July 18, 2026 • 43 mins
Benny and the boys are back in the audio dojo for a Saturday edition of the Fifth Hour! This time around, Ben goes on one of his patented scenic detours, bouncing from the Caspian Sea to acai berries, coconut trees and the mind-bending fact that we hear roughly 30,000 words a day. The World Cup radio coverage unexpectedly reunites Ben with the legendary "Remember Me Guy," sparking a trip through the hot tub time machine to revisit Superbad, the original iPhone, Bob Barker and The Sopranos. Plus, Ben delivers a heartfelt Maller sermon honoring beloved TV actor Hal Williams and tips his cap to Randolph Mantooth, while reminding us of Plato's line that "those who tell stories rule the world." Ben's still waiting for the crown, but until then, settle in for another magical, mystical ride through the Palace of Pontification.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Kabooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old Republic, a soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
In the air everywhere. The Fifth Hour with me, Ben
Mahler and you. We are here. We have survived another Friday.
It is now Saturday, the eighteenth day of July. There
are one hundred and sixty six days to go, the
twenty ninth week of the year, which means we're not
(00:52):
quite at that round number, that sweet spot. Everyone loves
round numbers. It's the one hundred and ninety ninth day
of the year today, so not quite to that magical
two hundred which will be tomorrow when allegedly the World
Cup finale will be played in a haze of smoke,
or will it? We have two minutes. I gotta set
(01:15):
the time here the fun facts. I've limited myself to
two minutes of fun facts for good pod it's all
about the good pod. So I'm now going to set
my timer, which will take probably more than two minutes here,
and then we're going to have two minutes of nothing
but fun facts, nothing but fun facts on things about today,
(01:37):
holidays about today. All right, on your marks, get set
and go. It is National Caviar Today. Caviar Day today.
Very fishy. I don't eat fish, so I have never
had caviar. The Dictionary defines caviar as the pickled row
of sturgeon, belugo, whales, and other large fish. And from
(02:01):
what I discovered, kings and aristocrats enjoyed caviar way before
oysters and champagne became popular back in the day. The
vast majority of the world's caviar is produced from a
fish caught in the Caspian Sea, So if you're a
caviar person, it's come from their consumption of caviar dates
(02:24):
all the way back to the twelve forties twelve forties,
and supposedly it's good in terms of calcium. It is
National Tropical Fruit Day today. Ninety five percent of tropical
fruit grown in developing countries, and over eighty percent of
the production is exported to develop nations. So you're talking
(02:47):
about places like the tropical fruits from South America. Pineapple,
pineapple a symbol of hospitality in South Africa. The asaie
berries apparently very hard to harvest. They grow way up
near the top of these sixty foot tall palm trees.
What else do I have here? Let's see a cie,
(03:10):
a native fruit to the Amazon region of Brazil. The
flowers of dragon fruit only bloom at night. What else?
What else? One coconut tree can produce up to one
hundred and eighty coconuts in a season, so it's good
to have coconut trees. And there is a bird that
shares the name of Kiwi. However, the Kiwi bird cannot fly.
(03:36):
So if you're a bird and you cannot fly, are
you really a bird? And the andoxidants in passion fruit
promoting healthy skin and hair. Oh my god, we've gone
over two minutes. A few more. We'reld listening day to day.
That's right in my wheelhouse. You're listening to a podcast.
There's no video feed of this podcast, even though some
of you knuckleheads have said we need a video. We
(03:57):
need to look at you to talk. Okay, you're old
listening day. The average person here is between twenty and
thirty thousand words a day. Twenty to thirty thousand words
a day. Now, I'm pointing this out before most people listen,
but don't listen like typically, you can recall about fifty
(04:17):
percent of what I tell you or anyone tells you
immediately after the conversation ends. An hour later, just an
hour later, you can recall just twenty percent of it.
That's it. You listen at between one hundred and twenty
five one hundred and two hundred and fifty words per minute. However,
you think at one thousand to three thousand words per minute.
(04:41):
It's kind of like the whole dream thing as far
as like the going back to the point of waking
up and you know how, you might remember your dreams
right away, but within a couple of minutes you forget.
And research shows that men only use half their brain
to listen, while women engage both lobes of the brain.
So there you go, ladies. So I guess we used
(05:02):
to have more women listening to the show. Now on
this pod, we've got remember Me Guy and how and Mantooth,
How and Mantooth. We begin though with this the World
Cup is winding down. The final game scheduled for Sunday,
the World Cup finale between Argentina and also the Spaniards
(05:23):
of Spain. And I know I am not going to
do a build it like Beckham commercial for home Depot
or tell you the games on Fox one. The World
Cup has done something that years and years of marketing meetings, consultants,
focus groups, and other corporate weasels and buzzwords could not accomplish.
It accidentally reunited our show with a listener I hadn't
(05:49):
heard from in almost two decades. Now. Not everyone heard
about this, so I wanted to share this story. It's
a great story. So, as many of you know, Fox
Sports Radio for the first time in the history of
the network, and I've been here since the beginning, became
the US radio home of the World Cup twenty twenty
six on Sirius XM, which meant that occasionally regular programming
(06:11):
got steamrolled blown to bits by ninety minutes of France
or Argentina, England, Spain and several countries I needed Google
Maps to locate. Now, some of you reacted exactly as expected.
You complained, and he is complain a little bit. You
(06:32):
complained loudly. We had tried to warn you. We did
every single show. At some point, I will do a
shameless promotion for the iHeartRadio app. I will say, listen,
get the iHeartRadio app. Make us a P one just
like your car precent one. You can make the Fifth
Hour podcast to P one or two or three, the
(06:53):
Ben Maler Show podcast, or the live Fox Sports Radio feed.
And I always said, listen, get iHeartRadio app and the
Fox Sports Radio channel as your backup plan if soccer interrupts.
I didn't say specifically soccer, but I something. And sometimes
there's other stuff on the channel that interrupts what we're doing.
We share it with Fox TV. And so if you
Evin Samnia and you're like, I can't hear the show,
(07:15):
what happened? And it turns out that those announcements entered
one year, took a scenic route through the brain, and
exited the other year before setting up permanent residents on
social media, which is what we just talked about a
few minutes ago. But the whole you don't really retain
a lot of information. So the emails arrived, got a
(07:37):
few nasty messages on social media, direct messages on social media,
a lot of complaining, a lot of bitching, belly aching, grumbling,
all of those things, and then something unexpected happened. Line three,
Line three, let's go to Eric in DC slash Maryland.
(07:58):
Who the f is that? I don't know? That is? Now,
if you're a longtime, longtime consumer of sports radio, you
know that your fellow longtime consumers of sports talk radio
are just a different species of caller. Now. Years ago,
years ago, we did a podcast breakdown about the ten
(08:22):
various breeds of sports radio callers. There's the addicted to
calling guy that often has nothing to say, just wants
to hear themselves on the show they liked the show.
I would say two percent chance is in that category
right now, and hollering James has been in that category
(08:42):
for a long time. There's insider guy that has a
cousin who's barbers gardeners, happens to mow the lawn of
Lebron James and knows where Lebron's gonna go. There's the
guy who hasn't heard the question but already has the answer. Guy. Now,
(09:04):
Eric in DC belongs in one of my favorite subcategories
of caller. Remember me, guy, do you not enjoy Remember
Me Guy as a talk showst I love Remember Me Guy.
You know him, He's the guy that calls up and
begins every conversation with, Hey, bed, remember me, I'm the
(09:27):
guy that did blah blah blah blah blah. Now usually
the answer is hell, no, I have no idea who
you are. You are a stranger. I am just trying
to get through my shift so I can get out
of here. Not because I'm trying to be a dick
in Dayton and not trying to be rude. It's because
over the years I have talked to literally thousands of men,
(09:52):
women and children. And if you called twice back in
the Obama administration and and once when gas was under
three dollars a gallon, the odds are not exactly in
your favor that I would know who you are. So
remember Me Guy always assumes that we share a common bond,
this profound life experience, and I get it. Not many
(10:16):
people call radio shows. It's like one percent of one
percent of the people listening will ever call a radio
show because of many reasons. It's annoying to stay on hold.
