Actor and Comedian. He is best remembered for his “Lonesome George” image and his clean-cut humor during the 1950s early years of television. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he began his career on WLS radio, on the “National Barn Dance” show, and toured with country music bands, being billed as “The Littlest Cowboy.” During World War II, he joined the Army Air Force, becoming an instructor pilot, and was soon promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant. He also began doing standup comedy for his fellow servicemen, and when he was released from military service in late 1945, he took his comedy act to nightclubs, hotels, and county fairs. His mild-mannered comic delivery, delivered with a warm, down-home style, soon had the attention of the early television producers, and he began on television in 1952. True stardom seemed to elude him, until he obtained his own show, “The George Gobel Show” in 1954, and for the next five years, his show was one of the top rated. Backed with a top notch writing team, his show had a quiet, homespun quality that were mostly humorous stories about things that supposedly happened to him and his wife, Alice (played by several actresses), and often involved word play, spoonerisms (“in one swell foop”), and self-depredation (“Well, I’ll be a dirty bird!”). He played both the guitar and the harmonica. He was married in real life to the former Alice Humecki, with whom he had three children. He would incorporate Alice into his act, making her into an overbearing “Spooky Old Alice” hen-pecking wife, but in reality, she was as warm and loving as he was. During this same period, he made two movies, “The Birds and the Bees” (1956) and “I Married a Woman” (1958), but neither movie was a great success. His career went into decline after his television show was cancelled in 1959, after which he was a frequent guest star on such shows as The Tonight Show, the Jack Benny Show, the Dinah Shore Show, and the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1974, he replaced the late Charley Weaver on the game show Hollywood Squares, and in 1981, he won the role of Mayor Otis Harper on the television series “Harper Valley PTA,” which lasted only one season. His most famous quote occurred on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1973, when flanked by comic ad-libbers Bob Hope and Dean Martin, he brought down the house with the line “Did you ever feel like the world was a tuxedo, and you were a pair of brown shoes?” George Gobel passed away February 24, 1991, at age 71, following heart bypass surgery in Encino, California.