Among other things, Chuck McCann seems to have been a heck of a nice guy. When actor Dick Yarmy was dying, McCann was one of the founders of “Yarmy’s Army,” a group of comedian/actors who went to cheery him up. They would continue meeting even after Yarmy’s death, a bunch of old comedians who were in poor health and not getting any younger who found it hard to get work. The names were familiar, too; Harvey Korman and Tim Conway, and that’s just for starters. McCann was also one of the founders of The Sons of the Desert, a now-international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society.

But that’s not where you know him from. If you’re my age, you probably know him for being cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or Scrooge McDuck’s butler Duckworth. Both Blinky and Pinky on the Pac-Man cartoon series. My mom would probably know him from the album The First Family. People from any generation have the opportunity to get to know him as one of the great Hey It’s That Guys of television. Today’s image in particular is from his appearance of one of Jim’s most obnoxious clients of The Rockford Files.

He was friends with Dick Van Dyke, too; McCann was Oliver Hardy to Van Dyke’s Stan Laurel on more than one occasion. (As an aspiring actor, he once talked to Laurel on the phone for almost an hour, after Laurel established that it wasn’t a collect call.) They’d done the act when they were both obscure; when Van Dyke was successful, he seems to have agreed to let his friend have the chance to hit the big time, too.

Maybe he never achieved the heights of friends like Don Adams, but you definitely would be able to recognize him if you saw him. His turn on The Rockford Files is well worth it; he plays the utterly sleazy Kenny Bell, a comedian who tries to scam Jim. Every once in a while, it’s nice to see Jim really get the better of someone, and this is one of those times. Given what I know about McCann, it seems it was a real acting job.

One suspects not a lot of people were in both Herbie Rides Again and Linda Lovelace for President, but the thing about working actors is that they take the jobs they can get. So you do the gig where you dub a ‘60s anime about Hans Christian Anderson, because it’s better than getting a day job. We’ve covered a lot of people for this column who have similar stories, after all.

I don’t have a day job because of my health problems; help me out by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!