December 15 - Tim Conway

Photo courtesy of d23.com

On this day, in 1933, Thomas Daniel Conway was born in Willoughby, Ohio. Tim, as he was known, majored in speech and radio at Bowling Green State University and became a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. After graduating in 1956, he joined the United States Army for a two year tour. Following his discharge, he returned to the Cleveland area and began working on local television. Teaming up with Ernie Anderson (who later became known as the Voice of ABC), Tim began writing short comedy sketches the duo would perform in between the movies they would show each weekday morning on WJW-TV, the CBS affiliate.

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The practice in those days was that the big network would occasionally send one of its stars to physically visit each of their affiliate stations as a kind of goodwill gesture. In 1961, Rose Marie, from The Dick Van Dyke Show, came to Cleveland. After she saw some tapes of Tim and Ernie’s sketches, she offered to mentor them in a career in comedy. This especially came in handy for Tim, when the following year, WJW would fire him for lying about his directorial experience. He moved to New York, where Rose Marie got him an audition for The Steve Allen Show. He passed with flying colors and became a regular player on the show.

Tim came to national prominence when, in 1962, he played second in command Ensign Charles Beaumont Parker on McHale’s Navy with Ernest Borgnine. For four seasons, Tim’s bumbling Ensign Parker barely survived the war while causing laughter to erupt in living rooms across the nation. Following his tour in the Navy, Tim would appear in a string of short lived television shows. Perhaps the most infamous of these is1969’s Turn-On, a counter cultural sketch comedy in the vein of Laugh-In. The show was so controversial that many east coast stations pulled it by the first commercial break of the pilot and most west coast stations, hearing about it from east coast affiliates, refused to air it at all. The irony is that while Tim was only a guest star for the pilot, he was actually around for its entire run. This didn’t hurt his reputation any as he would get his own shows, The Tim Conway Show and The Tim Conway Comedy Hour, both of which would last about 13 weeks in 1970.

Tim’s next big success, and the one I think of most, came on The Carol Burnett Show. He officially joined the cast in 1975 although he’d been a frequent guest for several seasons already. Two of his best characters from this period were The Oldest Man and corporate boss, Mr. Tudball, although he didn’t really have to say anything to get people to laugh, including all his co-performers. For his genius on the show, Tim earned four Emmy Awards, one for writing and three for performing.

As the Seventies became the Eighties, Tim once again starred in a string of short lived shows while at the same time making guest appearances on dozens of others. Taking on everything from Diagnosis: Murder to Hot in Cleveland, he is best known to the younger crowd as the voice of Barnacle Boy, the sidekick to Mermaid Man (voiced by Navy pal Ernest Borgnine), on SpongeBob SquarePants.

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Tim became part of the Disney family when he starred in a series of films for the studio in the Seventies. It began in 1973 with The World’s Greatest Athlete, a film about someone trying to win every event at the NCAA Track and Field Championship. He also appeared in 1976’s Gus with Ed Asner and Don Knotts. His best known role for Disney though, is as legendary outlaw Amos Tucker, a part he played opposite Don Knotts (again) in two films, The Apple Dumpling Gang and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. Tim and Don worked so well together, they would go on to star in several more non Disney films throughout the beginning of the Eighties.

Tim’s final big success came through a series of quasi how to videos he produced starting in the late Eighties featuring a character named Dorf. Impossibly short, with a crazy accent borrowed from Mr. Tudball, Dorf bumbled his way through teaching his viewers to do everything from play golf to drive race cars. In 2009, Dorf reappeared on the website iSpotSanta as he helped Santa modernize for the times (it did not go well, as you can imagine).

For all his contributions to the world of entertainment, Tim was inducted to the Television Hall of Fame in 2002. He then became an official Disney Legend in 2004. In 2016, Tim announced that he was retiring from performing after he kept experiencing dizziness. Earlier this year, it was revealed that he was suffering from dementia and has been rendered nearly speechless. His second wife (of 34 years) and his daughter have been in a bitter battle over his care and custody ever since.