The Nemesis of Gangsters Has Rich Background
HOLLYWOOD
Stacy Harris, good looking and personable G-Man of the
airwaves who heads the cast of This Is Your FBI, embarks upon his
adventures nowadays with a script in his hand and a microphone at his lips, but
the high excitement in his young life has not always been so synthetic.
Before he settled down to an acting career four years ago he had packed
away enough experiences to last him for the rest of his days.
Timber cruiser, deckhand, boxer, radio sportscaster,
newspaper artist, ambulance driver in United States wartime field service
overseas, motorcycle courier with the French troops
in north Africa, he was a restless rover and, before he came here from
New York with the airshow, he had seen the world from many different
angles. Now his is looking at it for the first time as a movie, as
well as a radio, actor, having lately entered the films in Postal Inspector,
starring Alan Ladd and Phyllis Calvert at Paramount. Oddly enough,
while he is indefatigable in his pursuit of public enemies as one of J. Edgar
Hoover’s special agents on This Is Your FBI, he is against the law as a
gangster in this picture.
Born in a Quebec lumber settlement, Harris nonetheless calls
Seattle, Wash., his hometown, for he began to live there in his early
boyhood. His father, David S. Harris, used to be a trouping actor,
but during his school days Stacy has little interest in show business. He wanted to be a forest ranger and with this end in view, he majored in
forestry at the University of Washington, paying part of his tuition and upkeep by
working during summer vacations as a lumberjack.
He Went to Sea
FORESTRY, however, last an eager recruit when this undergrad,
who was active in athletics, began to broadcast sports events on a Seattle
station. Soon he was newscasting as well. After
switching to another station as an announcer, he fell out with the boss and was
fired. Thereupon he shipped as a seaman on an oil tanker bound for
Alaska and the Orient.
“That,” he says, “was a rough experience.”
Back home again after a long voyage, he tried briefly to be
an artist of sorts on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, then went to sea
again, steaming out to Asiatic ports for a second time.
“I hated it,” he said, “but I was out of a job and had to
have one.”
His return from the Far East found him in San Francisco,
where, he reports, “I had my brains kicked out” boxing for $25 a night across
the bay in Oakland. Previous experience as a lightweight in Golden
Gloves matches while he was in college fortified him with sufficient courage to
take on this job.
A Modest Man
A LITTLE of this, however, was more than enough, so Harris
drifted south to Hollywood, and for the first time got into radio as an actor,
working for $10 a performance. But the roles were few and he got
hungrier and hungrier. Then, discouraged about his prospects here, he decided to
become a pilot in the United States Army Air Force and was sent to Randolph
Field, Texas, for training. He did not stay there long.
“I was healthy enough and young enough,” he said, “but not
smart enough.”
Further job hunting, first in New York, then in New Orleans,
led nowhere, so more or less in desperation the young man turned again to the
sea as a deckhand on a vessel sailing for England. There, he says,
he “skipped ship” and “bummed around the Continent.”
Upon Harris’ return to these shores, New York, New Orleans
and Chicago were all on his zigzag course from job to job, and the work he did
in these cities included more illustrating for a newspaper (“I was the kind of
artist,” he explained, “who draws the dotted lines and cross that marks the spot
where the body lay”); acting again in radio and playing a part in a Broadway
show. While in Chicago in 1940 he married. Not long
afterward he and his wife split up, and he “ran away to Canada,” he says, “to
make her sorry.”
There he wanted to join the Canadian Air Force but found he
couldn’t because of a United States law, whereupon he enlisted in the United
States field service and was sent to the Middle East as an ambulance
driver. Later he served through the British push westward from El
Alamein across North Africa, then transferred to the Free French as a motorcycle
courier. Wounded near the end of the war, he was invalided home
and discharged from service early in 1945.
In New York, radio now attracted him once more.
This time he made his acting pay, doing many roles on various shows,
including Gangbusters, March of Time, and others.
When This Is Your FBI was started in April 1945, he got into it
through the producer, Jerry Devine, for whom he had appeared previously on Army
broadcasts. It was not until about 18 months later, however that
the role of Special Agent Jim Taylor came into the scripts.
Milwaukee Journal Aug. 21, 1949
This is the article that provided the inspiration for this
blog. Dragnet fans will note the part in bold about wanting to
become a forest ranger. Of course, if all the events outlined in the article
didn’t happen exactly as they were written, well, then, they should
have.
