Trivia: Jim Nabors, he of the vacuous expression and the dumbstruck expletives "Gawwwleee" and "Shazzayam," graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in business administration. Nabors' first TV job was as an apprentice film cutter; shortly afterward, he launched a fitfully successful career as a cabaret singer. In 1963, he was hired to play the one-shot role of gas station attendant Gomer Pyle on the top-rated The Andy Griffith Show. Essentially a build-up to a punchline (Griffith explained to a nonplused stranger that the goofy Gomer planned to become a brain surgeon), Nabor's hayseed character proved so popular that he became a regular on the series. In 1964, with Griffith's manager Richard O. Linke calling the shots, Nabors was spun off into his own weekly sitcom, Gomer Pyle USMC, which ran for five successful seasons. Televiewers got their first inkling that there was more to Nabors than Gomer when, on a 1964 Danny Kaye Show, he revealed his rich, well-modulated baritone singing voice. He went on to record 16 popular record albums, utilizing his high-pitched Gomer voice in only one of them (1965's Shazzam). Nabors' larynx was further deployed on his TV variety series The Jim Nabors Show (1969-72), on the 1967 opening episode (and every subsequent season opener) of The Carol Burnett Show, and in countless personal appearances all over the world. Additionally, Nabors starred in such 1970s Saturday morning kiddie efforts as Krofft Supershow, The Lost Saucer and Buford and the Galloping Ghost (voice only). He played his first serious role as a vengeful hillbilly on a 1973 episode of TVs The Rookies, and essayed comic supporting parts in such good-ole-boy films as Cannonball Run (1978) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), both starring his close friend Burt Reynolds. Because Nabors never married, he found himself the target of numerous ugly and unfounded rumors concerning his private life. When he became deathly ill in the mid-1980s, there were those who jumped to the conclusion that Nabors had contacted AIDS. In fact, he had fallen victim to a particularly vicious form of hepatitis, picked up (according to Nabors) when he cut himself while shaving in India. Nabors recovered from his ailment after a highly publicized liver transplant saved his life.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.