You don't know when the host is gonna go to
you it takes discipline to call into a radio show,
and you don't know if you're gonna get your point
(10:36):
across and all of this, there's many people are shy.
In reality, we exchange two minutes discussing, you know, whoever
should draft a linebacker at the NFL Draft in oh seven. Anyway,
life happened. So Eric's story took a different turn. He
(11:00):
called us after stumbling on to Serious XM while listening
to the Fox Sports Radio World Cup coverage the soccer
game had ended. He did what everyone does. He turned
it off, went about his day, lived his life, got
up early to beat the DC heat in humidity. As
Tony Bruno used to say, it's not the heat, it's
the stupidity anyway, or the humidity. It's a stupidity. But
(11:23):
I screwed that line up. Sorry, Tony, bet job by me.
It's an outrage anyway. So he got up early, and
he flipped on the Serious XM radio and whila, hocus pocus,
presto abracadabra. He heard my voice, our show, and his
reaction is or was this guy's still on the radio.
(11:47):
You're still here? And frankly I had the same reaction.
He had drifted away from the show over the years.
Different job, day shift, different schedule, different life, the whole thing.
Life happens. The World Cup in a cosmic accident dropped
him back into our little overnight corner of the broadcast universe.
(12:07):
And then something even stranger happened. I actually remembered him now,
not immediately, because when you start out a call, when
you start out a call, hey, I remember me, guy,
I immediately rolled my eyes in snicker. I do, I do.
I didn't remember immediately, but once you started talking, it
hit me. November twenty seventh, two thousand and seven. November
(12:30):
twenty seventh, two thousand and seven or thereabouts, Eric was
the listener who called up with the devastating news that
the Washington Redskins star safety Sean Taylor had died after
being shot during a home invasion robbery in South Florida.
Taylor was twenty four years old. That's an almost twenty
(12:52):
five twenty four years old, one of the best young
safeties in the NFL, legendary crusher of all offensive players.
It was a shocking story and it just made no sense.
There was a home invasion, he got shot in the leg.
He thought, well, who dies of being shot in the leg.
(13:13):
You'll be okay. No, he died the next day. And
like some, some of what we do we remember, most
we don't like. Some calls disappear, Most disappear under the
endless pile of overnight conversations. Others leave DNA, they leave fingerprints.
Now that one did. It had been nearly twenty years,
(13:39):
nearly twenty years since this took place, and yet somehow
buried underneath thousands of endless malard monologues, callers, jokes, arguments,
bad food takes, malard palooses, Benny awards, Benny versus the penny.
(14:00):
The memory in the back of my mind, it was
still sitting there collecting us, which immediately sent me tumbling
backwards in time. I'm like, well, wait a minute, it
was two thousand and seven. It's twenty twenty six. Right now,
I'm going back to when Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan
and Paris Hilton dominated the pop culture news. Back then,
(14:24):
celebrity gossip qualified as national importance. Celebrities still were popular
in seven, right, Megan Fox had her coming of age
movie with Transformers. I believe that was in seven. You
had big stars Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Fergie killed the Killed
It in music. I think that's when Anna Nicole Smith died,
(14:49):
the model who married the really old guy. The last
Terry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows went
to bookstores. People actually lined up, remember bokstores. People lined
up around bookstores. I looked it up the movies, some
of the movies that came out other than Transformers and
all that you had, super Bad and Knocked Up, and
(15:13):
it reminded me, as I fell down through this rabbit
hole of nostalgia, that there was a time twenty years
ago where Hollywood made comedies that were original, that were
not remakes of comic book movies with budgets larger than
several small countries, and super Bad and Knocked Up. While
they weren't the greatest movies of all time, they were quotable.
(15:36):
They were part of the culture. When's the last time
you saw a movie that was really part of the culture.
It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Now went back, Prince.
I remember this because we talked about it. Prince did
this big phallic thing for Purple Rain at the Super
Bowl halftime performance and I believe it actually rained. If
(15:59):
I remember like it actually rained at his performance. There
that is production value you cannot buy, cannot buy. One
of my favorite stories from that period of time was
Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone seven hundred dollars per phone.
Now Steve Balmer practically laughed him out of the room.
(16:22):
He famously declared there was quote no chance Apple would
gain meaningful market share with the iPhone. About twenty years later,
today Steve Balmer owns the Clippers, and everyone else and
their mother owns an iPhone. It's rather funny how history
enjoys humiliating certainty anytime you say something certain. The late
(16:46):
Great Bob Barker of Some Great Bob Barker Stories with
Bob Barker, I don't have time for the mere He
handed The Prices Right to Drew Carey. Bob Barker had
been on that show for thirty five years and over
six thousand, almost seven thousand episodes of The Prices Right
and make sure to have your pets spread a NEOTERRD.
(17:06):
I'm Bob Barker. Yes, So that was back. So Drew
Carries hosted that show for almost twenty years. Wow. The Sopranos.
The Sopranos ended with one of the worst final episodes
of all time, the famous cut to black, And at
the time none of us realized. This is always the
great thing about life. You don't realize at the time
(17:28):
you're living through a period that would be nostalgia, at
least for somebody else. That's always how it works. Like
nobody announces ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to
the good old day. It's just like we always talk
about the joke medieval times. The people that lived in
medieval times didn't call it medieval times. They would just
called it life. They were living their life. You only
(17:50):
discover these things when you've left them, after they're gone,
and other people make determinations about them. But that's why
Eric's in DC slash Maryland. His phone call it hit
me a little harder than I expected. Sports radio people
sometimes forget why stations spend millions of dollars or at
least hundreds of thousands of dollars for broadcast rights, and
(18:13):
it gets easy to think you're simply filling airtime. That's it. No, no, no,
there is a formula. There's a method to the madness. Madness.
There's a method to the madness that somebody tunes in
to listen to Argentina and somebody else stays because they
accidentally hear a gas bag or blow hard. They never
(18:34):
sample before thinking about like Kirkland brand products at Costco
or just Costco samples in general. You walk in planning
to buy some water, toilet paper, paper towels. Somebody hands
you a tiny cup of Tazeki sauce and you're like,
I've ever had Tazeki sauce, and now you're hooked. Next
thing you know, you've purchased patio furniture and a kayak,
(18:58):
and I don't need a kayak. I don't even have
any water near me, and I live in an apartment
with no backyard. Why do I have patio furniture and radios?
Always kind of work like that. Games introduced audiences personalities
are supposed to keep them around if they're any good,
and most people never think about it because they're too
busy listening. And my man Eric in DC slash Maryland
(19:22):
became the latest example, living proof. He wasn't looking for
the show. He had forgotten about the show. The show
was just a memory in the back of his head.
He was looking for soccer. He turned on a soccer game,
turned it off, and instead he rediscovered as he turned
it back on a little overnight show going round the
mountain he had forgot about, and for a few minutes,
(19:44):
this is like the cool stuff, right, this is the
cool stuff. We both traveled backwards nearly twenty years and
we both had was bigger memory for him than me.
But I remembered it. I truly did I. And that
was back before the internet really kicked in, social media
kicked in, and it was a local TV station, I
believe in DC that had the story. So time has
a very funny sense of humor. Sometimes it feels painfully
(20:06):
slow as you get older. Very rarely. Other times you blink,
like as you're doing this and you discover the kid
who used to call you your overnight show. I get
this every once in a while. The kids say, you know,
I listened to you when I was in junior high school.
Now I have a wife and one kid and one
(20:26):
on the way and worked in a factory or worked
at the store, or I've done this or that or whatever,
and it is kind of cool. I do love hearing
those stories. I do it's pretty pretty because that's what
I was like when I was growing up. I love
radio and listening, and you know, I became that guy,
but I loved I loved it. Meanwhile, you know, I'm
(20:47):
just sitting behind the same microphone with the same headphones,
and I'm just talking, and I don't know who's there
and what they're doing and if anyone's listening. And longevity
in radio is not glamorous. You don't get paid a
lot of money back in the day you did. Nobody
throws parades because you managed not to get fired. Although
you know, hey, that has happened. There's no special gold watch.
(21:12):
You get that. The company, you know, they don't even
really call you up and say, hey, good job by you.
