Gays Next Door in 1972: The Doris Day Show

In 1972, when I was 11 years old, my friends and I liked a sitcom called The Doris Day Show, mainly because it was squeezed between the beefcake-heavy Here's Lucy and Sonny and Cher.  

It was a Mary Tyler Moore clone, a workplace comedy centered on Doris Martin (Doris Day), a hip, sophisticated journalist for Today's World magazine, living in San Francisco and dating a number of cute guys (including Patrick O'Neal and bisexual rat packer Peter Lawford, left).

And, in a television first, there was a gay couple living next door!

Lance and Lester (Alan Dewitt, Lester Fletcher) were often referred to, and appeared in the November 27, 1972 episode, "The Co-Op."  I didn't catch the flamboyant stereotypes, and no one used the word "gay" -- I wouldn't hear the word on tv until 1976 -- but I saw that two men had found a way to live together, escaping the heterosexist mandate .  Could San Francisco be a "good place"?

Doris Day got her start in the light musical comedies of the 1940s, but she made her mark as a liberated woman in a series of Camelot-era sex comedies with suggestive titles: Pillow Talk (1959), It Happened to Jane (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), The Thrill of it All (1963), Move Over Darling (1963).  Her usual costar, gay actor Rock Hudson, helped her tiptoe around the boundary between not knowing that gay people exist and knowing but not saying.

But her sitcom began as a hayseed comedy!

In its first season (1968-69), The Doris Day Show was Green Acres: City girl Doris, a new widow, moves to her father's ranch with her two sons, Toby (Todd Starke) and Billy (Philip Brown, below, who would go on to a successful career as a soap hunk), plus a ranch hand (James Hampton, right) and a housekeeper.  It aired on Tuesday nights, just after another relic of the 1950s, The Red Skelton Show.

Doris hated hayseed -- she didn't even know that her husband Martin Melcher had signed her up for it.

So in the second season (1969-70), she made some changes: although still living on the ranch, Doris commuted into San Francisco, where she worked as a secretary for Today's World magazine.

Today's World: Modern, hip, with it.

She got two quintessentially urban coworkers, played by  McLean Stevenson and Rose Marie.

In the third season (1970-71): Doris and her sons lived in an apartment over an Italian restaurant in San Francisco (Ranch?  What ranch?), where she got a gay-vague next door neighbor (Billy DeWolf).

In the fourth season (1971-72), the transition was complete: Doris was a sophisticated career woman, Ms. instead of Mrs., who had always been single (Kids?  What kids?).

And she managed to finagle some gay neighbors out of the network, something Mary Tyler Moore was never able to do.

The Dukes of Hazzard

The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985) wasn't really a hillbilly show, though the "backwood Adonis" theme can be traced back through Jethro Bodine to L'il Abner.  It was set in the country (Hazzard, Georgia), not the hills, and the premise was derived on the 1970s trucker fad.  The Duke cousins, the blond Bo (John Schneider) and the brunette Luke (Tom Wopat), drove a 1969 Dodge Charger instead of a truck, but they still zoomed through rustic locales with a country-fried sheriff, Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke), in hot pursuit.

The boys lived with their cousin Daisy (Catherine Bach) and their elderly Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle), who narrated the stories ("Well, the Duke boys were in trouble again....") and provided sage advice.

It was obvious early on that the actors were hired for their beefcake appeal.  Although their shirts were off constantly and they had nice muscles, the main draw was below the belt.  Look closely -- well, you don't really need to look closely.  It's out there for everyone to see.  John Schneider wore jeans so tight that they had to be peeled off at the end of a shoot. (Just in case you liked girls, they also put Daisy into revealing short-shorts that came to be called Daisy Dukes).

But the beefcake (and Daisy's cheesecake) didn't mean that the show was obsessed with heterosexual hookups.  In fact, dating and romance was not high on anyone's list of activities. Daisy falls in love a few times, but Bo and Duke, never.  They save an orphanage, enter their car in a race, catch bank robbers, pursue card sharks, sing, and run up against the corrupt Boss Hogg.

And the bonding was intense!  Ok, they were "cousins," but they were inseparable, devoted to each other, with eyes for no one else.  They behaved, and the residents of Hazzard treated them, precisely like long-time partners.

When they left the series briefly in 1982, Byron Cherry and Chip Meyer came in as cousins Coy and Vance.

Both John Schneider and Tom Wopat have had successful post-Duke careers, and they are both gay allies. I met Tom Wopat in 1999.  In 2008, John Schneider performed at the L.A. AIDS Walk, and spoke about three friends who died of AIDS, including his "best friend in all the world" during his years on The Dukes. 

Ricky/Rick Schroder

Ricky Schroeder was the iconic "cute kid" of the 1980s.  With his cherubic round face, baby blue eyes, and dimpled cheeks, he looked like a Campbell's Soup kid, or Richie Rich before his muscle spurt -- perfect for heart-wrenching roles on movies-of-the-week like Something So Right and A Reason to Live.

 In 1982, at age 12, Ricky was cast as a poor little rich boy on Silver Spoons -- his dad (Joel Higgins) is the fabulously wealthy owner of a toy company, so they live in a mansion that looks like a giant toy store.  Ricky has a series of same-sex chums, many of whom went on to teen idol careers  -- Anthony Starke, Jason Bateman as a bad boy, Billy Jacoby as another bad boy, Corky Pigeon as a nerd, Bobby Fite as a cowboy, and finally Alfonso Ribeiro, who grew into a bodybuilding hunk.

By 1987, Ricky was 17, muscular, and no longer cherubic, so Silver Spoons ended. Ricky renamed himself Rick, dropped the "e" from his last name (it merely signifies an umlaut in German), and started a massive re-invention campaign.

No more rich kids, nor more sophisticates.  If the role didn't require a Southern accent, he wasn't interested.  He played cowboys, country boys, rednecks,killers, and sports stars.  He was shirtless or sometimes completely nude in Too Young the Hero (1988), Across the Tracks (1991), and lots more.

And he did a substantial amount of buddy-bonding,

Rick has remained very active in moves and on tv.  In 2008 he made headlines by playing what was probably the first openly gay character on a tv science fiction series, Major Bill Keene on  The Andromeda Strain.

Though he is a long-term Republican, a member of the NRA, and a Mormon, three groups not known for their gay-friendliness, Rick is not at all homophobic.

There is a celebrity hookup story about Ricky on Tales of West Hollywood

Rabun, Georgia: The Heterosexual Weight Lifting Capital of the U.S.

In the USA Weightlifting competition for the top high school weightlifters in America, 3 of the top 10 were from Rabun High School in Georgia.

So where is this high school, and how is it getting so many weightlifters?

Rabun County, Georgia, population 16,000, is in the far northeastern part of the state, near the Tennessee border. Mostly mountainous.  60% of the county is in the Chattahoochie National Forest.  It was the shooting location for the 1972 movie Deliverance, about city boys being terrorized by inbred hicks.

One of the horrors they inflict is anal rape, painting all country folk as gay rapists (this was the homophobic 1970s).

Billy Redden, who played the banjo-playing teenager, was a student at Rabun High at the time.  He couldn't play the banjo; the director just thought that he looked like an inbred hick. 

Aw, he was cute.

In 2010, the International Youth Theatre presented the play Billy Redden at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.

As far as I can tell, there's no connection.

Naturally, Rabun residents don't take kindly to how Deliverance portrayed their kin.  As inbred hicks?  As gay?  Horrifying!

It actually is home to the  Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which  introduced the concept of "experiential education."  Students get credit for working in the community.  Foxfire Magazine began there in 1966 as a class writing assignment, and is now famous for covering Appalachian arts and crafts.

Rabun Gap is one of the few high schools in the U.S. to offer cirque (training in trapeze, acrobatics, and other circus arts).

When I looked for a photo, only girls appeared.  And this.  It's actually an Essex teenager who demonstrated "his world-class potential with a silver and three master's finals at the British Championships."  It doesn't say championship in what.

It's as close to a beefcake photo as you're going to find in Rabun, Georgia.









Back to Rabun County.  It is home to several camps, including Ramah Darom, for Jewish youth.

Here's one of the counselors, a Jewish boy from Alabama.  Can you imagine such a thing?

Fun fact:  Every photo of him that I could find on facebook, twitter, and instagram, he had his arm around a girl.  He wants us to know that he's heterosexual.

