Robert Culp

One of the sad parts of getting old is that the authors, actors, musicians and other famous people whose work I enjoyed as I was growing up are all even older than I am, and consequently are starting to drop like flies. My boyhood hero, Steve McQueen, smoked too much, got lung cancer, and died years ago at a relatively young age. Another one, Paul Newman, lasted much longer and resigned from life only recently.

The latest name to show up on the obituary page is that of Robert Culp, who died at 79 after apparently sustaining a head injury of some type. Culp wasn't the huge star that Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were, but if you watched TV from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, you probably saw his performances plenty of times.

When my family finally got TV around 1958 or so, I quickly became hooked on several of the western series that were dominant in prime time in those days. On several of the shows, the gimmick was that the hero carried a unique or unusual firearm. Lucas McCain (The Rifleman) rigged his Winchester for rapid fire, and Josh Randall (Wanted: Dead or Alive) sawed his down and called it a Mare's Leg. Robert Culp played a Texas Ranger named Hoby Gilman on "Trackdown" at that time, and his gimmick firearm was a big Smith & Wesson revolver, unlike most heroes who were armed with the traditional Colt Peacemakers. Robert Culp wasn't as handsome as the typical TV western hero, his character had a funky name (Hoby Gilman), and he toted that cool S&W pistola. All that made him "cutting edge" in the imagination of this pre-teen, and I immediately became a Bob Culp fan.

Skip ahead a few years. Now it's 1965-66 and I'm in college. Westerns have faded as the dominant genre on TV, and have been replaced by spies and secret agents. Robert Culp reemerges on "I Spy" with Bill Cosby, which is a radical racial combination for the period. With Culp and Cosby starring, "I Spy" is the coolest show of its kind, and my bro and I watch it regularly. As I recall, "I Spy" was on Thursday nights, and nearly every week, we would sit around his family room, smoking cigarettes and laughing at how cool Culp and Cosby were. Later, around 1972, they teamed up again in a movie called "Hickey and Boggs." The characters were a pair of private eyes who were nothing like the "I Spy" duo. Rather, Hickey and Boggs were a little shabby and down on their luck --- but still totally cool in their own way.

After I finished college and married, I got addicted to "Columbo." Interestingly, Robert Culp was the guest star on several "Columbo" episodes, playing the murderer. He was just as good as the villain as he was as the hero.

Never a huge star in movies or on television, Robert Culp was interesting to me in every part I saw him play. I spent many an hour watching him on the screen, and he never failed to keep me entertained. Sad to see him go.