They don't. That doesn't happen. I hear other people say
they get that. We don't get that. We don't get
congratulations on surviving another eighteen years of overnight shifts. But
every once in a while, the universe does toss you
a Soliday reminder that which you're actually involved in matters
(21:35):
to someone. Maybe not millions, maybe not millions, maybe not
even thousands. Sometimes it's just one guy who happened to
accidentally leave his Serious XM Radio after the World Cup
match on and I got to tell you that was enough.
That was a good dopamine hit and hidden under all
the complaints and the whining, you know your show's not on.
(21:58):
I'm paying for Serious ex but so you know you
got preempted by soccer. I'm like, well, I don't run
Serious XM. Contact them. I have nothing to do with that.
It is a reminder there's that magic. I promote the
magic of radio. It's still there, the theater of the mind,
and sometimes it simply takes ninety minutes of a football
match to prove it. It happens, all right. Now that
(22:22):
being said, we're gonna take a right turn and then
we're gonna go down half a block take a left turn.
The Fifth Hour podcast, which is here every Friday and
today obviously Saturday, and we'll have the mailbag tomorrow on Sunday,
gives us a bit of a hall pass from the
corporate overlords. It's where we wander down side streets, off
(22:43):
the beaten path that would never survive the formatting police
on the radio show. We can take a detour, we
can tell stories, we can remember people who never scored
a touchdown, never hit a walk off home run, or
demanded a trade, or viral on social media for some
(23:04):
crazy thing that happened at a waffle house at two
in the morning. Sometimes the greatest stories have nothing to
do with sports, and we can talk about them here
on the fifth hour. So randomly, in recent days, I
learned that a couple of actors checked out of this
mortal coil that we all share the world that we're
(23:24):
in this week, and I wanted to offer a pair
of tips of the headphone mallard eulogies, tributes, whatever you
want to call them, because this is kind of an
audio archive of what we do here. And I know
over time we forget things, and I don't want to
forget these two people, not because they were megastars. They weren't,
(23:45):
because really they were everywhere in my childhood. And if
you're around my age, congratulations you're getting old. Or if
you're older, you're already old. We watched enough television growing up.
I grew up in the mostly the eighties, but you know, seventies, eighties,
that period of time, and if you're listening to this pod,
(24:05):
there's a very good chance you watched way too much
television if you grew up in that time and these
people were part of the furniture of my life. First up,
Hal Williams. Who the f is Hal Williams? Exactly. That's
(24:26):
the point. You might not know the name, but you
know the game. The second you see the face, your
brain starts flipping through television channels like the old The
Zenith with Rabbit ears back in the day. Oh yeah,
that guy, that guy. Hal Williams passed away at ninety
(24:47):
one at his home in Rancho Mirage out near Palm Springs.
I had some health issues recently. They say he died
of natural clauses, which I believe means you got so old,
stuff stopped working. There's no warranty on it. The warranties expired,
can't replace it. You're cooked. Still. Ninety one is a
full ride. That's a great ride. I always say this,
(25:09):
when you get to ninety one, you probably want ninety two.
You probably want ninety three or ninety four, But ninety
one's a good ride. And He was best known as
Officer Smitty Officer Smitty Smith on Sandford and Son, a
cultural icon of the nineteen seventies. Now he also played
Lester Jenkins on a very popular show called two two
(25:30):
seven and Confession Time. I only watched a little of
Sandford and Son. I didn't watch much of it. I
watched considerably more of two two seven, Marla Gibbs, Jackie,
Regina King before she became Regina King. A Saturday night
television was I think it was on Saturday if I remember,
(25:51):
it was appointment viewing back before streaming, back when you
could could not binge. There was no binge watching when
if you missed an episode, too bad, you're cooked. Better
luck next week, you're out. Now, how Williams had one
of the great Hey, it's that guy faces in Hollywood.
(26:13):
Not a leading man, handsome, not Mattin, a idol, working man, familiar,
Hal Williams. Google him. If you're not blind, you can
see what I'm talking about. Hollywood survives, or it did
back in these days. It survived on people like this.
The headliners, the stars get the magazine covers back when
those were big, and get the interviews. The character actor
(26:37):
keeps the light on at the motel. Six. I'm Tom Boddett.
Five decades. This guy worked in show business. Five decades.
Think about that. Five that's how many generated as to
over two generations. This guy worked in Hollywood, and you
know how hard it is to keep one job for
(26:59):
fifty years. I've barely been able to keep this thing
going whatever that I've got, and half the audience thinks
I should have been fired around the Clinton administration, even
though Fox Sports Radio didn't exist around the Clinton administration.
Turns out I was fired at nine during the Obama run,
and then they rehired me six months and twenty six
days later. Williams popped up everywhere Hal Williams, The Waltons,
(27:22):
Private Benjamin, The Sinbad Show, Parks and rec even the
New Mattlock, different generations, different audiences, same dude, reliable, comfort food.
And when he passed away, I read a little bit
about him, and I love the fact that before acting,
how Williams worked as a postal worker. He delivered packages.
(27:45):
He also worked as a corrections officer. He moved to
la in nineteen sixty eight thinking hey, I can be
an actor. And here's the part I love. Even after
he started booking TV and some serious TV roles, he
kept working night shifts at the post office because acting
checks do not always show up. You know what I'm saying.
(28:09):
That was smart, that was pragmatic. That was an adult
move to make. Nobody writes movies about the guy who
keeps his government job because the mortgage doesn't care if
the pilot gets picked up. That doesn't happen, but maybe
they should. So Paul Harvey used to say, you know
what the news is. In a minute, you're going to
(28:31):
hear the arrest of the story. Well, that's the rest
of Hal Williams story. He had a backup plan, and
I've always appreciated the backup plan. People laugh at backup
plans until you need a backup plan. Now here's the
malar footnote following the Tom Looney playbook The School of Looney,
(28:52):
Making It all about you, so believe it or not,
the path of Hal Williams, and and this gas bag
you're listening to did cross in fact, not just once
or twice, many many nights, and not in Hollywood, not
on a TV set or a movie set. No, no, no,
(29:14):
no no. At NBA games way back when this guy
named Donald Sterling owned the Clippers, remember that circus. The
NBA eventually used what amounted to eminent domain to take
away his ownership of the Clippers. After those infamous recordings
in that big controversy TMZ story, the whole thing. However,
(29:39):
before all that, Donald Sterling produced two things. He produced
bad basketball teams and a whack pack of celebrities, a
very bizarre variety show. Among the regulars Penny Marshall, Billy Crystal,
Frankie Munez from Malcolm in the Middle, random celebrities, people
(30:02):
you'd never expect sitting together, and Hal Williams was in
that group. He'd wander around before games, always friendly, always smiling,
always schmoozing, and once you see the face, you're like, man,
I know this guy. He's like my neighbor. I know him,
(30:24):
and sometimes I say this with admiration. He'd somehow end
up in the media dining room at the Clipper games, freeloading,
because even celebrities like to freeload, working the room, talking
with the different hacks in the media, the beat writers,
the radio losers like me, eating that arena chicken that
had probably been under a heat lamp since the Reagan administration,
(30:47):
and so he fit right in. He was one of
the boys. Media people are basically raccoons with credentials, and
we'll all eat anything if it's free. Now most of
the time these days, we don't get free stuff much.
This may have sports with Coleman, who loves free stuff,
and I don't mind it either. So I had not
seen how in years. I don't go to the games
(31:09):
much anymore since the pandemic, and so I'm pretty much
embedded in the Malor mansion in the North Woods, in
the studio. I go to these NFL games, that's about it.
These days. I don't even go to baseball since the
I've been blacklisted than Dodgers got Otani. Not that I'm
bitter about that, but I wondered what happened to Hell
(31:29):
and I didn't even know if he was still alive.
I knew he was old back then, and now I
know so rest in piece Hal Williams. Television lost one
of its great utility players. Not an all star, solid,
reliable player, dependable player, plug and play guy. No Hall
of Fame speech, no giant headlines, just decades of making
(31:52):
other people's shows better and something honorable about that. But wait,
there's more like double mctgum, double your pleasure, double your fun,
or in this case, double your eulogies. Sadly, I was
informed by my reporter Alf the Alien opiner that we
(32:13):
lost Randolph Mantooth this week. Now the name Randolph Mantooth,
Now that's a name, Mantooth. What a name, mister Mantooth.