Ok, where is this high school that has all of the weightlifters?

Rabun County High is in Tiger, Georgia, a town of 300 with nothing else in it but two churches, a drive in theater, and a tourist attraction called Goats on the Roof.

 The principal and two vice principals include pictures of their wives and children. They really want us to know that they are heterosexual.

It offers the usual soccer, football, wrestling, tennis, and cheerleading, but there is a special weight training program, with its own dedicated coach (a picture of his wife and children, too).











Students are divided into Iron Cats (lots), Power Cats (a few), Super Cats (one), and Beast Cats (one).  Here's the Super Cat.  The only picture I could find where his arm wasn't around a girl.




















Every week they choose a Lifter of the Week.  This is Shawn, the lifter for Week 1 of the 2018-19 academic year (1100 pounds combined). He also plays football.

And his arm is usually around a girl.

See also: The Strongest High School Students in America

Mitch Vogel: The Bulge and Biceps of Bonanza

We needed as many freckle-faced redheaded boys as possible during the 1970s: Ron Howard on Happy Days, Johnny Whitaker on Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and Mitch Vogel on Bonanza (1970-73).

He played Jamie, a teenager adopted by the Cartrights to give Ben someone to offer fatherly advice to (and, apparently, to give Michael Landon some competition in the bulge department).




But before he blossomed into teenage biceps and bulges, Mitch was a popular child star, with roles in Adam-12, Ironside, The Young Rebels, and The Immortal.  

He was best known for The Reivers (1969), set in turn of the century Mississippi, as an 11-year old who tags along with his free-spirit relative (Steve McQueen) on a trip to a brothel in Memphis, sees naked ladies, and "comes of age" (although he doesn't actually have sex with anyone).

But the teenage Mitch did a lot of buddy-bonding, too.

In Two Boys (1970), Jud (Mitch) and his boyfriend Billy (Mark Kearney) "come of age" in a small Midwestern town.

In The Boy from Dead Man's Bayou (1971), Jeannot (Mitch) and Claude (Michael Lookinland from The Brady Bunch) buddy-bond as they wrest a church bell from the jaws of a giant alligator.

His characters got girls on Little House on the Prairie  (1975) and State Fair (1976), and were backwoods outsiders who didn't get anyone on Here Come the Brides and Saturday morning's The Mighty Isis (1975) and Ark II (1976).

His last credit movie role, Texas Detour (1978), is a Dukes of Hazard clone about three hippies stuck in a hayseed town.  Except it's a drama.

Today Mitch lives in Southern California, where he is active in directing, music, and church groups.

But gay Boomers will always remember him for the bulge and biceps of Bonanza.

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your parents watched every week, so you couldn't avoid it.  It was amazingly popular with adults: some of the regular episodes -- not even Christmas specials -- became the most watched episodes of all time.

The basic premise: a hillbilly from Bugtussle, Tennessee or Arkansas, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), becomes unbelievably rich when oil is discovered on his property, so he moves to a mansion in Beverly Hills, along with his crotchety mother-in-law Granny (Irene Ryan), his daughter Ellie Mae (Donna Douglas), and his dumb-lunk nephew Jethro (Max Baer Jr.).

Though they became marginally assimilated after nine years, they still wore hillbilly clothes, ate possum pie, and referred to their swimming pool as a "cement pond."  Plots usually involved big city types trying to dupe and manipulate them, but their backwoods wisdom, orneriness, or dumb luck win out in the end.

The message: big city life is dehumanizing.  Only in the country can real be real.

Other plots involved Ellie Mae's dating, Jethro's get-rich quick schemes (odd, since he already was rich), and Granny's dislike of all things big city.

There was never much beefcake in hillbilly comedies.  Max Baer Jr., son of the famous boxer Max Baer, had a nice physique, but rarely showed it on camera.  We were supposed to laugh at his dopiness, not sigh over his muscles.

Bonding was also rather uncommon.  Most of the primary relationships were platonically male-female: Jed and Granny, Ellie Mae and Jethro, bank president Mr. Drysdale and his secretary, Miss Hathaway (Nancy Culp, who incidentally was gay in real life.)









But gay-vague was everywhere.

