Robert Fuller

Last week, I realized that the person I had on the schedule for Attention Must Be Paid hadn’t been dead for five years yet. That’s fine; I can shift him down the schedule. No worries. I’d just started a rewatch of a beloved show because one of its stars had just died, and okay, maybe that was packing the site with people from it a bit, but then I read a bit about him and wow he was interesting. Then I went to check on when, exactly, he’d died, just because I’d already been burned, and I made the startling discovery that in fact he had not. And he is interesting, and, well, the person who was on today’s schedule is nearly forty years younger and is more likely to survive to the next opening I had.

Robert Fuller is not a name everyone knows. Nor is Leonard Leroy Lee, his birth name, or Buddy Lee, his nickname, or Robert Simpson Jr., the name he took after his mother remarried. Still, IMDb lists nearly a hundred credits, and given he worked as an extra and stunt man, not to mention as a dancer, it’s probably even more. They do, however, list him as “Extra (Uncredited)” in Come Back, Little Sheba, as his first film role. He’s also a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in both “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love,” alongside his stepfather, himself also a dancer and actor under the name Robert Cole.

A lot of people who are not me probably know him best for the Westerns he starred in. He was considered for the role of Little Joe Cartwright, then he was actually hired for Laramie. He made 124 episodes, though he apparently still had time to be an extra in Spartacus, where he was, I can only assume, Spartacus. He made sixty episodes of Wagon Train despite being on only two seasons, because we used to be a real country. He kept doing Westerns long after Westerns were in fashion, unto narrating something called “Carlo, the Sierra Coyote” that I knew without looking was Disney.

But even that isn’t where I know him from, of course. That’s his 125 episodes of Emergency! As Dr. Kel Brackett, he was the stern but competent medical focus of Rampart General Hospital. In the pilot, it is he who must be persuaded to support the paramedic program because without his support, the program will fail. He flirts with head nurse Dixie McCall, and it’s implied several times that there’s real chemistry there, but they are both wedded to their jobs. And, yeah, it’s one of those medical shows where the ER personnel do everything, so we see him perform surgery and do epidemiology and all kinds of things.

Apparently, unlike Kel, he hated school and said he wasn’t very good at it. But I can’t help wondering if the problem is that he had such a nomadic childhood that he wasn’t able to settle in place and actually learn. He lived in multiple states, and I can’t think two years of military school would have been a very good fit. Still, there’s a reason he’s one of the poker players in the tournament in Maverick, and it’s the same reason his final TV roles before retiring were episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, including the series finale. He was also the voice of a doctor on the “The Comeback” episode of Seinfeld. Because he’s TV history.