The Menards Guy vs Giant Spiders...Sort Of

If you lived in the Midwest and watched television at all from the late 1970s and through the 1980s into the 1990s, you're bound to recall a familiar face with a toothy, lopsided grin one could almost call a grimace, beneath a shock of thick white hair and behind a pair of thick black glasses, who pitched discounts on everything from batteries to house paint to screen doors in commercials that invariably ended with a boisterous "Save big money at Menards!"

Founded in the early 1960s and headquartered in Eau Claire,
Wisconsin, Menards has 300 stores in 14 states. With annual sales
of  $9.5 million, it's the third largest home improvement franchise,
behind The Home Depot and Lowe's.

He became known as the "Menards Guy." No, he wasn't an executive for the home improvement chain. Ray Szmanda was a Wisconsin resident, a former radio announcer and founder of a broadcasting school in Wausau, Wisconsin, who, on a whim, auditioned for the company's TV spots in 1976. Szmanda, 91, succumbed to complications from pneumonia, heart disease, and a fall on April 29, 2018.

Ray Szmanda grew up in Milwaukee. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served in the Pacific during World War II, entertaining his island-hopping shipmates by playing drums in a service band. He studied broadcasting and writing at Brown Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota, before landing a job as an announcer at a Milwaukee television station. He hosted radio musical programs and migrated into commercial announcing while working as an insurance agent.

It's funny how regional commercials can boost a local spokesperson to celebrity status. Alan Hamel, a Canadian TV children's show host and syndicated game show emcee who married actress Suzanne Somers, became synonymous with California's Alpha Beta supermarkets in endless commercials throughout the 1970s and '80's, capped off by Alan advising, "Tell a friend."

Alan Hamel and Suzanne Somers have been married since 1977.

Cal Worthington, who became the most successful singular owner of a car dealership group in 1990, grossing in excess of $315 million over a single year, started out with a modest auto sales lot in Huntington Park in southeastern Los Angeles County. By the 1970s, Worthington was saturating commercial breaks overnight on four of the seven television stations in Los Angeles. Worthington's ads could be seen breaking into late-night movies from midnight to six a.m.

In response to a competitor who appeared on-camera with his pet dog named Storm, Worthington livened up his commercials with his "dog Spot," however the "pet" was never a dog. It would be an exotic animal led around the car lot on a leash by Cal, such as a gorilla, a tiger, an elephant, a roller-skating chimpanzee, a hippopotamus, even a killer whale. The ads featured a bouncy jingle to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It" with such lyrics as "If you want a car or truck, go see Cal, if you want to save a buck, go see Cal," and ending with "Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal." There were kids who thought that his name was "Go See Cal."

In the early 1970s, Worthington appeared twice on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and guest-starred on the Lee Majors stuntman series "The Fall Guy" in 1985 as Dealin' Dave. He was parodied in such movies as "Beetlejuice" and Marty Feldman's "The Last Remake of Beau Geste," which featured comedian Avery Schreiber as a used camel salesman with the jingle, "See Hakkim, see Hakkim. see Hakkim"(pictured below).

As for Ray Szmanda, when Menards started advertising, the company wanted someone similar to NFL sportscaster Pat Summerall, who was a spokesperson for True Value hardware stores.

At one point, Ray's various commercials for Menards were running thousands of times per week. "It was an energy level thing with the company," Szmanda said in an interview with Associated Press. "They asked me for more energy as we went along. The more energy that I gave, the more popular I became."

Szmanda's popularity spawned fan websites and brought him a flood of fan mail. He would relate how strangers approached him and beg him to "just say it." He would oblige with a booming "Save big money!" Ray's son, Charles Szmanda, commented, "It's like hearing a hit record because it says what everybody wants to hear."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated, "In a way, he was the guru of home remodeling projects even though he was not particularly handy." Daughter Jane Szmanda Zeller remarked, "He was only handy with a hammer. Dad knew his limitations as far as being handy." He called himself an "average do-it-yourselfer" who figured he was "pretty good" with a caulk gun.

