History Spotlight, 4/2

Geez, Buddy Ebsen and Jack Webb share a birthday. And I can only write about one of them. Oh, and some guy named Charlemagne was born today too. But who cares about the King of the Franks, it's my all-time favorite TV cop Joe Friday's birthday!

Jack Webb was born on April 2, 1920 in Los Angles. He grew up dirt poor in the Bunker Hill slum in his mother's rooming house. One of the residents of that house was an out-of-work jazzman who introduced Jack to jazz when he gave him Bix Beiderbecke's "At the Jazz Band Ball." It was one of those epiphany moments that young kids have when they realize that there is a whole world out there that they hadn't ever noticed. For the rest of his life, he was to be an enthusiastic supporter of jazz musicians. It must have blown some jazzmen's minds when they got their big break courtesy of America's top TV cop.

Jack was 21 when the US entered World War Two and, like most men of the age, he served in the military. He was a crewmember on a B-26 Marauder, a twin-engine medium bomber. The B-26 was known as the Widowmaker and the Flying Coffin because of some design flaws that caused the propellers to disintegrate and was the target of then-Senator Harry S Truman's ire.
After the war, he moved to San Francisco and got his own half-hour comedy show, "The Jack Webb Show" but it turns out that comedy was not his forte (although I bet he'd make a great straight-man). He moved into dramatic radio, doing a number of noir-ish shows like Johnny Modero, Pat Novak for Hire and Pier 23. I've got some of these on disc and they're fun to listen to, but you really need to get into the radio drama frame of mind, which can be difficult for modern ears. In 1948, he played a police lab tech in the docudrama He Walked By Night, with technical assistance provided by the LAPD. It was while working with actual cops that the germ of an idea -a police procedural based on actual police procedures- entered his head.

This idea was to come to fruition in the radio drama Dragnet, premiering in 1949. It ran on radio until 1954 and there was a TV version that started up in 1951. Jack was obsessed with detail and realism and strived to portray cops as honest, regular guys just trying to do an extremely difficult job. Most cop shows of the time portrayed the police as little better than the criminals they were chasing (perhaps a holdover from Prohibition and the Depression) and Webb wanted to portray them as working class heroes.

His big break into the pictures came when he was cast as the original badass Marine Corps Drill Instructor (way before R. Lee Ermey was even out of short pants) Sergeant Jim Moore in the 1957 movie The D.I. You can see elements of this role later on when he was playing later incarnations of Joe Friday, especially when he is laying down the law to some hippie.

Most people of my generation (heck, most people of my father's generation) best remember the color version of Dragnet that premiered on NBC in 1967. He also spun off from Dragnet the squad car-lever police procedural Adam-12 and the EMT procedural Emergency.

He smoked like a chimney, ate steak like a Texan and thus died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 62. On the day he died, flags in Los Angeles were flown at half-staff and Joe Friday's badge number, 714, was retired. Kudos to Jack Webb! Here's hoping he's smoking a Pall Mall, eating a big steak and listening to cool jazz with a hot blonde in Heaven right now.

How do you pick just one Jack Webb classic moment? Here is attempting to keep a straight face with Johnny Carson: