A Parade for Parley Baer

Those who think Travalanche is a blog about obscure character actors have not been paying very close attention to what’s written here. There are scores of content areas here, and if there is a commonality that binds them together it has more to do with connecting the past with the present. Our interest is in talking about age old cultural forms and how they feed into the here and now. As a by-product, I wind up writing about many people who were once important and are now obscure, but their present obscurity is by no means THE POINT. Quite the opposite. Their SIGNIFICANCE is the point. (Sorry to rant, I frequently encounter people who miss the point).

What then, may be the significance of character actor Parley Baer (1914-2002)? TBH, there are many character actors of roughly his stature whom I’m perfectly content NOT to write about, and for a second I considered skipping Baer. This was before I learned that he came out of the CIRCUS. And THAT connection, friends, is the sort of thing that tips the balance here. I don’t care if your face is on billboards (with the notable exception of Angelyne), it’s only if you were in the circus, or vaudeville, or burlesque, or the legit theatre, or something of that nature, that you begin to become interesting to me. There are exceptions, but that’s the gist of it.

I’ve seen several stupid articles that open by saying that Baer is most famous for having originated the role of Chester on the radio version of Gunsmoke. Why do I call such articles stupid? NEARLY EVERYONE WHO WAS ALIVE DURING THE ERA OF OLD-TIME RADIO IS *DEAD*. Very little associated with radio, a medium that only lasted for about 20 years to begin with, remains alive in popular, mainstream memory. Go ask some kid to name 10 old time radio shows, or the people who starred in them. Let’s get real. The point of this blog is to reacquaint the public with a culture they have forgotten. Let’s not live under the delusion that it has REMAINED in the public memory. So what WAS well Baer known for? Well surely Boomers at least, and my generation (X) will recognize that face. He played the Mayor on The Andy Griffith Show, and countless McMann-Tate clients on Bewitched. He was a regular on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as the neighbor Darby. He was also the voice of Ernie Keebler in cookie commercials. He had nearly 300 film and tv credits since 1950. THAT’s what anyone living would know him for.

But like I say, Baer came out of the circus. (And he seems to be no relation to Max Baer — or for that matter Pallenberg’s Bears).  He owned and managed the American National Circus, worked in the press department of the Al G. Barnes Circus,was a publicist and ringmaster for Circus Vargas and Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey. He also worked with 7 tigers in a big cat act at Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Later he served on the boards of circuses, and kept a hand in as a docent at the L.A. Zoo. Baer’s wife (m. 1946) was the bareback equestrienne Elizabeth “Ernestine” Clarke (1921-2000), whose acrobat father Ernest Clarke was the first to turn a triple somersault on a flying trapeze.

Unusually, Baer’s work in the circus seems to overlap in the timeline his acting career and wartime service, making it difficult to parse out when he was doing what in a short article. He was originally from Salt Lake City, where he studied drama at the University of Utah, and got his first radio experience on local station KSL in the 1930s. This led to acting on national shows like The Whistler,The Harold Peary Show, and the aforementioned Gunsmoke. Baer earned several medals for his WW2 service, and attained the rank of Captain. Starting in 1950 he found constant work in television, doing guest shots on scores of shows, with westerns a particular specialty (though his Gunsmoke part was taken over by Dennis Weaver). He’s in fewer films, but some are well-known, such as Pick Up on South Street (1953), Gypsy (1962), The Brass Bottle (1964), Bedtime Story (1964), Two on a Guillotine (1965), Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), Those Calloways (1965), The Young Lions (1968), Day of the Evil Gun (1968), and White Dog (1982).

Baer’s last accessible work was in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager. He’s also listed in the credits of an obscure animated international co-production called Man and Cat (2001). A far from a cry from a man and seven BIG cats!

For more on show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,