In 1969, Szmanda founded Trans-American School of Broadcasting in Wausau to train television and radio talent. One of his students, Ken Clark, who later taught at the institute and has enjoyed a 40-year career in radio, noted, "It seemed like he was inexhaustible. At the time, his work was viewed by some as old-fashioned, and perhaps even corny. But over  the years that's been replaced by tremendous respect for a man who made himself an icon and who gave so much of himself for one industry. Ray was truly one of a kind."

Szmanda sold the school in 1986. Around that same time, he hosted episodes of "High Quiz Bowl." He was hired to narrate an audio recording of the King James version of the Bible. His hobbies were operating a ham radio and collecting vintage cars, while his first love was music. He was a drummer in a jokey trio that performed in Milwaukee and throughout the Midwest, and he was admittedly still taking music lessons in his 80s. "I have a genuine enthusiasm for everything I do," he told Madison's State Journal. "I don't bother with things I can't feel positive about. I'm just a real up kind of person."

In the late 1990s, Szmanda went on hiatus from the commercial work for two years to care for his wife of nearly 51 years, Maxine, who had colon cancer that led to lung cancer. She died in 2000.

In Ray's absence, Menards brought in a new spokesperson, a perky, young woman in glasses and bib overalls. All that is known about her is that she wore a name tag that said "Kim" (pictured below). Proving to be unpopular with viewers, she didn't last long, and Szmanda returned to the store aisles on a periodic basis, never formally giving up the Menards Guy.

On the cusp of his newfound celebrity in 1978, Ray Szmanda had a small but significant role in a low-budget speculative fiction flick titled "The Alpha Incident," made by Gleason, Wisconsin-based filmmaker Bill Rebane.

Mr. Rebane's career deserves a sidebar here. On the one hand, he is notorious for cranking out a string of shoestring-budgeted grade-Z thrillers like 1974's "Invasion from Inner Earth," 1975's "The Giant Spider Invasion," and 1979's "The Capture of Bigfoot." On the other hand, he is credited with introducing the first 360-degree, or wrap-around, motion picture process, an innovation that led to the Cinemax theaters. He founded the Wisconsin Film Office and successfully created the first full-time feature movie studio in the Midwest. His dozen films have all enjoyed successful international release, while "The Giant Spider Invasion" was one of the 50 top-grossing pictures of the year. Aside from his feature films, he made at least 100 industrial movies. And he ran for governor of Wisconsin twice as the Reform Party candidate. Not bad for a Latvian immigrant who learned English by watching American cinema.

The titular creature of "The Giant Spider Invasion" was a fake fur-covered VW Beetle filled with tireless college students operating the oversized pipe cleaner legs. The cast was headed by 53-year-old Barbara Hale (best known as Perry Mason's leggy secretary, Della Street) as a scientist and expert on black holes; Alan Hale Jr. as the local jokester of a sheriff who reprises "Gilligan's Island" Skipper's line, "Hey, little buddy," and breaks the fourth wall in direct-into-the-camera mugging; longtime Hollywood dialect instructor Robert Easton (pictured below), best known on television and in the movies for his own hillbilly characterizations (Easton also wrote the screenplay); and "guest star" Leslie Parrish, who saw better days in her motion picture debut as Daisy Mae in 1959's "Li'l Abner" and as Laurence Harvey's ill-fated wife in 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate." Barbara Hale's husband, Bill Williams, star of the 1950s western series "The Adventures of Kit Carson," appeared in the film as the local bartender-hash slinger; Williams and Hale were the parents of "Carrie" actor William Katt.

With Arlene Golonka and Ann Prentiss (yes, Paula's kid sister) in
the background, Robert Easton plays against hillbilly type as a
haughty KAOS agent called the Maestro on TV's "Get Smart."

In 1987, Rebane directed Tiny Tim in his sole feature film, a slasher movie titled "Blood Harvest," in which the falsetto-throated singer portrays the clown-faced "Marvelous Mervo," who may or may not be butchering the local townspeople like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

In Madison, Wisconsin, in 2005, "Mystery Science 3000" host Michael J. Nelson and Kevin Murphy, the voice of gumball machine-robot Tom Servo, emceed a Bill Rebane Film Festival, with the moviemaker himself in attendance (pictured below).

