March 5 Birthday Wishes

Bob Woodward [1909 - 1972]

Virginia Christine [1920 - 1996]

Dean Stockwell [1936 - ]

James Wainwright [1938 - 1999]

Fred Williamson [1938 - ]

I was wondering where I'd seen Virginia Christine before. She was Mrs. Olsen in the Folgers Coffee commercials!

Dean Stockwell has had a long career, starting as a child star back in the 1940s, and probably best know as Al Calavicci on Quantum Leap.

James Wainwright is best known from Joe Kidd. He also played in a 1979 episode of MASH as a gung-ho colonel whose regiment had a high casualty rate, and to keep off the battlefield, Hawkeye slips him a mickey and performs an unnecessary appendectomy on him. This was something that Hawkeye and trapper did in early episodes of the series, and in this episode BJ Hunnicutt was supposed to be complicit in this as well. But Mike Farrell, the actor that played BJ, argued that it was unethical for a sugeon to opperate on someone for no reason, while Alan Alda argued that they wolud be saving lives on the battlefield. So the writers rewrote the script, with the characters taking up the same arguments.

And speaking of MASH, Fred Williamson played Spearchucker Jones in the movie. In the series, the character was played by Timothy Brown, who played Corporal Judson in the movie.

Virginia Christine was also in some classic westerns, one being the wife of Harry Morgan in High Noon. Her husband, Fritz Feld, also has long career dating all the way back into silent films in Germany.
Bob Woodward worked in many westerns, sometimes playing the bad man and often as a stagecoach driver as he was thought to be one of the best stuntmen riding wagons and coaches. In many of the old western TV series like Range Rider and Gene Autry, when you see the heroine in a runaway wagon, Bob Woodward would be laying in the back operating the horses through a hole where the reins would go through and a peep hole for him to watch where he was going. A very underated stuntman who also had some acting roles. House Peters Jr. told me if it wasn't for Bob Woodward he would have been killed in one old western.