Our Daily Dead

From the NY Times….Ron Carey, comic actor, dies at 71. He died of a stroke at a hospital near his home, a nephew, Michael Ciccolini, said.

“Ron Carey was the pint-sized, round-faced comic best known as the unjustifiably cocky Police Officer Carl Levitt on the long-running television situation comedy ‘Barney Miller’.”

“At 5-foot-4 and with traces of an inner-city New Joisey accent, Mr. Carey played a plainclothes cop constantly seeking a promotion by currying favor with his superiors. “

“‘Barney Miller,’ which ran from 1976 to 1982, starred Hal Linden as the captain of a New York City police precinct whose officers dealt with the zany characters who came, not always by choice, into the station house. Mr. Carey, as Officer Levitt, would inject unsolicited opinions on how to handle whoever was in the holding cell. Besides playing roles in other less successful sitcoms, Mr. Carey appeared in 15 movies, including ‘High Anxiety’ in 1977 and ‘History of the World: Part I’ in 1981, both with Mel Brooks.”

Ah yes, Barney Miller. Take us back a year or two to perhaps 1977-8 or so and the happy little burg of McKinleyville, CA. One of us ODDfellows shared a house in that fine burg with a couple other mates. Seems the house was backed up to the freeway thus we had the logging trucks for melodious background noise. The house was also a touch damp and drafty and most winter nights it seemed that the Humboldt fog would creep right inside with the three of us. And there we’d be each hunkered down under our respective sleeping bags watching Barney Miller. The other two worked on crab boats out of Trinidad harbor so many nights we dined on fresh Dungeness crab - “Oh damn, crab again” - and sipped martinis. And here we thought there was something more and better to life.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Ron Carey, dies, died, Carl Levitt, Barney Miller, Hal Linden, Mel Brooks

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 7:36 am and is filed under ODD Guests, Movies & TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.