"MST3K's" Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy, Bill Rebane, and Paul
Bentzen, a frequent actor in Rebane's films, address the audience.

"The Alpha Incident" (1978) is about a deadly, contagious microorganism from Mars brought to Earth by a space probe that is being transported by train to safekeeping in Denver when it literally gets derailed in a small northern town and forces a handful of humanity into quarantine in a claustrophobic railway station. The alien virus infects the brain in sleep, so the movie becomes a tedious marathon of talking heads as the terrorized people fight to stave off slumber.

Meanwhile, in a mysterious command center, a uniformed bigwig credited only as "The Official" (Ray Szmanda) holds the fate of the sequestered party in his hands as he communicates with scientists over his ominous red hot line. Szmanda even got a couple of close-ups as he intoned such sinister orders as "Shoot to kill if necessary but leave the bodies alone."

Given top billing in "The Alpha Incident" was former Hollywood leading man Ralph Meeker, known for such tough guy roles as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer in 1955's "Kiss Me Deadly," directed by Robert Aldrich, and as real-life gangster Bugsy Moran in 1967's "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," directed by Roger Corman.

Private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) gets an earful from
assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper) in "Kiss Me Deadly."

Corporal Paris (Meeker) and (in the background) Private Ferol
(Timothy Carey) prepare to face a firing squad in 1957's "Paths
of Glory," directed by Stanley Kubrick.

In 1967's "The Dirty Dozen," directed by Robert Aldrich, Ralph
Meeker plays cynical military psychologist Capt. Kinder, who
advises world-weary Maj. Reisman (Lee Marvin) that he's in 
command of "just about the most twisted, anti-social bunch of
psychopathic deformities I have ever run into."

Cast against type in "The Alpha Incident," Meeker's character, an office pencil-pusher (pictured below), is so shy and withdrawn, he borders on catatonic. One wonders if he was seriously ill at the time. The actor did suffer a stroke two years later, forcing him to retire, and he died from a heart attack in 1988 at the age of 67.

SPOILER ALERT: At least Ralph Meeker gets to make a
gooshy exit in the film's only special effect - and it's a doozy.

A standout in the cast is George "Buck" Flower (pictured below) as the sotted caboose brakeman whose bumbling unleashes the contagion.

A character actor in everything from family pictures to softcore exploitation to television dramas, with horror and science fiction outings in between, veteran scene-stealer Flower is probably best known for his appearances in director John Carpenter's "The Fog," "Escape from New York," "Starman," "Body Bags," "Village of the Damned," and, most memorably, as a rags-to-riches bum in "They Live."

Local Boys - and Girl - Make Good

Wisconsinite Ray Szmanda's acting in "The Alpha Incident" got us to thinking in the Moviehouse about a couple of Minnesota's contributions to the casts of locally filmed movies, one a bare-boned independent effort, the other a lavishly mounted Hollywood production.

"Just Be There" was a just barely released romantic melodrama in 1973 about a young Marine veteran of theVietnam War (with the unlikeliest of Marine hippie haircuts, complete with a bushy, Peter Max mustache) confronting a difficult return to normalcy with his long-term girlfriend and his status-conscious parents while he just wants to be left alone to write a book. The guy was played by somebody whose only movie this was and who produced it. The put-upon girlfriend was portrayed by Lynn Baker, who had supporting roles in 1971's "Billy Jack" and 1974's "The Trial of Billy Jack."

John Denver attends the Colorado premiere of "Billy Jack," beside
Lynn Baker (Sarah) and Clark Howat (Sheriff Cole).

Lynn Baker (right) attends a 2009 "Billy Jack" reunion with
wife-and-husband stars Delores Taylor and Tom Laughlin.
Tom died in 2013, age 82, Delores passed in 2018, age 85.

Once he's pocketed into a job with his dad's pork belly commodities company, which comes with  the perks of a luxury sports car and a cushy apartment, the aspiring novelist in "Just Be There" gets dressed down by the confused girlfriend who declares, "I love you and I want what you want but you don't know what you want...You put on your little suit and you go to your office and you make your big deals, just like all the other plastic people - you're a phony!"

