Last night I watched a YouTube documentary about "Gilligan's Island." Yeah, I know...
Well, an amazing photo popped up very briefly toward the end of the show. There's a screen shot of that photo below.
That's Sherwood Schwartz on the left, who created the show (along with "The Brady Bunch"), and that's Alan Hale (Jr.) on the right, who played the Skipper.
And look at what the Skipper is holding! It's interesting that the Kirby logo was blotted out, I imagine for the same reason the Electrolux logo & name were changed in favor of the "Davis 500."
Well, that photo piqued my interest so I started googling. Sure enough, Alan Hale was a Kirby salesman at one time, and apparently a very enthusiastic and successful salesman at that. I found the following blog from August 28, 2015 on a Facebook site called "I Sell Kirbys and I am Happy."
I pruned the overly long text here and there [all editing is indicated] and did a bit of reformatting because most of the paragraphs in the original posting ran far too long and made it hard to wade through.
From the Facebook Page "I Sell Kirbys and I am Happy" August 28, 2015
[....]
[Alan Hale's] father, the late Alan Hale Sr., known in his later years as a "heavy," dated back to older movies to 1911 and the old Lubin company. By 1914 he was the leading man at Biograph (where D.W. Griffith made his early reputation), from whence he graduated to Hollywood and a long procession of parts ranging from "A Doll's House" with Nazimova to Little John in the classic "Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn and he also did both the silent and talking versions.
His mother Greta Ahrbin was the Shirley Temple of Chicago in 1906, later a star of Biograph under the pseudo-name of Gretcher Hartman, and still later a vamp re-christened Sonia Markova and palmed off as a sultry Bolshevik/Russian import.
For Alan Hale Sr., pictures were everything - his love and his entire life. However, for his son (the Skipper) Alan Hale Jr., all 240-280 pounds of him, they are a million laughs; and also a great way to make a living. He was never intimidated by his father - friend of Valentino, Flynn, John Ford, William Wellman - his father's reputation, nor the fact that he resembles him. CB DeMille once said, "[Alan Jr.] has a greater potential than his father." But it was more often said, "Kid, you can act, but your father, he was a great actor. He was great." "Of course," says Hale, "I never met a man who didn't like dad."
[Alan Jr.] got into pictures for an eminently sensible reason - he needed a new bicycle. His father got him a part in a Wellman picture called: "Wild Boys of the Road" circa 1933. (Alan Hale Jr. was then only 13 years old.) The 'part' called for him to jump off and on freight cars, and Wellman decided it was safer for his old friend's son to sit behind the camera. For not appearing in his first movie, Buddy received $6.50 a day.
It was seven years before the really big and most life-orienting question - "Mother, how can I make some money fast?" - came up again. Two days later he was at work in "I Wanted Wings, " again for Wellman. After his first real acting job he came home and told his father, "Gee, dad, I don't understand why you say you get tired all the time."
After that, it seemed that Alan Hale was destined to have acting in his blood. But then life had always been a romp. The Hales moved to Hollywood during the days when boarding houses hung out signs saying "NO DOGS OR ACTORS!" Of course, back then, many common people thought that dogs and actors were of 'the same breed.' Understandably, they thought that the best place for actors was, ironically, on the screen. The only thing that bothered them about the "NO DOGS OR ACTORS" signs was the billing.
They lived across the street from the Garden of Allah, then the home of the senior Hale's friend, Nazimova, named after the exotic hostelry made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald and his old cronies. The Hale house was also directly in back of what is now Schwab's Drugstore, another now-very-famous Hollywood landmark. (It was then Madame Gordon's Elementary School for Girls.)
[....]
[Alan Jr.] and a friend who was a close neighborhood pal both went to Madame Gordon's, temporarily rendering that prim institutional co-educational, then later to a very popular Hollywood military school called Black Foxe. When acting finally claimed him from the bosom of his "idyllic" childhood, he celebrated by getting homesick on location.
However, when he was caught by the acting "bug," nothing could stop him from reaching his destiny. Even the ups-and-downs of the acting game bothered him not at all. He has made countless movies, with some major and with some minor roles, yet (unlike his father) it is hard to recall the names of any of them. He has also starred in two previous TV series whose titles, "Casey Jones" and "Biff Baker, U.S.A.," would be tough for even TV buffs to remember.
In the 1940's, things got slow and he had to take a job selling vacuum cleaners, a project he attacked with such gusto that it still takes all his self control not to try to sell you one (thus the reason for this interview title). When selling vacuums, he and his partner would descend on an unwary housewife, get a friendly-but- insistent foot in the door and take over.
He epitomized the typical vacuum salesman but had more vigor and vim than others. Hale would put on an act making dirt jump out of mattresses and employing every hoary old burlesque device on a door and 'sold' so effectively that the whole affair ended up as a party in his honor, complete with ice cream, cake, cookies and milk followed by dinner, dancing and drinks. He even sold two more vacuum cleaners. One time, he even sold one to a lady with only linoleum and marble floors.
I asked him about his vacuum cleaning success. "It's like feeling out an audience," he says. "You gotta make 'em feel it's their machine from the moment you walk in." At the time he tested for Gilligan's Island, he was in St. George, Utah at Zions National Park laughing it up in a Western gilligan's Island Editor note: Actually it wasn't a Western. It was a Civil War movie. At the time, his career was descending and he was an extra which was one of the few jobs he was able to get at the time. He flew in on a Sunday, tested for his role, and then flew back.
[....]
[Alan Jr.] he talks of his second wife, Naomi Ingram, who was once a singer and who is a small woman he calls 'Trinket' and their life together in a house only three blocks away from the old house he grew up in (the one in back of Schwab's Drugstore), of his mother who he calls 'old public energy- number-one' in her late 60's, of his golf game (he says he has a 10 handicap which is growing), and how he gave up his father's membership in the Lakeside Country Club to join the 'Hollywood Hackers,' a showbiz group that plays anywhere fancy dictates.
Then, of course, all about dad, the complete actor who was also a sometimes inventor but never became a millionaire from any of his inventions which include a sliding theater seat, a greaseless potato chip, and a self-mowing lawn mower. "I think he also invented a concrete tire," says Buddy who laughs while saying, "Of course, it would only work on rubber roads!"
Next to his same 8x8 dressing room that he 'wears' is a somewhat new 1963 Cadillac, newly polished; inside a folding bar, the 'always present' golf clubs, a photograph of a young girl smiling, inscribed, "Dear dad, I hope you like my picture. Love, Lana," a pair of behemoth pale blue underdrawers (he says for another Gilligan's Island episode), the phone number of his banjo teacher and a recipe for Boiled Beef Horseradish Sauce taped on the wall.
Outside there's another scene to be shot. Just a lot of horse radish? "Not really," says Buddy. "Just more complete nonsense than in dad's day. I mean, you're in their living room. You better please 'em or forget it." Like selling vacuum cleaners." "The whole point." roars Hale. "I'm still selling them. By the way, do I have a deal for you." More laughter.
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Post# 359720 , Reply# 1 9/21/2016 at 19:40 (2,773 days old) by CharlesKirby66(Manteca, CA)
(Los Angeles) 
Comes to the Rescue!
