Lindsay Bloom Turns 75

Many happy returns of the day to Lindsay Bloom (b. 1950).

You know! Lindsay Bloom! The one who’s not Barbi Benton!

Though, like Benton, Bloom was not from the Southland, as her screen castings may tend to imply. The Omaha native started out winning beauty pageants in the late ’60s: Miss Omaha, Miss Utah, Miss Arizona. From here she won a slot as one of the Dinglaling Sisters, the comely dance and comedy chorus on The Dean Martin Show. This led to a role in the movie Cover Girl Models (1975) which led to the lead in AIP’s trucksploitation movie Six Pack Anniethat same year. She was Jean Harlow in Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Paradise (1977), and was in the ensembles of Texas Detour (1978), French Quarter (1978), H.O.T.S. (1979), The Main Event (1979), The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood (1980), and Terror at London Bridge (1985).

The odds are good that you have seen few, if any, of those motion pictures. You’re much more likely to have seen one of her many television appearances. She may be best known from her role as a regular on The New Mike Hammer (1984-89) as Velda, the shapely receptionist to Stacy Keach’s Hammer. She was also in the pilot for Goober and the Trucker’s Paradise (1978) starring George Lindsay, but that series was not picked up. She guest starred on Emergency!, Rhoda, Wonder Woman, Police Story, Starsky and Hutch, Barnaby Jones, Laverne and Shirley, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat,Trapper John M.D., and of course The Dukes of Hazard.Throughout the Mike Hammer period in the late ’80s, Bloom was also a frequent and popular celebrity panelist on Super Password.

Through only 40, Bloom dropped her screen career around 1990, although she did return to take a role in Grizzly Adams and the Legends of the Dark Mountain (1999), which unaccountably doesn’t star Dan Haggarty, but Tom Tayback, who just as unaccountably seems unrelated toVic. (Just as Lindsay is fairly accountably unrelated to Claire or Verna.) In 2007 Bloom formed a singing duo with Michelle DellaFave (also a former Dean Martin Golddigger and Dingaling) called Blue Eyed Soul. Her most recent credit is a role in the 2020 family film Charlie’s Christmas Wish.

Interested in other Lindsays? Don’t miss my posts on Lindsay Wagner, Vachel Lindsay, William Lindsay Gresham, and George “Goober” Lindsey. It all goes to my maxim: “let a thousand Lindsays bloom!”