Town Characters

“My uncle was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad, but New York City?”

- Henny Youngman

Hollywood Happy Hour

“The movies are full of drunks,” Roger Ebert wrote in a 2006 newspaper column, including – to paraphrase the late Pulitzer Prize-winning critic – literary drunks (Mickey Rourke in “Barfly” and Matt Dillon in “Factotum,” both films based on the semi-autobiographical writings of poet-novelist Charles Bukowski), funny drunks (Dudley Moore in “Arthur,” Billy Bob Thornton in “Bad Santa,” and the inimitable W.C. Fields, described by Ebert as “a serious drinker who was often under a doctor’s care, checked into sanitariums between movies and died a horrible alcoholic’s death”), frat-boy binge drinkers (John Belushi in “Animal House,” the Broken Lizard gang in “Beerfest,” the Wolfpack in “The Hangover”), tragic drunks (Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in “Ironweed,” Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas”), and alcoholic subjects for treatment (Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in “The Days of Wine and Roses,” Michael Keaton in “Clean and Sober,” Sandra Bullock in “28 Days,” Meg Ryan in “When a Man Loves a Woman,” the screenplay for which was co-written by former “Saturday Night Live” writer and future Minnesota U.S. Senator Al Franken).

 

John Belushi as Bluto Blutarsky in "Animal House"

“Like the prostitute, the drug addict and the mentally or physically challenged,” Ebert noted, “the drunk has provided actors with fabulous opportunities to chew the scenery…and win awards.”

"You must never, never ask me to stop drinking."
- Nicolas Cage in "Leaving Las Vegas"...
Actors who have won Oscars for drunk roles include (from top, left to right):
Ray Milland in "Lost Weekend"; James Dunn in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn";
Claire Trevor in "Key Largo"; Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen";
Lee Marvin in "Cat Ballou"; Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?" (Richard Burton was nominated for Best Actor); John Wayne in
"True Grit"; Gig Young in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"; Maggie Smith
in "California Suite";Nicolas Cage in "Leaving Las Vegas"; James Coburn in
"Affliction" (while Coburn won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Nick Nolte
was nominated for Best Actor); Jeff Bridges in "Crazy Heart" (costar Robert
Duvall had won the Best Actor Oscar for a similar role in "Tender Mercies").
"What does it do to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon
can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary...I'm walking a tightrope over
Niagara Falls, I'm one of the great ones!" - Ray Milland in "Lost Weekend"

Besides the abovementioned Academy Award winners, Oscar has a long history of embracing drunks, so to speak, with nominations, if not wins...

Actors whose boozy roles were nominated for Academy Awards include:
James Mason in "A Star Is Born"; Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon in "The Days
of Wine and Roses"; Susan Tyrrell in "Fat City"; Dudley Moore in "Arthur";
Albert Finney in "Under the Volcano"; Jane Fonda in "The Morning After";
Dennis Hopper in "Hoosiers" (Hopper was convinced he would be nominated
for his role in the same year's "Blue Velvet"); Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson
in "Ironweed"; Denzel Washington in "Flight."

On the small screen, Dick Van Dyke (a recovering alcoholic in real life) was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role as an alcoholic in the 1974 made-for-television movie “The Morning After.” James Woods won an Emmy for his title role as a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1989 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of “My Name Is Bill W.” (Costar James Garner was nominated for his role as AA co-founder “Dr. Bob”). Twenty-one years later, Winona Ryder was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story,” another Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation revisiting the story from the point-of-view of Bill’s (portrayed here by Barry Pepper) wife, who co-founded Al-Anon.

(Left) James Woods in "My Name Is Bill W."; (right) Barry Pepper, Winona Ryder
in "When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story"

A Stiff Belt of History

Beyond the evidence showing that Hollywood loves a drunk, let’s open the history books for a glance at some of the roles booze played in American history. First and foremost, there might not even be a United States of America were it not for the commerce of pubs and taverns, where a number of the nation’s Founding Fathers fomented plans for the rebellion and liberty over tankards of fermented potations.