That's a teacher. Mister Mantooth sounds like either an NFL
linebacker or a villain in a James Bond movie. Mantooth Man. So,
(32:34):
Randolph Mantooth passed away at eighty. I've been very sick
in recent years. He was at a hospice facility up
in Ventura in southern California here a little north of
LA and if Hal Williams was, hey, it's that guy,
Randolph Mantooth was just Johnny Gage. That's it. Period Stop
(32:56):
And you said, who the hell is Johnny Gage? I
don't know. I'm not like you, mallor. I don't know
who that is. I'm young, I'm hip, I'm cool. Let
me tell you, dummy, I'll tell you. He starred this
guy in every episode of Emergency What the hell is
the Emergency from nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy seven,
(33:17):
and for millions of kids, Johnny Gage made firefighters cool.
Actually that's not true. He made paramedics cool. There's a
bit of a difference. Now, emergency arrived at exactly the
right moment. Some say the government encouraged emergency to be
made if you want to go down the conspiratorial route
(33:39):
or route. At that time, believe it or not, there
was a period of time fifty some years ago, over
fifty years ago, where emergency medical services were still relatively new.
Can you imagine that? Yeah, firefighters only put out fires.
And then they added these things called paramedics, and most
people didn't know what paramedics actually did. And so the
(34:02):
show introduced America to this profession, adding on the drama
rama because that's what you do. Television very good at
mixing things, and in the days before the World Wide
Web and surfing that world wide Web, it glamorized certain jobs,
(34:22):
sometimes unrealistically. And for about two years, little Benny, Benny
the Bopper, growing up, we wanted to be a firefighter. Actually,
Little Benny wanted to be everything. At one point I
was a firefighter. I wanted to be a Gi Joe soldier,
a police officer, broadcaster, dodger, slugger, professional eater, whatever seemed
(34:48):
fun that week. Emergency was part of that. Chips was
another part of it, Eric Estrada, Poncherella. Come on now,
if you were a kid in the nineteen eighties, reruns
of Emergency and Chips were basically peanut butter and jelly.
You couldn't have one without the other. Johnny Gage or
(35:09):
Roy DeSoto saving lives, cooking at the station, shopping for food,
flirting with hot nurses. Man, what a life these guys had, right,
saving lives as heroes and eating good food and beautiful women,
always looking impossibly calm despite somebody falling off a building,
(35:32):
you know, every twenty three minutes, right, and every episode,
and the show center around station fifty one. Of course,
here's the fun TV trivia. Station fifty one at the
time did not actually exist. LA was big, It wasn't
that big, not then. So the producers filmed at the
Los Angeles County Fire Station one twenty seven in Carson, California,
(35:57):
because there wasn't again a real station fifty one. Now
how they got to station one twenty seven without getting
a station fifty one, I don't know. Station one twenty
seven Face South. I read about this at Face South.
It had perfect lighting. And one thing TV and people
in Hollywood love is perfect lighting they love it. Good lighting.
The building still looks remarkably similar after all these years. Now,
(36:22):
how do I know that a couple years back I
drove by it. I was in that area, I drove
by it. One of the underrated perks of growing up
in southern California and becoming an adult in southern California
is that, for me, at my age, half of my
childhood TV memories exist in real life. They're things you
(36:46):
drive around Los Angeles and suddenly, hey, I remember that
house or that building, the emergency fire station, check chips
I mentioned, I Love Chips, the Highway Patrol Show. The
headquarters of the Highway Patrol show that they used on
the TV show are in downtown Los Angeles, underneath, literally
(37:09):
underneath the Santa Monica Freeway. The Brady Bunch House. I
used to take dates to the Brady Bunch House in
the Valley. I've told stories on this podcast. When I
did Benny Versus the Penny, we had a studio at
Universal Studios and I had access. It was great. We
walked pretty much every week through the courtyard of Back
(37:30):
to the Future, the courthouse on the Universal lot, like
Everything's here, Everything's here. Hollywood is basically one giant neighborhood
with better camera angles. And speaking of chips, I did
want to mention this years ago. I actually did have
a chance to meet Larry Wilcox, better known as Officer
John Baker, who was a really cool dude, huge Kings fan,
(37:51):
my friend Norm, Norm Peters, who literally knew everyone. Norm
was an old TV guy in Madison, was consin back
in the day, and he'd moved to LA and he's
the one that made the introduction. He always loved to
show off, Hey I know this guy, that guy. I mean,
there were some huge people that I met because of Norm,
(38:12):
because of Norm. Robert Shapiro, the OJ Simpson lawyer, a
friend of Norm, met him, John Begger. There are a
bunch of other ones. I don't have time for that now,
but but anyway, Norm could have introduced me to Cleopatra
or Babe Ruth if they'd still been around. Larry Wilcox
thankfully still alive, So no eulogy here will wait till
(38:33):
he dies. Not yet. Man Tooth though, back to Mantooth,
his impact stretched well beyond acting. I've read that he
became a very strong entertainment advocate for firefighters EMS professionals.
He spoke at those conferences, He worked with firefighters, safety organizations,
(38:53):
supported first responders. He didn't just play the role. He
embraced it, which is obviously admirable because we've all seen
actors who spend six months pretending to know something and
then immediately move on to pretending their astronauts or cowboys
or lawyers or whatever. Mantooth stayed connected when you become
(39:14):
the role. This is something people complain about. They don't
like it, Like Al Bundy became Al Bundy, right, you know,
the cast of Seinfeld became the cast of Seinfeld. They
couldn't get out of those characters for the most part.
And Mantooth understood this is a big deal. He portrayed
a paramedic. He inspired generations of paramedics. And so think
(39:35):
about that, an actor changing career choices. That's real influence.
That's not trending for two hours, it's not going viral
for eight hours. It's lasting. And maybe maybe that's what
struck me about both Hal Williams and Randolph Mantooth. Neither
spent their careers chasing controversy. They didn't in the online world.
(40:01):
They tried, it didn't exist back then they would have
if it had they tried becoming the just important people
in life, but not social media philosopher or anything like that.
They simply worked year after year, decade and after decade, professional, dependable, comfortable.
It would appear in their own skin. And that certainly
(40:22):
has become a lost art over the years, we've become
obsessed with celebrity, fame, followers, engagement algorithms. Now, meanwhile, the
people who quietly showed up every day, like these guys,
they did exceptional work and they faded into the background.
That's what happens. You get older and then you forget
(40:43):
about it, and then they're gone, and then you really
forget about them. So I wanted to make this to
tip the headphones and the cap to these guys. You
realize that they were always there. I mean, like the
dependable diner you've driven past a thousand times. You don't
appreciate the diner until the lights go out and the
four least sign is in the window. Now, for better
(41:05):
or worse, television has changed, I would argue not for
the better. Streaming has opened up a whole new world.
There are more shows now than ever. There are more
shows being made than ever, ironically, there are fewer faces
that we all recognize. There's no communal experience in Hollywood anymore.
(41:30):
Movies suck TV. Everyone's got their niche. That's it, and
we're like the if you're around my age, we're the
last generation that grew up with fewer channels and bigger stars.
Character actors actually became part of the national family. Everyone
(41:51):
knew them, Nobody remembered their names, everybody remembered their faces,
like Hal Williams. Now Randolph Mantooth is a little different
because he had a lead role in that show. The
show was only for a few years and he went
on and did other acting. Two different careers, two different paths,
but there's one common thread. They entertained millions, millions of people.
(42:14):
They left things a little better in this world. Then
they found them. And if somewhere beyond the Pearly Gates
there's a television set, I'm guessing How's already found the
media buffet and is in the background as a supporting
actor behind the Pearly Gates on the TV show and
Johnny Gage he just answered an emergency call and told
(42:36):
the people, well, the good news is I am dressed
like a paramedic and I am ready to be here
to take care of you. The bad news is I
am not an actual paramedic, so anyway, rest in peace, gentlemen,
Thank you for the memories, appreciate that. We'll get out.
On that note, the mail bag, mail bag, mail bag,
mail bag, mail bag is tomorrow, Tomorrow, tomorrow. Have a
(42:57):
great rest of your Saturday, and we will chat with
you next time. As Dick and Dayton would say, bye bye,
bye bye,
Kabooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old Republic, a soul fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The Clearinghouse of Hot takes break free for something special.
The Fifth Hour with Ben Maller starts right now.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
In the air everywhere. The Fifth Hour with me, Ben
Mahler and you. We are here. We have survived another Friday.
It is now Saturday, the eighteenth day of July. There
are one hundred and sixty six days to go, the
twenty ninth week of the year, which means we're not
(00:52):
quite at that round number, that sweet spot. Everyone loves
round numbers. It's the one hundred and ninety ninth day
of the year today, so not quite to that magical
two hundred which will be tomorrow when allegedly the World
Cup finale will be played in a haze of smoke,
or will it? We have two minutes. I gotta set
(01:15):
the time here the fun facts. I've limited myself to
two minutes of fun facts for good pod it's all
about the good pod. So I'm now going to set
my timer, which will take probably more than two minutes here,
and then we're going to have two minutes of nothing
but fun facts, nothing but fun facts on things about today,
(01:37):
holidays about today. All right, on your marks, get set
and go. It is National Caviar Today. Caviar Day today.
Very fishy. I don't eat fish, so I have never
had caviar. The Dictionary defines caviar as the pickled row
of sturgeon, belugo, whales, and other large fish. And from
(02:01):
what I discovered, kings and aristocrats enjoyed caviar way before
oysters and champagne became popular back in the day. The
vast majority of the world's caviar is produced from a
fish caught in the Caspian Sea, So if you're a
caviar person, it's come from their consumption of caviar dates
(02:24):
all the way back to the twelve forties twelve forties,
and supposedly it's good in terms of calcium. It is
National Tropical Fruit Day today. Ninety five percent of tropical
fruit grown in developing countries, and over eighty percent of
the production is exported to develop nations. So you're talking
(02:47):
about places like the tropical fruits from South America. Pineapple,
pineapple a symbol of hospitality in South Africa. The asaie
berries apparently very hard to harvest. They grow way up
near the top of these sixty foot tall palm trees.
What else do I have here? Let's see a cie,
(03:10):
a native fruit to the Amazon region of Brazil. The
flowers of dragon fruit only bloom at night. What else?
What else? One coconut tree can produce up to one
hundred and eighty coconuts in a season, so it's good
to have coconut trees. And there is a bird that
shares the name of Kiwi. However, the Kiwi bird cannot fly.
(03:36):
So if you're a bird and you cannot fly, are
you really a bird? And the andoxidants in passion fruit
promoting healthy skin and hair. Oh my god, we've gone
over two minutes. A few more. We'reld listening day to day.
That's right in my wheelhouse. You're listening to a podcast.
There's no video feed of this podcast, even though some
of you knuckleheads have said we need a video. We
(03:57):
need to look at you to talk. Okay, you're old
listening day. The average person here is between twenty and
thirty thousand words a day. Twenty to thirty thousand words
a day. Now, I'm pointing this out before most people listen,
but don't listen like typically, you can recall about fifty
(04:17):
percent of what I tell you or anyone tells you
immediately after the conversation ends. An hour later, just an
hour later, you can recall just twenty percent of it.
That's it. You listen at between one hundred and twenty
five one hundred and two hundred and fifty words per minute. However,
you think at one thousand to three thousand words per minute.
(04:41):
It's kind of like the whole dream thing as far
as like the going back to the point of waking
up and you know how, you might remember your dreams
right away, but within a couple of minutes you forget.
And research shows that men only use half their brain
to listen, while women engage both lobes of the brain.
So there you go, ladies. So I guess we used
(05:02):
to have more women listening to the show. Now on
this pod, we've got remember Me Guy and how and Mantooth,
How and Mantooth. We begin though with this the World
Cup is winding down. The final game scheduled for Sunday,
the World Cup finale between Argentina and also the Spaniards
(05:23):
of Spain. And I know I am not going to
do a build it like Beckham commercial for home Depot
or tell you the games on Fox one. The World
Cup has done something that years and years of marketing meetings, consultants,
focus groups, and other corporate weasels and buzzwords could not accomplish.
It accidentally reunited our show with a listener I hadn't
(05:49):
heard from in almost two decades. Now. Not everyone heard
about this, so I wanted to share this story. It's
a great story. So, as many of you know, Fox
Sports Radio for the first time in the history of
the network, and I've been here since the beginning, became
the US radio home of the World Cup twenty twenty
six on Sirius XM, which meant that occasionally regular programming
(06:11):
got steamrolled blown to bits by ninety minutes of France
or Argentina, England, Spain and several countries I needed Google
Maps to locate. Now, some of you reacted exactly as expected.
You complained, and he is complain a little bit. You
(06:32):
complained loudly. We had tried to warn you. We did
every single show. At some point, I will do a
shameless promotion for the iHeartRadio app. I will say, listen,
get the iHeartRadio app. Make us a P one just
like your car precent one. You can make the Fifth
Hour podcast to P one or two or three, the
(06:53):
Ben Maler Show podcast, or the live Fox Sports Radio feed.
And I always said, listen, get iHeartRadio app and the
Fox Sports Radio channel as your backup plan if soccer interrupts.
I didn't say specifically soccer, but I something. And sometimes
there's other stuff on the channel that interrupts what we're doing.
We share it with Fox TV. And so if you
Evin Samnia and you're like, I can't hear the show,
(07:15):
what happened? And it turns out that those announcements entered
one year, took a scenic route through the brain, and
exited the other year before setting up permanent residents on
social media, which is what we just talked about a
few minutes ago. But the whole you don't really retain
a lot of information. So the emails arrived, got a
(07:37):
few nasty messages on social media, direct messages on social media,
a lot of complaining, a lot of bitching, belly aching, grumbling,
all of those things, and then something unexpected happened. Line three,
Line three, let's go to Eric in DC slash Maryland.
(07:58):
Who the f is that? I don't know? That is? Now,
if you're a longtime, longtime consumer of sports radio, you
know that your fellow longtime consumers of sports talk radio
are just a different species of caller. Now. Years ago,
years ago, we did a podcast breakdown about the ten
(08:22):
various breeds of sports radio callers. There's the addicted to
calling guy that often has nothing to say, just wants
to hear themselves on the show they liked the show.
I would say two percent chance is in that category
right now, and hollering James has been in that category
(08:42):
for a long time. There's insider guy that has a
cousin who's barbers gardeners, happens to mow the lawn of
Lebron James and knows where Lebron's gonna go. There's the
guy who hasn't heard the question but already has the answer. Guy. Now,
(09:04):
Eric in DC belongs in one of my favorite subcategories
of caller. Remember me, guy, do you not enjoy Remember
Me Guy as a talk showst I love Remember Me Guy.
You know him, He's the guy that calls up and
begins every conversation with, Hey, bed, remember me, I'm the
(09:27):
guy that did blah blah blah blah blah. Now usually
the answer is hell, no, I have no idea who
you are. You are a stranger. I am just trying
to get through my shift so I can get out
of here. Not because I'm trying to be a dick
in Dayton and not trying to be rude. It's because
over the years I have talked to literally thousands of men,
(09:52):
women and children. And if you called twice back in
the Obama administration and and once when gas was under
three dollars a gallon, the odds are not exactly in
your favor that I would know who you are. So
remember Me Guy always assumes that we share a common bond,
this profound life experience, and I get it. Not many
(10:16):
people call radio shows. It's like one percent of one
percent of the people listening will ever call a radio
show because of many reasons. It's annoying to stay on hold.
You don't know when the host is gonna go to
you it takes discipline to call into a radio show,
and you don't know if you're gonna get your point
(10:36):
across and all of this, there's many people are shy.