Filmed in Minnesota in Minneapolis and St. Paul locations, the movie, like all significant, low-budget explorations of the post-Nam experience from the 1970s, is padded with time-killing montages of walks and jogs through parks, soul-searching motorcycle rides, and meaningless drives through picturesque Twin Cities scenery. It was directed by David Feldshuh, older brother of acclaimed actress Tovah Feldshuh, an Emmy nominee for "Holocaust" who was seen on "The Walking Dead" as Deanna Monroe.

Former St. Paul Mayor Charlie McCarty has a meaty role in "Just Be There" as soldier-boy's corporate pop and, compared to the stiff playing his son, walks off with the picture. During his single term from 1970 to 1972, the flamboyant McCarty often drew national attention with his unorthodox administrative methods, which included racing against emergency vehicles to crime and fire scenes in a specially equipped automobile dubbed the "Supercar." The colorful figure, elected as an independent, was himself called "Supermayor." Sadly, he died of an apparent heart attack in 1974, age 53.

Another Twin Cities notable, Nancy Nelson (pictured below), a former Miss Minnesota USA in 1970 and TV personality in Minneapolis who moved to Los Angeles and earned an international reputation as the "Queen of Infomericals," appears in "Just Be There" as a seductive corporate femme fatale.

Nancy Nelson was married to Minneapolis WCCO-TV news anchor
Bill Carlson and maintained a half-coastal relationship with him,
jetting back and forth between Minnesota and California, before
Bill's death from prostate cancer in 2008.

In 1970's star-studded disaster drama "Airport," Nancy Nelson had a small role as "Bunnie." We're betting Bunnie was a flight attendant. That movie, incidentally, was shot in part at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

When author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. saw director George Roy Hill's 1972 film version of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, he gleefully wrote, "I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel...to the silver screen...I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book." The movie, sandwiched between George Roy Hill's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting," is an episodic tale of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become "unstuck in time," flitting back and forth from his internment as a young POW in Germany during World War II to his abduction by aliens to their planet Tralfamadore to his own death and back again.

From fresh-faced youth to a infirm old age, Billy was flawlessly played by screen newcomer Michael Sacks. Sacks went on to memorable supporting roles in Steven Spielberg's "Sugarland Express" and the supernatural thriller "The Amityville Horror" but retired from acting in 1984 for a career in technology, including positions at IBM Research and Morgan Stanley.

Oh, and Valerie Perrine makes her film debut in
"Slaughterhouse-Five" as Montana Wildhack, an
adult movie star who ends up on Tralfamadore
with Billy Pilgrim.

Many of the scenes of Billy's domestic life on Earth were filmed in locations around Minneapolis, Minnesota, which happens to be George Roy Hill's hometown. His family owned the city newspaper the Minneapolis Tribune. In a brief scene depicting Billy's election as president of the local Lions Club, shot in a Minneapolis hotel, George Waters, of Rochester, Minnesota's Waters Instruments (which pioneered non-invasive measurements of heart-lung function developed by the Mayo Clinic), delivers one line. Hill and Waters were classmates at The Blake School, a prep school in Minneapolis.

Rochester's own, George Waters, enjoys his
brush with greatness in "Slaughterhouse Five."

Parting Lines

Bringing this all back to Ray Szmanda, after he passed, Menards released a statement that read, "Ray Szmanda remained a steady fixture in our advertising for nearly a quarter of a century before his retirement in 1998. Still to this day, Ray's friendly, enthusiastic and fun-loving personality have made a lasting impression on our customers and all of us at Menards."

Ray's daughter Jane Szmanda Zeller said, "My dad was probably one of the most positive people I've ever known. He could accomplish anything with hard work and determination. That's what we were all brought up to believe."

Daughter Joan Burmeister agreed. "He was the best. He was always on your side...He was the one who thought through everything and looked at the whole picture. He was the most motivating person you could ever meet."

Ray is survived by six children, 17 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.


Postscript:

Bet you didn't know Ray Szmanda's nephew, Eric Szmanda (pictured below), portrayed DNA specialist and psychic aficionado Greg Sanders on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."