Martha Washington’s grandson noted that George Washington generally “drank a home-made beverage” at dinner, referring to beer brewed on his estate. Thomas Jefferson’s earliest designs for Monticello included spaces for brewing and storing beer.

A descendant of John Adams wrote that to the end of his life, “a large tankard of hard cider was his morning draught before breakfast.” Although Samuel Adams, the namesake of Samuel Adams Boston Lager and the Samuel Adams beer brand founded in 1985, might have dabbled in brewing, historical evidence suggests that he worked as maltster, not a brewer.

By the way, the face on Samuel Adams beer labels belongs to Paul Revere,
not Samuel Adams. The brew was originally named for Revere, but marketers
discovered that "Paul Revere Beer" was not appealing to the public, however,
by then, it was too late to change the artwork for the label.

Although Benjamin Franklin probably never said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” as is popularly printed on modern t-shirts, he did write, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

On December 4, 1783, George Washington summoned his officers to Fraunces Tavern in New York City to inform them that he was resigning his commission as commanding general of the Continental Army and returning to civilian life.

“With a heart full of love and gratitude,” Washington said, “I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

Benjamin Franklin's Junto, also known as the Leather Apron Club

The origin of America’s public libraries can be traced unequivocally to alehouses. In 1727, Benjamin Franklin established the Junto, an intellectual “society of mutual improvement,” initially consisting of a half dozen men, whose purpose was to debate issues of morals, politics, and philosophy and discuss business affairs. Also known at the Leather Apron Club, they met weekly on Friday evenings in a tavern. Initially exchanging books from their personal collections, the members of the Junto eventually pooled their resources to purchase volumes none could afford individually. Subsequently, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, America’s first lending (or subscription) library and the predecessor of the free public library.

During the Civil War, political detractors informed President Abraham Lincoln that Union General Ulysses “Unconditional Surrender” Grant (above) was a drunkard who “is not himself half the time.” According to the September 18, 1863, edition of the New York Herald, Lincoln replied, “But can you tell me where he gets his whiskey?...Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.” Less than two years later, General Robert E. Lee (immaculately attired in his dress uniform) and the Army of the Confederate States surrendered to a disheveled, rumpled, mud-spattered General Grant.

Alcohol was important in settling the frontier and American West. It was used to cement alliances between European settlers and Native Americans, as well as serving as a facilitator of trade. Alcohol, according to one website, “served to relieve pain, boredom, and thirst on many American frontiers.”

As settlers expanded westward, some sold liquor from their wagons as makeshift saloons. Saloons were often created from whatever was on hand, including hastily thrown-together tents and lean-tos, sod shelters, hulls of old sailing ships, and rooms dug into the side of a hill.

Long Branch saloon in Dodge City, Kansas

One of the first western saloons was established at Brown’s Hole, Wyoming, in 1822, to serve fur trappers. In 1871, Abilene, Kansas, with a year-round population of about 800, had 11 saloons to service the 5000 or more cowboys who arrived from Texas in late spring and summer with herds of longhorns to be shipped East on rail. By 1880, the bar trade across the West was booming. Dodge City, Kansas, with 700 full-time residents, supported 14 saloons and 47 prostitutes. By 1883, Livingston, Montana, population 3000, had 33 saloons. In Leavenworth, Kansas, there were 150 saloons and four wholesale liquor houses. Fifty saloons were hastily erected in the newly established community of Guthrie to accommodate the Oklahoma Territory’s phenomenal Land Run of 1899 (also known as President Benjamin Harrison’s “Hoss Race”).

