Go See Cal (In Hell)!

Is Cal's dog, Spot*, in mourning?

Available at Amazon.

The Just Another Blog yada™ personal connection/something that no one else will be trivial enough to mention (or remember) is Cal introducing Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen at Doug Weston's Troubador the first wk. of Dec. 1973. And 'though he didn't look that good then, he managed to hold on another forty yrs., shuffling off yesterday at 92, while watching football. (Imagine the last thing you heard was a football announcer, or an advert. Or don't; whatever's heard makes no difference to the dead or anything else.)

So long, cowpoke.

Cal had recently re-appeared on local telebision (We wonder if paying for his allegedly nasty divorce made him go all out for more sales.) & we noted that his voice was going. That's usually the last sign.

In hearsay, our friend Jim the Wop went to see Cal in '74 or so, & reported the salesman was always trying to steer him to a more expensive used car.

Non-locals not giving a crap about Southern California's cultural icons needn't & won't click Franklin Avenue or ME, who sums it up:

As you’ll see, the guy knew how to get attention. In his line of work, that may be more important than offering good merchandise at a fair price…

Video at both links, we're much too busy to do anyone any embedding favors. And the local paper of record, which, in a demonstration of media consolidation, offers the also Tribune-owned KTLA-TV Channel 5's 30-sec. obit.

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*Spot was a parody:
For nearly a quarter-century, from the 1960s until the 1990s, Worthington ran a series of offbeat television and radio advertisements for his auto dealerships patterned loosely after the pioneering "oddball" advertisements of Earl "Madman" Muntz. They were known as the "My Dog Spot" ads because each commercial would introduce "Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!" However, the "dog" was never a dog. In most cases, it was an exotic animal being led around on a leash, such as a tiger or elephant. These commercials began as a parody of a long-running series of commercials produced by salesman Chick Lambert, who worked for multiple Los Angeles-area Ford dealers over many years. These commercials invariably began with "I'm Chick Lambert, Sales Manager here at Ralph Williams Ford, and this is my dog, Storm." Storm was a German Shepherd, who was usually lounging on the hood of the first car to be featured in the ad.