‘Gomer Pyle’ best friend dies at 94
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ronnie Schell, who played the best friend to the title character on the 1960s sitcom “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and whose gradual ascendancy in show business earned him the title of “America’s Slowest Rising Comedian,” died Friday. He was 94.
Schell died of natural causes at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He had been hospitalized after a recent fall, according to publicist Harlan Boll, who spoke to Schell’s son Gregory.
Schell played Marine Pvt. Duke Slater opposite star Jim Nabors for three seasons on the popular CBS show.
He left during the fourth season to star as a DJ in his own sitcom, “Good Morning, World.” But it flopped after 26 episodes, and Schell returned to “Gomer Pyle” for its fifth and final season. By then, his character was promoted to corporal.
Schell was tagged with the “slowest rising” label by San Francisco radio personality Don Sherwood.
“It was Sherwood who coined the phrase because everybody I worked with moved on ahead,” Schell told The Mercury News in 2011, citing Phyllis Diller and the Smothers Brothers as newcomers who later hit it big.
Schell’s co-star on “Good Morning, World” was Goldie Hawn, who became a regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and won a supporting actress Oscar in 1970.
“I always say it’s been mighty lonely in the middle,” he told the San Jose, California, newspaper.
But Schell found steady work, and sometimes outlasted his contemporaries who scored early success and later stopped or were no longer around.
Born Ronald Ralph Schell in Richmond, California, on Dec. 23, 1931, he joined the U.S. Air Force out of high school and served four years. He got into entertaining in the military and later at San Francisco State University, where he graduated in 1958.