In reality, we exchange two minutes discussing, you know, whoever
should draft a linebacker at the NFL Draft in oh seven. Anyway,
life happened. So Eric's story took a different turn. He
(11:00):
called us after stumbling on to Serious XM while listening
to the Fox Sports Radio World Cup coverage the soccer
game had ended. He did what everyone does. He turned
it off, went about his day, lived his life, got
up early to beat the DC heat in humidity. As
Tony Bruno used to say, it's not the heat, it's
the stupidity anyway, or the humidity. It's a stupidity. But
(11:23):
I screwed that line up. Sorry, Tony, bet job by me.
It's an outrage anyway. So he got up early, and
he flipped on the Serious XM radio and whila, hocus pocus,
presto abracadabra. He heard my voice, our show, and his
reaction is or was this guy's still on the radio.
(11:47):
You're still here? And frankly I had the same reaction.
He had drifted away from the show over the years.
Different job, day shift, different schedule, different life, the whole thing.
Life happens. The World Cup in a cosmic accident dropped
him back into our little overnight corner of the broadcast universe.
(12:07):
And then something even stranger happened. I actually remembered him now,
not immediately, because when you start out a call, when
you start out a call, hey, I remember me, guy,
I immediately rolled my eyes in snicker. I do, I do.
I didn't remember immediately, but once you started talking, it
hit me. November twenty seventh, two thousand and seven. November
(12:30):
twenty seventh, two thousand and seven or thereabouts, Eric was
the listener who called up with the devastating news that
the Washington Redskins star safety Sean Taylor had died after
being shot during a home invasion robbery in South Florida.
Taylor was twenty four years old. That's an almost twenty
(12:52):
five twenty four years old, one of the best young
safeties in the NFL, legendary crusher of all offensive players.
It was a shocking story and it just made no sense.
There was a home invasion, he got shot in the leg.
He thought, well, who dies of being shot in the leg.
(13:13):
You'll be okay. No, he died the next day. And
like some, some of what we do we remember, most
we don't like. Some calls disappear, Most disappear under the
endless pile of overnight conversations. Others leave DNA, they leave fingerprints.
Now that one did. It had been nearly twenty years,
(13:39):
nearly twenty years since this took place, and yet somehow
buried underneath thousands of endless malard monologues, callers, jokes, arguments,
bad food takes, malard palooses, Benny awards, Benny versus the penny.
(14:00):
The memory in the back of my mind, it was
still sitting there collecting us, which immediately sent me tumbling
backwards in time. I'm like, well, wait a minute, it
was two thousand and seven. It's twenty twenty six. Right now,
I'm going back to when Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan
and Paris Hilton dominated the pop culture news. Back then,
(14:24):
celebrity gossip qualified as national importance. Celebrities still were popular
in seven, right, Megan Fox had her coming of age
movie with Transformers. I believe that was in seven. You
had big stars Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Fergie killed the Killed
It in music. I think that's when Anna Nicole Smith died,
(14:49):
the model who married the really old guy. The last
Terry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows went
to bookstores. People actually lined up, remember bokstores. People lined
up around bookstores. I looked it up the movies, some
of the movies that came out other than Transformers and
all that you had, super Bad and Knocked Up, and
(15:13):
it reminded me, as I fell down through this rabbit
hole of nostalgia, that there was a time twenty years
ago where Hollywood made comedies that were original, that were
not remakes of comic book movies with budgets larger than
several small countries, and super Bad and Knocked Up. While
they weren't the greatest movies of all time, they were quotable.
(15:36):
They were part of the culture. When's the last time
you saw a movie that was really part of the culture.
It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Now went back, Prince.
I remember this because we talked about it. Prince did
this big phallic thing for Purple Rain at the Super
Bowl halftime performance and I believe it actually rained. If
(15:59):
I remember like it actually rained at his performance. There
that is production value you cannot buy, cannot buy. One
of my favorite stories from that period of time was
Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone seven hundred dollars per phone.
Now Steve Balmer practically laughed him out of the room.
(16:22):
He famously declared there was quote no chance Apple would
gain meaningful market share with the iPhone. About twenty years later,
today Steve Balmer owns the Clippers, and everyone else and
their mother owns an iPhone. It's rather funny how history
enjoys humiliating certainty anytime you say something certain. The late
(16:46):
Great Bob Barker of Some Great Bob Barker Stories with
Bob Barker, I don't have time for the mere He
handed The Prices Right to Drew Carey. Bob Barker had
been on that show for thirty five years and over
six thousand, almost seven thousand episodes of The Prices Right
and make sure to have your pets spread a NEOTERRD.
(17:06):
I'm Bob Barker. Yes, So that was back. So Drew
Carries hosted that show for almost twenty years. Wow. The Sopranos.
The Sopranos ended with one of the worst final episodes
of all time, the famous cut to black, And at
the time none of us realized. This is always the
great thing about life. You don't realize at the time
(17:28):
you're living through a period that would be nostalgia, at
least for somebody else. That's always how it works. Like
nobody announces ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to
the good old day. It's just like we always talk
about the joke medieval times. The people that lived in
medieval times didn't call it medieval times. They would just
called it life. They were living their life. You only
(17:50):
discover these things when you've left them, after they're gone,
and other people make determinations about them. But that's why
Eric's in DC slash Maryland. His phone call it hit
me a little harder than I expected. Sports radio people
sometimes forget why stations spend millions of dollars or at
least hundreds of thousands of dollars for broadcast rights, and
(18:13):
it gets easy to think you're simply filling airtime. That's it. No, no, no,
there is a formula. There's a method to the madness. Madness.
There's a method to the madness that somebody tunes in
to listen to Argentina and somebody else stays because they
accidentally hear a gas bag or blow hard. They never
(18:34):
sample before thinking about like Kirkland brand products at Costco
or just Costco samples in general. You walk in planning
to buy some water, toilet paper, paper towels. Somebody hands
you a tiny cup of Tazeki sauce and you're like,
I've ever had Tazeki sauce, and now you're hooked. Next
thing you know, you've purchased patio furniture and a kayak,
(18:58):
and I don't need a kayak. I don't even have
any water near me, and I live in an apartment
with no backyard. Why do I have patio furniture and radios?
Always kind of work like that. Games introduced audiences personalities
are supposed to keep them around if they're any good,
and most people never think about it because they're too
busy listening. And my man Eric in DC slash Maryland
(19:22):
became the latest example, living proof. He wasn't looking for
the show. He had forgotten about the show. The show
was just a memory in the back of his head.
He was looking for soccer. He turned on a soccer game,
turned it off, and instead he rediscovered as he turned
it back on a little overnight show going round the
mountain he had forgot about, and for a few minutes,
(19:44):
this is like the cool stuff, right, this is the
cool stuff. We both traveled backwards nearly twenty years and
we both had was bigger memory for him than me.
But I remembered it. I truly did I. And that
was back before the internet really kicked in, social media
kicked in, and it was a local TV station, I
believe in DC that had the story. So time has
a very funny sense of humor. Sometimes it feels painfully
(20:06):
slow as you get older. Very rarely. Other times you blink,
like as you're doing this and you discover the kid
who used to call you your overnight show. I get
this every once in a while. The kids say, you know,
I listened to you when I was in junior high school.
Now I have a wife and one kid and one
(20:26):
on the way and worked in a factory or worked
at the store, or I've done this or that or whatever,
and it is kind of cool. I do love hearing
those stories. I do it's pretty pretty because that's what
I was like when I was growing up. I love
radio and listening, and you know, I became that guy,
but I loved I loved it. Meanwhile, you know, I'm
(20:47):
just sitting behind the same microphone with the same headphones,
and I'm just talking, and I don't know who's there
and what they're doing and if anyone's listening. And longevity
in radio is not glamorous. You don't get paid a
lot of money back in the day you did. Nobody
throws parades because you managed not to get fired. Although
you know, hey, that has happened. There's no special gold watch.
(21:12):
You get that. The company, you know, they don't even
really call you up and say, hey, good job by you.
They don't. That doesn't happen. I hear other people say
they get that. We don't get that. We don't get
congratulations on surviving another eighteen years of overnight shifts. But
every once in a while, the universe does toss you
a Soliday reminder that which you're actually involved in matters
(21:35):
to someone. Maybe not millions, maybe not millions, maybe not
even thousands. Sometimes it's just one guy who happened to
accidentally leave his Serious XM Radio after the World Cup
match on and I got to tell you that was enough.
That was a good dopamine hit and hidden under all
the complaints and the whining, you know your show's not on.
(21:58):
I'm paying for Serious ex but so you know you
got preempted by soccer. I'm like, well, I don't run
Serious XM. Contact them. I have nothing to do with that.
It is a reminder there's that magic. I promote the
magic of radio. It's still there, the theater of the mind,
and sometimes it simply takes ninety minutes of a football
match to prove it. It happens, all right. Now that
(22:22):
being said, we're gonna take a right turn and then
we're gonna go down half a block take a left turn.
The Fifth Hour podcast, which is here every Friday and
today obviously Saturday, and we'll have the mailbag tomorrow on Sunday,
gives us a bit of a hall pass from the
corporate overlords. It's where we wander down side streets, off
(22:43):
the beaten path that would never survive the formatting police
on the radio show. We can take a detour, we
can tell stories, we can remember people who never scored
a touchdown, never hit a walk off home run, or
demanded a trade, or viral on social media for some
(23:04):
crazy thing that happened at a waffle house at two
in the morning. Sometimes the greatest stories have nothing to
do with sports, and we can talk about them here
on the fifth hour. So randomly, in recent days, I
learned that a couple of actors checked out of this
mortal coil that we all share the world that we're
(23:24):
in this week, and I wanted to offer a pair
of tips of the headphone mallard eulogies, tributes, whatever you
want to call them, because this is kind of an
audio archive of what we do here. And I know
over time we forget things, and I don't want to
forget these two people, not because they were megastars. They weren't,
(23:45):
because really they were everywhere in my childhood. And if
you're around my age, congratulations you're getting old. Or if
you're older, you're already old. We watched enough television growing up.
I grew up in the mostly the eighties, but you know, seventies, eighties,
that period of time, and if you're listening to this pod,
(24:05):
there's a very good chance you watched way too much
television if you grew up in that time and these
people were part of the furniture of my life. First up,
Hal Williams. Who the f is Hal Williams? Exactly. That's
(24:26):
the point. You might not know the name, but you
know the game. The second you see the face, your
brain starts flipping through television channels like the old The
Zenith with Rabbit ears back in the day. Oh yeah,
that guy, that guy. Hal Williams passed away at ninety
(24:47):
one at his home in Rancho Mirage out near Palm Springs.
I had some health issues recently. They say he died
of natural clauses, which I believe means you got so old,
stuff stopped working. There's no warranty on it. The warranties expired,
can't replace it. You're cooked. Still. Ninety one is a
full ride. That's a great ride. I always say this,
(25:09):
when you get to ninety one, you probably want ninety two.
You probably want ninety three or ninety four, But ninety
one's a good ride. And He was best known as
Officer Smitty Officer Smitty Smith on Sandford and Son, a
cultural icon of the nineteen seventies. Now he also played
Lester Jenkins on a very popular show called two two
(25:30):
seven and Confession Time. I only watched a little of
Sandford and Son. I didn't watch much of it. I
watched considerably more of two two seven, Marla Gibbs, Jackie,
Regina King before she became Regina King. A Saturday night
television was I think it was on Saturday if I remember,
(25:51):
it was appointment viewing back before streaming, back when you
could could not binge. There was no binge watching when
if you missed an episode, too bad, you're cooked. Better
luck next week, you're out. Now, how Williams had one
of the great Hey, it's that guy faces in Hollywood.
(26:13):
Not a leading man, handsome, not Mattin, a idol, working man, familiar,
Hal Williams. Google him. If you're not blind, you can
see what I'm talking about. Hollywood survives, or it did
back in these days. It survived on people like this.
The headliners, the stars get the magazine covers back when
those were big, and get the interviews. The character actor
(26:37):
keeps the light on at the motel. Six. I'm Tom Boddett.
Five decades. This guy worked in show business. Five decades.
Think about that. Five that's how many generated as to
over two generations. This guy worked in Hollywood, and you
know how hard it is to keep one job for
(26:59):
fifty years. I've barely been able to keep this thing
going whatever that I've got, and half the audience thinks
I should have been fired around the Clinton administration, even
though Fox Sports Radio didn't exist around the Clinton administration.
Turns out I was fired at nine during the Obama run,
and then they rehired me six months and twenty six
days later. Williams popped up everywhere Hal Williams, The Waltons,
(27:22):
Private Benjamin, The Sinbad Show, Parks and rec even the
New Mattlock, different generations, different audiences, same dude, reliable, comfort food.
And when he passed away, I read a little bit
about him, and I love the fact that before acting,
how Williams worked as a postal worker. He delivered packages.
(27:45):
He also worked as a corrections officer. He moved to
la in nineteen sixty eight thinking hey, I can be
an actor. And here's the part I love. Even after
he started booking TV and some serious TV roles, he
kept working night shifts at the post office because acting
checks do not always show up. You know what I'm saying.
(28:09):
That was smart, that was pragmatic. That was an adult
move to make. Nobody writes movies about the guy who
keeps his government job because the mortgage doesn't care if
the pilot gets picked up. That doesn't happen, but maybe
they should. So Paul Harvey used to say, you know
what the news is. In a minute, you're going to
(28:31):
hear the arrest of the story. Well, that's the rest
of Hal Williams story. He had a backup plan, and
I've always appreciated the backup plan. People laugh at backup
plans until you need a backup plan. Now here's the
malar footnote following the Tom Looney playbook The School of Looney,
(28:52):
Making It all about you, so believe it or not,
the path of Hal Williams, and and this gas bag
you're listening to did cross in fact, not just once
or twice, many many nights, and not in Hollywood, not
on a TV set or a movie set. No, no, no,
(29:14):
no no. At NBA games way back when this guy
named Donald Sterling owned the Clippers, remember that circus. The
NBA eventually used what amounted to eminent domain to take
away his ownership of the Clippers. After those infamous recordings
in that big controversy TMZ story, the whole thing. However,
(29:39):
before all that, Donald Sterling produced two things. He produced
bad basketball teams and a whack pack of celebrities, a
very bizarre variety show. Among the regulars Penny Marshall, Billy Crystal,
Frankie Munez from Malcolm in the Middle, random celebrities, people
(30:02):
you'd never expect sitting together, and Hal Williams was in
that group. He'd wander around before games, always friendly, always smiling,
always schmoozing, and once you see the face, you're like, man,
I know this guy. He's like my neighbor. I know him,
(30:24):
and sometimes I say this with admiration. He'd somehow end
up in the media dining room at the Clipper games, freeloading,
because even celebrities like to freeload, working the room, talking
with the different hacks in the media, the beat writers,
the radio losers like me, eating that arena chicken that
had probably been under a heat lamp since the Reagan administration,
(30:47):
and so he fit right in. He was one of
the boys. Media people are basically raccoons with credentials, and
we'll all eat anything if it's free. Now most of
the time these days, we don't get free stuff much.
This may have sports with Coleman, who loves free stuff,
and I don't mind it either. So I had not
seen how in years. I don't go to the games
(31:09):
much anymore since the pandemic, and so I'm pretty much
embedded in the Malor mansion in the North Woods, in
the studio. I go to these NFL games, that's about it.
These days. I don't even go to baseball since the
I've been blacklisted than Dodgers got Otani. Not that I'm
bitter about that, but I wondered what happened to Hell
(31:29):
and I didn't even know if he was still alive.
I knew he was old back then, and now I
know so rest in piece Hal Williams. Television lost one
of its great utility players. Not an all star, solid,
reliable player, dependable player, plug and play guy. No Hall
of Fame speech, no giant headlines, just decades of making
(31:52):
other people's shows better and something honorable about that. But wait,
there's more like double mctgum, double your pleasure, double your fun,
or in this case, double your eulogies. Sadly, I was
informed by my reporter Alf the Alien opiner that we
(32:13):
lost Randolph Mantooth this week. Now the name Randolph Mantooth,
Now that's a name, Mantooth. What a name, mister Mantooth.