At first, most saloons served straight booze - rye or bourbon - raw alcohol, often mixed with burnt sugar and maybe a little chewing tobacco to stretch profits. The house liquor – appropriately called Red Eye, Tanglefoot, Forty-Rod, Tarantula Juice, Taos Lightning, Coffin Varnish – was often 100 proof, though it could be cut by the barkeep with turpentine, ammonia, cayenne, even gun powder. When customers wanted to avoid rotgut, they might have ordered fancy mixed drinks such as claret sangarees or champagne flips. Other popular potables included Cactus Wine, made from tequila and peyote tea, and Mule Skinner, made with whiskey and blackberry liquor. As towns grew, the supply of hard liquor improved, featuring quality whiskey imported from the eastern U.S. and Europe.

Beer was never served ice cold but rather at 55 to 65 degrees, and patrons had to drink it in a hurry before it got too warm and flat. It wasn’t until the 1880s that Adolphus Busch introduced artificial refrigeration and pasteurization to the brewing process.

Because the saloon was usually one of the first and more prominent buildings in a settlement, it was common that it was also utilized as a public meeting place. Judge Roy Bean, who boasted he was the “Law West of the Pecos,” held court in his Texas saloon, The Jersey Lily (pictured below).

In mining settlements, saloons stayed open 24 hours a day and seven days a week. In cow towns, the local censuses would swell with the arrival of a number of professional gamblers, entertainers, and prostitutes, all of whom plied their assorted trades in saloons and all of whom were subject to abrupt reductions, as gunfire was more likely to erupt in a saloon than elsewhere in town. Folklore has it that an Irish fiddler named Kelley, who worked at a saloon in Idaho City, asked the proprietor to build a platform, rigged to the ceiling with a network of pulleys and halyards, which could be hoisted aloft whenever hot lead started flying.

The death of Wild Bill Hickok is, of course, the stuff of legend. On August 2, 1876, in Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Hickok, certainly no stranger to alcohol himself, was playing poker when a drifter named Jack McCall shot him in the back of the head.

Not so well known is a deadly encounter five years earlier between Hickok and a gambler and saloon owner named Philip Coe  (below) that stemmed from an obscene illustration on the sign above a particular saloon.

The Bull’s Head Saloon was opened in the boomtown of Abilene, Kansas, in 1871 by Coe and Ben Thompson, a onetime Texas Ranger, gambler, and deadly gunfighter. Coe was later described by the mayor of Abilene as “a vile character as I ever met” who “sold whiskey and men’s souls.” Thompson soon departed Kansas, leaving Coe to contend with the town council’s objections over the bar’s sign depicting a bull, complete with an anatomically correct, erect pizzle. The council ordered then-City Marshal Hickok to step in and oversee the sign’s cleanup. Hickok dispatched painters to daub over the offending genitalia, however, when the paint dried, a distinctive outline remained.

The result is that Hickok earned the unrelentingly bitter enmity of Coe, and in October of 1871, the feud came to a head during a drunken spree through the streets of Abilene by Coe and about 50 of his Texas friends when he and Hickok exchanged pistol fire. Coe shot a hole through Hickok’s frock coat, but Hickok’s slug hit the gambler in the gut, and Coe managed to squeeze off one last round between the marshal’s legs before collapsing. Unfortunately, a deputy marshal named Mike Williams rushed through the hostile crowd, and Hickok, who suffered bad eyesight, mistakenly killed him with two bullets in the head. Hickok, who paid for Williams’ funeral, would be haunted by the blunder for the rest of his life and never fired another shot at a man. Coe lingered in agony for three days before expiring from his wound.

Amid the customary presence of cowboys, miners, townspeople, high rollers, card sharks, sporting ladies, musicians, and vaudevillians in saloons, we should not overlook the singular character that is known popularly as the town drunk.

