Bangor Daily News – Jan 11, 2008
Writer, producer Idelson dies at
88
Actor played son on ‘Vic and Sade’
BY DENNIS MCLELLAN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES – Bill Idelson, an
actor, television writer and producer who as a teenager played the son on the
classic radio show “Vic and Sade” and later played the recurring role of Rose
Marie’s mother-dominated boyfriend on TV’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” has died. He
was 88.
Idelson, who had been hospitalized
since June after breaking his hip, died of complications from the injury Dec.
30 in a Los Angeles hospital, said his wife of 56 years, actress Seemah Wilder:
As an actor, Idelson appeared in
episodes of dozens of television series, including “Dragnet,” “Perry Mason,” “The
Twilight Zone,” “My Favorite Martian,” “The Odd Couple,” “Happy Days” and “Will
& Grace.”
But he might be remembered best by
TV fans for his role as Herman Glimcher, the mama’s-boy boyfriend of Rose Marie’s
Sally Rogers character on several episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
“Herman never could marry because
his mother wouldn’t sign off on it yet, and when he had a date with Sally
Rogers he brought his mother a couple of time,” Carl Reiner, the show’s
creator, told the Los Angeles Times last week.
Reiner, who knew of Idelson before
casting him in the role, said he was “a very subtle actor.”
“He made no big movements, and
every time you cut to him you could get a laugh,” said Reiner. “He was so
in-character, you knew he was a loser just by his attitude and his physical
being – the way he walked and moved.”
At the time Idelson was appearing
on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and other TV programs, he also was carving out a
successful career as a television writer.
In addition to writing a couple of
episodes for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” he wrote for TV series including “The
Twilight Zone,” “Gomer Pyle: U.S.M.C.,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Get Smart,” “The
Odd Couple,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “M*A*S*H” and “Happy Days.”
Idelson twice won the Writers
Guild Award for best episodic comedy – for an episode of “Get Smart” and for an
episode of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Among his credits as a television
producer are “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Anna and the King,” “The McLean Stevenson
Show” and “Love, American Style.” For the latter show, he shared an Emmy
nomination in 1971 for Outstanding Series—Comedy.
The son of Russian immigrants,
Idelson was born in Forest Park, III., on Aug. 21, 1919. He launched his acting
career in 1931 playing Skeezix on WGN’s radio version of the “Gasoline Alley”
cartoon strip, “Uncle Walt and Skeezix.”
A year later, he was cast as Rush,
the adopted son of unpretentious Kitchenware company bookkeeper Victor Rodney
Gook (Art Van Harvey) and his homebound wife, Sade (Bernardine Flynn) on “Vicand Sade,” which became a long-running radio serial.
Created and written by Paul
Rhymer, the humorous, idiosyncratic show depicted the three-member family that
lived on Virginia Avenue—in “the small house halfway up in the next block.”
Described by Time magazine in 1943
as “a soap opera in which nothing much ever happens,” the five-times-a-week,
15-minute show presented a world in which Vic was once asked to deliver a
speech at the Missouri State Home for the Tall and the garrulous Rush enjoyed
going down to the YMC to “watch the fat men play handball.”
“He was a luminary,” legendary
golden-age-of-radio writer Norman Crowin said of Idelson’s work on “Vic andSade.”
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