That's a teacher. Mister Mantooth sounds like either an NFL
linebacker or a villain in a James Bond movie. Mantooth Man. So,
(32:34):
Randolph Mantooth passed away at eighty. I've been very sick
in recent years. He was at a hospice facility up
in Ventura in southern California here a little north of
LA and if Hal Williams was, hey, it's that guy,
Randolph Mantooth was just Johnny Gage. That's it. Period Stop
(32:56):
And you said, who the hell is Johnny Gage? I
don't know. I'm not like you, mallor. I don't know
who that is. I'm young, I'm hip, I'm cool. Let
me tell you, dummy, I'll tell you. He starred this
guy in every episode of Emergency What the hell is
the Emergency from nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy seven,
(33:17):
and for millions of kids, Johnny Gage made firefighters cool.
Actually that's not true. He made paramedics cool. There's a
bit of a difference. Now, emergency arrived at exactly the
right moment. Some say the government encouraged emergency to be
made if you want to go down the conspiratorial route
(33:39):
or route. At that time, believe it or not, there
was a period of time fifty some years ago, over
fifty years ago, where emergency medical services were still relatively new.
Can you imagine that? Yeah, firefighters only put out fires.
And then they added these things called paramedics, and most
people didn't know what paramedics actually did. And so the
(34:02):
show introduced America to this profession, adding on the drama
rama because that's what you do. Television very good at
mixing things, and in the days before the World Wide
Web and surfing that world wide Web, it glamorized certain jobs,
(34:22):
sometimes unrealistically. And for about two years, little Benny, Benny
the Bopper, growing up, we wanted to be a firefighter. Actually,
Little Benny wanted to be everything. At one point I
was a firefighter. I wanted to be a Gi Joe soldier,
a police officer, broadcaster, dodger, slugger, professional eater, whatever seemed
(34:48):
fun that week. Emergency was part of that. Chips was
another part of it, Eric Estrada, Poncherella. Come on now,
if you were a kid in the nineteen eighties, reruns
of Emergency and Chips were basically peanut butter and jelly.
You couldn't have one without the other. Johnny Gage or
(35:09):
Roy DeSoto saving lives, cooking at the station, shopping for food,
flirting with hot nurses. Man, what a life these guys had, right,
saving lives as heroes and eating good food and beautiful women,
always looking impossibly calm despite somebody falling off a building,
(35:32):
you know, every twenty three minutes, right, and every episode,
and the show center around station fifty one. Of course,
here's the fun TV trivia. Station fifty one at the
time did not actually exist. LA was big, It wasn't
that big, not then. So the producers filmed at the
Los Angeles County Fire Station one twenty seven in Carson, California,
(35:57):
because there wasn't again a real station fifty one. Now
how they got to station one twenty seven without getting
a station fifty one, I don't know. Station one twenty
seven Face South. I read about this at Face South.
It had perfect lighting. And one thing TV and people
in Hollywood love is perfect lighting they love it. Good lighting.
The building still looks remarkably similar after all these years. Now,
(36:22):
how do I know that a couple years back I
drove by it. I was in that area, I drove
by it. One of the underrated perks of growing up
in southern California and becoming an adult in southern California
is that, for me, at my age, half of my
childhood TV memories exist in real life. They're things you
(36:46):
drive around Los Angeles and suddenly, hey, I remember that
house or that building, the emergency fire station, check chips
I mentioned, I Love Chips, the Highway Patrol Show. The
headquarters of the Highway Patrol show that they used on
the TV show are in downtown Los Angeles, underneath, literally
(37:09):
underneath the Santa Monica Freeway. The Brady Bunch House. I
used to take dates to the Brady Bunch House in
the Valley. I've told stories on this podcast. When I
did Benny Versus the Penny, we had a studio at
Universal Studios and I had access. It was great. We
walked pretty much every week through the courtyard of Back
(37:30):
to the Future, the courthouse on the Universal lot, like
Everything's here, Everything's here. Hollywood is basically one giant neighborhood
with better camera angles. And speaking of chips, I did
want to mention this years ago. I actually did have
a chance to meet Larry Wilcox, better known as Officer
John Baker, who was a really cool dude, huge Kings fan,
(37:51):
my friend Norm, Norm Peters, who literally knew everyone. Norm
was an old TV guy in Madison, was consin back
in the day, and he'd moved to LA and he's
the one that made the introduction. He always loved to
show off, Hey I know this guy, that guy. I mean,
there were some huge people that I met because of Norm,
(38:12):
because of Norm. Robert Shapiro, the OJ Simpson lawyer, a
friend of Norm, met him, John Begger. There are a
bunch of other ones. I don't have time for that now,
but but anyway, Norm could have introduced me to Cleopatra
or Babe Ruth if they'd still been around. Larry Wilcox
thankfully still alive, So no eulogy here will wait till
(38:33):
he dies. Not yet. Man Tooth though, back to Mantooth,
his impact stretched well beyond acting. I've read that he
became a very strong entertainment advocate for firefighters EMS professionals.
He spoke at those conferences, He worked with firefighters, safety organizations,
(38:53):
supported first responders. He didn't just play the role. He
embraced it, which is obviously admirable because we've all seen
actors who spend six months pretending to know something and
then immediately move on to pretending their astronauts or cowboys
or lawyers or whatever. Mantooth stayed connected when you become
(39:14):
the role. This is something people complain about. They don't
like it, Like Al Bundy became Al Bundy, right, you know,
the cast of Seinfeld became the cast of Seinfeld. They
couldn't get out of those characters for the most part.
And Mantooth understood this is a big deal. He portrayed
a paramedic. He inspired generations of paramedics. And so think
(39:35):
about that, an actor changing career choices. That's real influence.
That's not trending for two hours, it's not going viral
for eight hours. It's lasting. And maybe maybe that's what
struck me about both Hal Williams and Randolph Mantooth. Neither
spent their careers chasing controversy. They didn't in the online world.
(40:01):
They tried, it didn't exist back then they would have
if it had they tried becoming the just important people
in life, but not social media philosopher or anything like that.
They simply worked year after year, decade and after decade, professional, dependable, comfortable.
It would appear in their own skin. And that certainly
(40:22):
has become a lost art over the years, we've become
obsessed with celebrity, fame, followers, engagement algorithms. Now, meanwhile, the
people who quietly showed up every day, like these guys,
they did exceptional work and they faded into the background.
That's what happens. You get older and then you forget
(40:43):
about it, and then they're gone, and then you really
forget about them. So I wanted to make this to
tip the headphones and the cap to these guys. You
realize that they were always there. I mean, like the
dependable diner you've driven past a thousand times. You don't
appreciate the diner until the lights go out and the
four least sign is in the window. Now, for better
(41:05):
or worse, television has changed, I would argue not for
the better. Streaming has opened up a whole new world.
There are more shows now than ever. There are more
shows being made than ever, ironically, there are fewer faces
that we all recognize. There's no communal experience in Hollywood anymore.
(41:30):
Movies suck TV. Everyone's got their niche. That's it, and
we're like the if you're around my age, we're the
last generation that grew up with fewer channels and bigger stars.
Character actors actually became part of the national family. Everyone
(41:51):
knew them, Nobody remembered their names, everybody remembered their faces,
like Hal Williams. Now Randolph Mantooth is a little different
because he had a lead role in that show. The
show was only for a few years and he went
on and did other acting. Two different careers, two different paths,
but there's one common thread. They entertained millions, millions of people.
(42:14):
They left things a little better in this world. Then
they found them. And if somewhere beyond the Pearly Gates
there's a television set, I'm guessing How's already found the
media buffet and is in the background as a supporting
actor behind the Pearly Gates on the TV show and
Johnny Gage he just answered an emergency call and told
(42:36):
the people, well, the good news is I am dressed
like a paramedic and I am ready to be here
to take care of you. The bad news is I
am not an actual paramedic, so anyway, rest in peace, gentlemen,
Thank you for the memories, appreciate that. We'll get out.
On that note, the mail bag, mail bag, mail bag,
mail bag, mail bag is tomorrow, Tomorrow, tomorrow. Have a
(42:57):
great rest of your Saturday, and we will chat with
you next time. As Dick and Dayton would say, bye bye,
bye bye,
Fox Sports Radio News
Host
Jonas Knox
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