Town Drunks

The term “town drunk” seems to have originated around the 17^th century. Although technically not a “town drunk,” the inebriated character of the Porter in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is a comic relief drunk who imagines himself the gatekeeper to hell and lightens the dark mood of the play after a heinous murder has taken place. Expounding on drink’s effect on lechery, he declares, “It provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”

In Mark Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Muff Potter is a likable town drunk who befriends Tom and finds himself unjustly accused of murder. Eight years later, Twain introduced another town drunk, Pap Finn, the mean, abusive father in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Walter Brennan (center) as Muff Potter in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1938);
other actors who portrayed Potter include Buddy Ebsen and Warren Oates, while
Pap Finn has been played by Neville Brand, Rance Howard, and Ron Perlman

On television, 1959 was a peak year for TV westerns, with 26 western series on prime-time schedules, and most of them offered actors plum roles as town drunks – pitiful wretches, more often than not - who find redemption thanks to the interventions from the program’s broad-shouldered champions.

(From top, left to right) TV town drunks have included Leslie Nielsen,
Dabbs Greer, King Donovan, Henry Hull, James Gregory, Denver Pyle.

Character actors Henry Hull, James Gregory, and King Donovan played town drunks on “Bonanza,” as did Guy Stockwell on “The Virginian.” Years before cracking up audiences in the “Naked Gun” movies, Leslie Nielsen portrayed a town drunk on “Wagon Train.” Denver Pyle (best known as Uncle Jesse on “The Dukes of Hazzard”) and Dabbs Greer (fondly remembered as Reverend Alden in “Little House on the Prairie”) were town drunks on “The Rifleman.” And speaking of “The Rifleman,” actor Paul Fix’s recurring role on the series of Sheriff Micah Torrance was written as a redeemed drunkard.

James Nusser (right) as Louie Pheeters in "Gunsmoke"

From 1956 to 1970, James Nusser, an actor with a drinking problem in real life, played Louie Pheeters, the unkempt, stubble-faced town drunk on nearly 80 episodes of “Gunsmoke.”

Veteran Hollywood stuntman Harvey Parry played Charlie, “the fastest drunk in the West,” on the comedy series “F Troop.” Captain Parmenter (Ken Berry) explained, “We were lucky to get him. Dodge City had a spare.”

Stuntman Harvey Parry at work in "How the West Was Won"; a prisoner alongside
Clint Eastwood in "Hang 'Em High"; a referee in "Raging Bull," with Robert De Niro

Dan Duryea, a venerable character actor who played more than his share of duplicitous sorts, if not, in his own words, “the meanest s.o.b. in the movies,” including several westerns (most notably as outlaw Waco Johnnie Dean in the classic 1950 James Stewart western “Winchester ’73”), delivered a surprisingly sympathetic performance in an early, 1959 episode of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone.”

(Left to right) Martin Landau, Dan Duryea, Doug McClure in "The Twilight Zone"

In “Mr. Denton on Doomsday,” Duryea played a pathetic town drunk, once a feared gunfighter, who is miraculously offered a second chance when a mysterious traveling snake oil salesman named Henry J. Fate arrives in town. The particularly poignant story, scripted by Serling, featured Martin Landau as a sadistic bully and a very young Doug McClure (who would go on to small-screen fame as ranch hand Trampas on the nine seasons of “The Virginian”) as a youth itching to make a name for himself as a gunslinger.

Val Avery, Art Carney in "The Twilight Zone"

Redemption of lost souls was a theme Rod Serling revisited a number of times in “The Twilight Zone,” probably no more sentimentally than in a 1960 episode titled “The Night of the Meek,” featuring Art Carney as a boozing derelict who gets fired as a department store Santa Claus (“Santa is a lush!” a weary bartender comments), only to discover a magical bag of gifts for skid row bums and needy children. This episode, broadcast shortly before Christmas, was particularly moving and appropriately heartwarming. However, one viewer was so upset by the “blasphemy” of depicting a drunk Santa that he fired off letters of outrage to Rod Serling and to the network.

