Jo Ann Pflug

I don’t know. Maybe it’s the name. She’s got the kind of career that looks like it’s constantly on the verge of taking off, and it never did. Not really. I hope it’s not that she turned down roles that required nudity, because that’s too depressing to contemplate even if it was the ‘70s. She turned down the role of Montana Wildhack, the porn actress in Slaughterhouse-Five, because she wouldn’t play a porn star, which, you know, fair enough. IMDb says she turned down the lead role in One Day at a Time “for other reasons,” and man do I hope it wasn’t because she thought it was immoral to play a divorced character.

But I think part of the problem was the name. I don’t know how to pronounce “Pflug.” It’s apparently a German word that means “plow,” but I don’t speak German and can only assume, therefore, that every letter is pronounced. A quick search online shows that there are English-language words with “pfl” in them, but either they’re initialisms that are unlikely pronounced as words—for one, the only time I’ve heard “PFLAG” as anything other than “P-Flag” is in Reality Bites—or else there’s a syllable division between the “p” and the “f.” Wikipedia doesn’t even give me IPA symbols for the name, and I don’t know IPA anyway.

So maybe that’s why she was never a sensation. Easy to see why she was on so many game shows; she was married to Chuck Woolery for eight years. She had a lot of her role in MASH cut; she was Lieutenant Dish. She was Sue Storm on the ‘60s Fantastic Four animated series. She did ten episodes of the Operation Petticoat TV series and ten of The Fall Guy. She had a Standard TV career of the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, and she seems to have mostly retired from acting in the ‘80s, presumably after marrying Charles Stuck Young in 1988.

Who is that? Yeah, got me. There’s very little information that I can find about him. Apparently she has spent decades as a society hostess in Savannah, Georgia, presumably why she ended up in a role in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil so small that I can’t even figure out what character it was. (I have not, for obvious reasons, seen that movie in some time.) Maybe she’s one of the guests in that party scene; they are, for the most part, real former guests of those parties. I’d note that one of the pages I did find that mentions her current husband says that he “has maintained a private life with little public documentation,” which makes him sound shady whether he is or not.

I’m very curious how the life of a ‘70s game show panelist on things like Match Game pairs with having been, according to her, baptized and Born Again in Pat Boone’s pool. (I ask you, how do you resist that detail?) Those game shows were as filthy as they could get away with being given standards and practices at the time. I watched a clip while in search of pronunciation—they just call her “Jo Ann,” so no help there—where half the panel clearly wants to say “piss” and can’t, and the audience knows it. Even Lieutenant Dish has nothing on that.