Rant #2,272: "Where Paleface and Redskin All Turn Chicken ... "

When a former President of the United States passes, the nation, and the world, seemingly stops and takes notice, and that is what is happening right now in remembrance of George Bush, who died this past weekend at 95 years of age.

Often called the most successful one-term President in U.S. history, Bush will be honored this week with his funeral and a public day of mourning. Current President Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff for a month, and if younger Americans did not know who President Bush was, they certainly will learn a quick lesson on his legacy over the next few days.

When such a magnanimous person dies, others who made their mark in society and whose time has come kind of get lost in the shuffle, and that is exactly what happened to a major Baby Boomer icon of the 1960s pretty much through the 1980s who, like Bush, left us this past weekend.

Ken Berry, the affable song and dance man who turned himself into one of TV's most well known and best comedic actors, died on Saturday. He was 85 years old.

Berry came up in Hollywood as a song and dance man, but by the time he was making strides in Tinseltown, those attributes weren't needed anymore.

His career tuned its sights on television, and he ended up starring in three very popular TV series over a 20 years plus period.

His Baby Boomer icon credentials first took shape as Captain Wilton Parmenter on "F-Troop," the send-up of the post Civil War West. Parmenter was a pleasant, but very naive, captain, and all things going on revolving around the fort--including numerous business deals with the Hakowis, the Indian tribe that populated F-Troop's area of responsibility--went way over the head of the clueless captain, as was the romantic pursuit of him by hot-to-trot Wrangler Jane.

The show was perfectly cast--including Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch, James Hampton and Melody Patterson--and although it lasted just two seasons, the fumbling, bumbling F-Troop has lived on in reruns for the past 50 years as a unique TV original, a total satire of the period of time which was spot on with what it was making fun of.

And Berry--whose ascendence up the show biz ladder started just a few years earlier as the Las Vegas opening act for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello--chewed the scenery with all the other actors, bumbling and fumbling through each episode, and often using his dancing skills to great advantage with pratfalls and stumbles that only such a deft dancer could achieve without injury.

When ABC abruptly canceled the show, his star was on the rise, and he was primed as the actor who would basically take over the role of the star on "The Andy Griffith Show" when Griffith decided that the Andy Taylor character had run its course.

Berry became a member of the show's cast as Sam Jones, a humble North Carolina farmer who, like Andy Taylor, was a widower with a young son. He carried over when Griffith finally left, and the show morphed into the still top-rated "Mayberry RFD," which was basically "The Andy Griffith Show" without Griffith, as most of the actors who supported Griffith on the latter stages of his show stayed on with the new show, with the addition of a few new cast members.

This role was as different from the Capt. Parmenter role as it could possibly be. The Jones character was the moral compass of the show, as Griffith had been with his show, and the comedy was very light, even lighter than the Griffith show used to major advantage as one of the top-rated shows of its era.

Audiences continued to love Mayberry, and the show was a hit, but during the purge of shows that CBS went through in the early 1970s that removed old-fashioned family fare in the wake of "All In the Family's" success, "Mayberry RFD" was abruptly canceled after only three seasons on the air.

Berry continued to be a major presence on TV, guest starring on a multitude of TV shows over many years between "Mayberry RFD" and his next starring stint, including "The Carol Burnett Show" and "Love, American Style," and for a short period he even had his own variety show, "The Ken Berry Wow Show."

In the early 1980s, when "The Carol Burnett Show" spun off Vicki Lawrence's popular "Mama" character into its own series, Berry became Vinton Harper, her hapless and very dumb son on the half hour sitcom, which had a short incarnation as a network show and then reached its zenith in popularity as a syndicated show. If his Capt. Parmenter was naive, Harper was dumb, period, and Berry pulled the character off perfectly.

Through the years, Berry starred in a few films, but his main forte was television--he was even married to one of the most sought after female character actors on TV for a number of years, Jackie Joseph, who he had a tempestuous relationship with and who divorced him in 1976. They had two children, their son dying of brain cancer at a young age.

According to reports, Berry most loved his Wilton Parmenter character, and it kind of zig-zagged with his real life service in the Army, where his direct superior was Leonard Nimoy, who, of course, experienced his own success as Spock in "Star Trek."

Berry will be remembered most for the Parmenter character, and his life and career live on in almost constant reruns of those three shows he starred in.