(Left) Dean Martin, John Wayne in "Rio Bravo";
(right) John Wayne, Robert Mitchum in "El Dorado"

On the screen, Dean Martin portrayed Dude, the town drunk in “Rio Bravo,” a onetime deputy nicknamed “Borrachon” (Spanish for “drunkard”). The 1959 western, starring John Wayne, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, and Walter Brennan, was so popular that the director, Howard Hawks, along with the same screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, virtually remade it in 1967 as “El Dorado,” starring John Wayne (again), with Robert Mitchum as a booze-soaked sheriff and James Caan as the Duke’s poetry-spouting sidekick, Alan Bourdillion Traherne, aka “Mississippi.”

Lee Marvin in "Cat Ballou"

By the mid-1960s, Hollywood, as if returning to the Shakespearean roots of depicting the drunkard as a jester, transformed the town drunk’s role from pathos to comic relief. When the Academy gave Lee Marvin the Best Actor Oscar for 1965’s “Cat Ballou,” it was not so much for his achievement in pulling off the dual roles of onetime gunfighter Kid Shilleen and his brother, a hired killer named Strawn, but rather for his show-stopping performance as the former alone – the boozy, tipsy saddle bum Shilleen. Marvin, who also reaped a Golden Globe Award, along with the British equivalent of the Oscar, and a Silver Bear Award from the Berlin International Film Festival, ended his Oscar acceptance speech by quipping, “I think I should be sharing this award with a horse somewhere out there in the San Fernando Valley.”

Also released in 1965, “The Hallelujah Trail” was sort of an “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” set in the wild West, a big, rambunctious, loud, long (nearly three hours in the theater, complete with a pre-title overture, intermission, and exit music) comedy splashed across the screen in Super Cinerama in selected theaters. Directed by John Sturges (of “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape” fame), the jumbled plot centers on a wagon train of whiskey bound for the booming mining town of Denver, which attracts the interest of a tribe of Sioux led by Chief Five Barrels (described in the movie as a “real boozer”), as well as a women’s temperance league.

Donald Pleasance as Oracle Jones, with Val Avery and Dub Taylor,
in "The Hallelujah Trail"

Other parties involved include the United States Cavalry, Irish teamsters – hired as wagon drivers – who threaten to strike unless they receive whiskey rations, and a Denver miners militia dispatched under the guidance of Oracle Jones, a loony frontier seer whose mystical predictions can only be induced when he’s drunk. Of course, chaos ensues and all factions converge for what the moviemakers hoped would be comedic mayhem.

Jim Hutton, Martin Landau, Robert J. Wilke in "The Hallelujah Trail"

As dubious as the movie’s stereotyping of the Irish, women, and Native Americans was the questionable casting of white actors Martin Landau as Chief Walks-Stooped-Over and Robert J. Wilke as the aforementioned Chief Five Barrels. (Typically playing scowling villains in westerns – including one of the bad guys waiting for the 12:00 train in “High Noon” and the loudmouth dispatched by James Coburn’s knife in “The Magnificent Seven” – Wilke’s final screen role was as General Barnicke in “Stripes.”)

Joan Hackett and James Garner in "Support Your Local Sheriff"

Decidedly a more low-key and definitely quieter comedy, 1969’s “Support Your Local Sheriff” was a sly and frequently hilarious parody of western clichés, starring James Garner as a pacifist lawman who is only passing through town on his way to Australia.  Directed by Burt Kennedy from a savvy screenplay by producer William Bowers (who scripted the straightforward 1950 western classic “The Gunfighter,” starring Gregory Peck), the delightful satire, which, in the words of Leonard Maltin, kicked “virtually every western cliché in the pants,” showcased costar Joan Hackett’s rarely displayed skills at zany slapstick while providing ample scenery-chewing for a parade of horse opera regulars, including Walter Brennan, Henry Morgan, Bruce Dern, and Gene Evans.

Coincidentally, early in his career, Jack Elam (on the right in "Support Your
Local Sheriff," with James Garner and Bruce Dern), had an uncredited role
as a jailed town drunk in the 1952 Gary Cooper western "High Noon."

