Masak grew up wanting to be an athlete and at age 16 was scouted by baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. “I once had a teacher tell me if she could have stopped laughing at me, she would have failed me.” “I was the class clown, I was the showoff in school,” he said in 2011. His father, Floyd, was a salesman and musician and his mother, Mildred, a merchandise buyer. Ronald Alan Masak was born on July 1, 1936, and raised on the South Side of Chicago near Comiskey Park. He appeared as Metzger on 41 episodes of the CBS show through 1996, with his character - who had quit the New York Police Department in search of a quieter work life up north - driving around town in a red 1976 Cadillac Eldorado.įrom left: Ron Masak, Angela Lansbury and William Windom on ‘Murder, She Wrote’ Courtesy Everett Collection (In reality, Bosley had departed to star on NBC’s Father Dowling Mysteries.) Masak made his big-screen debut in the John Sturges espionage thriller Ice Station Zebra (1968), starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, then appeared opposite George Hamilton in Evel Knievel (1971) and as a bartender and friend of Barbara Eden’s character in Harper Valley P.T.A. (1978).Ī Hollywood columnist once dubbed Masak “the King of Commercials,” and he served for 15 years as a pitchman for Vlasic pickles, voicing the animated, bow-tied stork that sounds a lot like Groucho Marx.Īfter playing a couple of other characters on the series, Masak joined the Angela Lansbury-starring Murder, She Wrote in 1988 for its fifth season after the previous inept Cabot Cove sheriff, Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), left Maine to live with his sister in Kentucky. On the summer 1973 ABC sitcom Love Thy Neighbor, based on a hit British TV show, Masak and Joyce Bulifant portrayed a husband and wife who discover they’re not as open-minded as they thought when a Black couple (Harrison Page, Janet MacLachlan) move in next door. In February 1960, the everyman actor portrayed a harmonica-playing soldier on “The Purple Testament,” the 19th episode of The Twilight Zone, and had a turn as a nutty Dracula-like count on The Monkees in 1968. Gallagher, Comic Known for Smashing Watermelons, Dies at 76
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