1. Mr. Drysdale's son, Sonny (Louis Nye) is sophisticated, well-educated, and not interested in girls.  His parents keep trying to hook him up with Ellie Mae (so he will eventually inherit the Clampett millions), but he will have none of it.  He and Ellie are just friends.










2. Hollywood star Dash Riprock (Larry Pennell), a parody of Rock Hudson, is handsome, suave, and not interested in girls.  He vaguely courts Ellie Mae, but his heart isn't in it,  regardless of how much his studio pushes them together.


Apparently the producers thought it hilarious to keep having Ellie Mae run into men who were not interested in girls.







3. Jethro had a "twin sister," Jethrine.  She stayed back in the hills, and didn't show up often, but when she did, it was obvious that it was Jethro in drag.  I got the distinct impression that everyone was just playing along, responding to his drag persona as if she was a different person.

See also: Petticoat Junction; Green Acres

The Hager Twins: Picking and Grinning

What can you say about twin brothers who grew up in Chicago but claimed to be cowboys?

Who were discovered working at Disneyland, and signed on by "pickin' and grinnin'" Buck Owens to 16 years of the hayseed "family values" variety show Hee-Haw (1969-1985).  Yet posed nude (and coyly hidden) in Playgirl in 1973?

(But not to worry; fully clothed, their tight cowboy jeans left nothing to the imagination.)

Who released singles like "Gotta Get to Oklahoma (Cause California's Getting to Me)" and an album entitled Motherhood, Apple Pie, and the Flag,  yet had a fast-paced, self-deprecating comedy routine, like a country-western Sonny and Cher?  In glittery, rhinestone-enlaced costumes, like country-western Liberaces?

Who sang mournful songs about cheating girlfriends and absent wives, but never married and were never seen with women?  They lived close together through all of their lives (except for a 3 1/2 year separation), and died eight months apart in 2008 and 2009.

Not many gay kids looked to Hee-Haw for role models.  But maybe they should have.

In addition to Hee-Haw, Jim and Jon starred in the tv movie Twin Detectives (1976), about twin detectives, and on a 1978 episode of The Bionic Woman, as evil twin clones from another planet.

The handsome, photogenic duo spent the last twenty years of their lives appearing at county fairs, nostalgia events, and the annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.  Singing, riffing, and signing autographs for their thousands of devoted fans.

Spring 1983: Reading Faulkner: Redneck Muscle and Boys in Drag

Nothing brings back my memories of college literature classes more than William Faulkner.  Other authors I can return to with respect, even with pleasure, but Faulkner is mostly incomprehensible, and the parts I understand fill me with disgust.

In the spring of 1983, I took a horrible class in turgid, heterosexist "classics."  First Ulysses (by James Joyce), and then The Waste Land (by T.S. Eliot).  Then...shudder, gasp... The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner.

"Marvelous!" the Professor chirped. "Stupendous!  A masterpiece!  The greatest novel ever written!"

I doubt he has ever read it.  I doubt anyone has.  It is literally impossible to understand even a word.  Check out the first two sentences:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.  They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.

Benjy the Idiot is standing on the other side of a fence from a golf course.  I looked it up -- no way to ever figure it out from the cryptic text.

As I understand it from extensive research, The Sound and the Fury is about three brothers in the dying, decrepit, depressed Compson family of Mississipi: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  I imagine they look like this.

Part 1: Narrated by Benjy, an "idiot" who has no conception of time, and jumps back and forth at random between events that he didn't understand in the first place.  He cries a lot, and he's obsessed with his sister Caddy's muddy underwear.

Gay subtext: The elderly "Negro" servant Dilsey warns her grandson Luster to stay away from the Man with the Red Tie.  Wearing red is probably a gay symbol, like wearing lavender today.  Maybe they're having a gay affair.  And hopefully Luster looks like this.

Part 2: Narrated by Quentin, a Harvard freshman who's crazy, and whose mind jumps back and forth at random just like Benjy's. He's obviously gay, in love with his roommate, Shreve, who responds by grabbing his knee.  Someone even calls Shreve his "husband."

He claims to have committed incest with his sister Caddy, but he's lying to hide a worse shame -- she had sex with someone else.

Wait -- aren't you supposed to have sex with someone other than your brother?