Veteran character actor Jack Elam steals the show as Jake, the town drunk – or, as he puts it, “the town character” – who shovels horse manure at the livery stable until Garner appoints him deputy. In a very funny coda, Elam tells the audience that Garner marries Hackett but never does make it to Australia, adding, “I get to be sheriff of this town, and then I go on to become one of the most beloved characters in western folklore."

Jack Elam and James Garner in "Support Your Local Gunfighter"

A couple of years later, director Burt Kennedy tried to repeat the formula in “Support Your Local Gunfighter” – with limited success (the screenplay sorely lacked the satiric wit of William Bowers) – pairing James Garner with Suzanne Pleshette. Jack Elam reprised his role as the “town character,” this time named Jug instead of Jake, who ends the movie by telling the audience that he went on to become an international star in Italian westerns. (Not coincidentally, Elam had recently played a hired gunman in Italian director Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in the West.”)

(Left) Jack Starrett in "Blazing Saddles"; (right) Gabby Hayes

When it comes to sending up movie conventions, there was never any subtlety in Mel Brooks’ cinematic assaults on cherished genres, including the western. Indeed, the poster for 1974’s “Blazing Saddles” proclaimed, “Never Give a Saga an Even Break.” In a cookie-cutter frontier community where everyone is seemingly named Johnson (including Howard Johnson, whose ice cream parlor boasts “1 Flavor”), the town drunk, Gabby Johnson, is a mealy-mouthed old coot, an obvious takeoff on Gabby Hayes, a bewhiskered, toothless, grizzled sidekick to Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Randolph Scott, and John Wane in countless westerns.

Jeremy Slate, Jack Starrett in "Born Losers"

Gabby Johnson was portrayed by Claude Ennis Starrett Jr., who, better known as Jack Starrett, acted in and directed a number of low-budget drive-in exploitation pictures. He played law officers in the late- 1960s biker films “Born Losers” (which introduced Tom Laughlin’s character Billy Jack), “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” “Angels from Hell,” and “Hell’s Bloody Angels.”

Not surprisingly, Starrett started his directing career with a pair of biker movies, 1969’s “Run, Angel, Run” and 1970’s “Nam’s Angels” (a forerunner of the MIA rescue missions by Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris). He directed the 1970s blaxploitation flicks “Slaughter” and “Cleopatra Jones,” as well as a pair of cult favorites, “The Gravy Train” (1974), an action-packed crime thriller, also known as "The Dion Brothers," starring Stacy Keach, Frederic Forrest, and Margot Kidder, and 1975’s “Race with the Devil,” featuring Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and Loretta Swit.

In “Blazing Saddles,” Starrett’s Gabby Johnson inspires the town council with an over-the-top oratory: “I was born here and was raised her and dad-gum it, I’m gonna die here, and no sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswogglin’ cracker-croaker is gonna (indecipherable babbling)!” – a speech praised by fellow townsman Olson Johnson (David Huddleston) as “authentic frontier gibberish."

Jack Starrett, up to his old law enforcement shenanigans, in "First Blood"

Starrett, whose best known screen role was as the brutal small-town deputy, Art Gait, in “First Blood” (the first appearance of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo), contended with alcoholism, which led to his death at age 52 from kidney failure in 1989.

“Rustlers’ Rhapsody” (1985) was a “Blazing Saddles” wannabe, an often-misfiring scattershot parody of all things western, from the singing cowboy era of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers to violent spaghetti westerns, written and directed by Hugh Wilson, the creator and executive producer of the television sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” who scripted and directed the first “Police Academy” film. Tom Berenger starred as Rex O’Herlihan, the stalwart hero in a white hat who finds himself yanked out of a black-and-white horse opera and planted in a more self-referential setting in color.

