson in Big Town (1954) and Pete's boss Mr. Slocum in Pete and Gladys (1961).

Trivia: From her earliest stage work onward, American actress Rosemary DeCamp played character roles that belied her youth and fresh-scrubbed attractiveness. On radio, DeCamp developed the vocal timbre that enabled her to portray a rich variety (and age-range) of characters. A peripheral performer on One Man's Family at 21, DeCamp showed up on several radio soap operas and anthologies before settling into the role of secretary Judy Price on the Dr. Christian series in 1937. DeCamp made her film bow in Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), in which she and most of the cast were required to "age" several decades. With The Jungle Book (1941), the actress played the first of her many mother roles. The most famous examples of DeCamp's specialized film work are Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which she was the Irish-American mother of George M. Cohan (James Cagney, who was 14 years her senior), and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), in which she played George Gershwin's Jewish mother (Gershwin was impersonated by Robert Alda, who was one year younger than DeCamp). Even when playing a character close to her own age, such as the Red Cross worker in Pride of the Marines (1945), DeCamp's interest in the leading man (in this case the same-aged John Garfield) was strictly maternal. On television, DeCamp was Peg Riley to Jackie Gleason's Chester A. Riley on the original 1949 run of The Life of Riley. She also played rakish Bob Cummings' levelheaded sister Margaret in Love That Bob (1955-59), and later was seen as Marlo Thomas' mother on That Girl (1966-70). In 1965, Rosemary subbed for her old friend Ronald Reagan as host on Death Valley Days; FCC rules of the time compelled the removal of Reagan's scenes when the show was telecast in California, where he was running for governor. Upon Reagan's election, Robert Taylor took over as host, but DeCamp was installed as permanent commercial spokesperson for 20 Mule Team Borax. Semi-retired for several years, DeCamp reemerged in 1981 for a "de-campy" cameo part in the horror spoof Saturday the 14th.

Trivia: American hoofer Paul Hartman and his wife Grace frequently appeared on stage and in vaudeville. In the late 1930s, he played character roles in films.