This part is also completely incomprehensible.  Not even a single sentence makes any sense. I understand Quentin commits suicide.

Part 3: Narrated by Jason, the third brother, the only one who thinks normally and writes normally.  This part is sort of comprehensible, except for references to events from the first part that we don't know about because they were both written in gibberish, and the fact that a different Quentin shows up -- this one Caddy's daughter.  Calling a girl by a boy's name always leads to gay subtexts, but it also compounds the confusion in what is already an incomprehensible book.

Jason's story is about stealing money from Quentin #2.  I think.

Part 4: No narrator. Miss Quentin has taken the money Jason stole from her, plus some of his own, and run off with the Man with a Red Tie (the one Luster is having an affair with in Part 1).  So maybe Miss Quentin is a boy in drag.  Jason does get awfully upset when he sees "her" in a bathrobe.

The homophobic Jason looks for Miss Quentin, to get his money back, but finally gives up.  The end.

It took a lot of creativity and endless Cliff's Notes to get through!

And beefcake photos.  Here's a semi-nude William Faulkner, thinking up new and better ways to torture English majors.

I didn't know it at the time, but a year later I would be cruising in Faulkner country, Oxford, Mississippi.

There's a gay dating story about William Faulkner on Tales of West Hollywood.

Alice and Tommy

Most 1970s comedies involved people who lived in big cities like Minneapolis (Mary Tyler Moore), Indianapolis (One Day at a Time), Chicago (Bob Newhart), and New York (The Jeffersons). .  But not Alice  (1976-85). Linda Lavin played Alice Hyatt, an aspiring singer en route from New Jersey to L.A. to jump-start her career, when her car stalled outside Mel's Diner in "small town" Phoenix (it actually had a sizeable population).

She took a "temporary" waitress job that lasted nine years, and meanwhile bonded with her boss, gruff, beefy Mel (Vic Tayback) and fellow waitresses: gutzy Flo (Polly Holliday), whose risque catchphrase "Kiss mah grits!" became a phenomenon; and mousy Vera (Beth Howland).  Alice also had a cute, wisecracking son, Tommy (Philip McKeon, left). 

Three ladies, a kid, and a bear?  I wasn't impressed.  Besides, Alice ran on Sunday nights, after the oldster-favorites 60 Minutes and All in the Family, opposite Battlestar Galactica or Chips.  I didn't start watching regularly until about 1980, when it was squeezed between One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons. 

It was a pleasant surprise.  The banter between the four regulars was sharp and witty, the plotlines were not terribly heterosexist, and there was ample beefcake: cowboys and muscular truck driver patrons of the diner, the various men dating the regulars, and Tommy's school friends.  Hunky Denny Miller (right) even played a gay character, the school coach: after he comes out, Alice hesitates about allowing Tommy to go on an overnight camping trip with him, but finally relents. Score one for tolerance!

Speaking of Tommy, during the last half of the series, he was 15-19 years old, the prime time for teen idols.  But he didn't get much play in the teen magazines, just a couple of shirtless and swimsuit shots.

This was the era of Scott Baio, Willie Aames, and Billy Warlock, so maybe he lacked the muscles to make a big splash.

There's a Philip McKeon hookup story on Tales of West Hollywood.

Several of the cast members were gay or gay friendly.  Vic Tayback and Polly Holliday were both rumored to be bisexual, and Phil McKeon, who has never married, is rumored to be gay (gay or not, he's even more handsome than when he was playing Tommy).

 His tv mom,  Linda Lavin, has performed with the Orlando, Florida Gay Chorus, and in 2012, she played the mother of a gay son in The Lyons on Broadway.

The Surprising Gay Origin of Pogo's "Deck Us All"

Every Christmas from 1949 to 1975, and then again in the 1980s and 1990s, the comic strip Pogo had the hayseed denizens of Okefenokee Swamp singing a mangled version of "Deck the Halls":

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
 Lullaby, Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola Hullabaloo!

Cartoonist Walt Kelly said that he chose that particular song because it was easily recognizable but not religious.  His Pogo version became extremely popular, with a life outside the comic strip, broadcast on the radio, recorded by pop artists during the Golden Age of Novelty Songs.