G.W. Bailey, Tom Berenger in "Rustlers' Rhapsody"

In a game supporting cast that includes Marilu Henner, Sela Ward, Patrick Wayne (as a bad-guy lawyer), and Andy Griffith and Fernando Rey (as a pair of villainous “colonels”), actor G.W. Bailey (best known as the antagonistic Captain Harris in several “Police Academy” comedies, as well as his recurring role as Lieutenant Provenza on the TNT series “The Closer” and “Major Crimes”) steals the show as Peter, the town drunk who trades his drunk suit for a sidekick suit and hitches up with a reluctant Rex, who had sworn off sidekicks since they kept getting killed.

Of course, the quintessential town drunk has to be Otis Campbell (above), portrayed by the incomparable Hal Smith on “The Andy Griffith Show” from 1960 to 1968. Likable and harmless, Otis was allowed to sleep it off on a nightly basis in the Mayberry jail.

Danny Thomas, Marjorie Lord, Frank Cady (as Mayberry town drunk Will Hoople),
and Andy Griffith in "Danny Meets Andy Griffith"

Smith had earlier played a town drunk on an episode of the Danny Thomas sitcom “Make Room for Daddy” (Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard were executive producers of “The Andy Griffith Show,” as well as “The Dick Van Dyke Show”), but on the pilot episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” which premiered on “The Danny Thomas Show” as “Danny Meets Andy Griffith,” the town drunk, named Will Hoople, was portrayed by Frank Cady, best known as general storekeeper Sam Drucker on “Petticoat Junction,” “Green Acres,” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

Towards the end of “The Andy Griffith Show,” sponsors diminished the character of Otis over concerns about portrayals of excessive drinking, although, according to close friends Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, Smith didn’t drink in real life. By the time cast members reunited for the 1986 TV movie “Return to Mayberry” (above), a clean and sober Otis had been reduced to a job as an ice cream truck driver.

Smith, who was also an in-demand voice-over artist in animated films, including the voice of Owl in Disney’s first four “Winnie the Pooh” shorts, played essentially the same character of the town drunk in the 1966 Don Knotts comedy “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (above). In Blake Edwards’ epic 1965 comedy-to-end-all-comedies, “The Great Race,” starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and Peter Falk, Hal Smith had a small but memorable role as the mayor of a western town called Boracho (a variation on the Spanish word for “drunk”).

Hal Smith as the mayor of Boracho in "The Great Race"

Hal Smith appeared as Otis in commercials for MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and, though virtually unrecognizable, in the music video for Alan Jackson’s “Don’t Rock the Juke Box.”

Last Call

As early as the 1840s into the late 1920s, the figure of the town drunk served as an example and an object lesson of the evils of drunkenness in such stage melodramas as “Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life,” “The Drunkard,” and “Ten Nights in a Barroom,” which was filmed in 1931. The sanctimonious morals were hilariously lampooned in the classic 1933 W.C. Fields short “The Fatal Glass of Beer.”

History tells us that the one of the most notorious women temperance crusaders was Carrie Nation (above), and one of the most tireless advocates of women’s suffrage was Carrie Catt. In the moviehouse, we find little coincidence between the passing of two United States Constitutional amendments in the summer of 1920, one of which enacted Prohibition, the other giving women the right to vote. And what did Prohibition lead to? Only the birth and growth of bootlegging, gangsters, rum-running, organized crime, illegal speakeasies, and Murder, Inc. And in 1921, America elected Warren G. Harding as President (“I am not fit for this office,” he once said, “and should never have been here”), whose scandalous administration earned him one of the lowest rankings ever as president (pre-George W. Bush, U.S. News & World Report rated Harding the second worst president in history).

A Drink With Something In It

There is something about a Martini,

A tingle remarkably pleasant;

A yellow, a mellow Martini;

I wish that I had one at present…

Then here’s to the heartwarming wassail,

Wherever good fellows are found;

Be its master instead of its vassal,

And order the glasses around…

…from the only known poem published by W.C. Fields