But what about the lyrics?  Fans clamored to know what they meant.

At first Kelly claimed that they were pure nonsense.  But fans persevered, and in 1963 Kelly published a book listing several possible explanations.

None of them the right one.







Ten years after his death, his close friend, CIA Agent Wilbur Crane Eveland, was interviewed in a Pogo-phile fan magazine, and revealed the secret:

Prison slang.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie

Hang the prison guards up on the wall, so they won't bother us.

Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo

Names of prisons

Nora's freezin' on the trolley

Nora, the subordinate partner in a same-sex prison romance, is "freezin'", in solitary confinement, according to "the trolley," the prison grapevine.

Swaller dollar cauliflower, Alleygaroo!
???

Don't we know archaic barrel

Homemade prison booze

Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.

Has facilitated the romance between Lilla Boy (another subordinate partner) and Louisville Lou.

Trolley Molly don't love Harold

But not Molly, according to the prison grapevine.

Boola, Boola, Pensacola, Hullaballoo!

???

I wonder how mild-mannered cartoonist Walt Kelly, who was never even arrested, knew all of this prison slang.  He was a language aficionado, so maybe he had reference books.

But why load-up his mangled Christmas carol with prison slang, including references to three same-sex prison romance?

In the 1940s, many prisoners were "prisoners of conscience," war objectors, political dissidents, gay men.  According to Eveland, this was the liberal, gay-positive Kelly's shout-out to them.

Kelly included same-sex desire all the time in Pogo.  Since his players were animals, it always slipped below the censorship radar.

In a long 1955 continuity, a male flea falls in love with Beauregard Hound Dog, and proposes marriage.  Five years later, in a commentary, Kelly wrote "I guess it would have to be a female flea.  That never occurred to me until now."

Way to cover your tracks!  But Kelly kept making the same "mistake" over and over until the day he died.

See also: Pogo, the Gay Possum of Okefenokee Swamp

Slapsie Maxie and Mad Max: Boxers with a Hint of Lavender

I've heard the phrase Slapsie Maxie many times, usually applied in derision to a guy who fights with open-hand slaps rather than closed-fist punches.   It's supposed to suggest that you're a sissy, potentially gay. But only recently did I discover that the phrase originated with a potential landsman.

Born in 1907, Jewish boxer Maxie Rosenbloom (left) had a weak, open-glove punching style that earned him the nickname "Slapsie Maxie."

It was effective: he won 222 of his 298 fights.  But he was hit in the head so often that he lost some motor functioning and reasoning skills, becoming what they called "punch drunk."  

Forced into retirement in 1937, Slapsie Maxie began a new career in the movies, playing "himself" or other big, tough,  slow-witted, "punch drunk" characters.

He also capitalized on the association of "slapping" with effeminancy, playing characters with "a touch of lavender," such as a powder puff salesman in The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942),  a gangster named "Trixie Belle" in Here Comes Kelly (1943), or a Hopalong Cassidy parody named Skipalong Rosenbloom (1951).  

The humor came from seeing someone big and tough who might be gay, or who was too "stupid" to realize that his acts were gender-transgressive.

 In real life, he was married for a few years (1937-45), but he seemed to prefer the company of men, such as trainer and manager Frank Bachmann (left).  And he was not averse to gender-transgressions: apparently a young Davis Hopper saw him in drag at the premiere of Dodge City (1939).

Slapsie Maxie also opened a popular nightclub, Slapsie Maxie's, and made a dent in radio and on tv, playing "himself" in an ongoing role on The Fred Allen Show, and appearing on episodes of The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Donna Reed Show.

In 1950, he teamed up with his lifelong friend, another boxer-turned-actor, Max Baer (known as Mad Max, top photo and left), playing the "stooge" who bedevils "straight man" Baer.  They starred "as themselves" in four comedy shorts and toured as the comedy team "The Two Maxies."

They remained close friends until Baer's death in 1959.  Slapsie Maxie died in 1976.

Max Baer's son, Max Baer Jr. (born in 1937) made his own splash in Hollywood as Jethro Bodine, dimwitted backwood Adonis on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-71).  Later he contributed to gay history by producing Ode to Billy Joe (1976), starring Robby Benson as a gay teenager who commits suicide.