Edward Kemmer, 84, Star of ‘Space Patrol’

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The New York Sun

Edward Kemmer, who died Tuesday of a stroke, boldly explored uncharted regions of the cosmos while playing Commander Buzz Corry on the early television show “Space Patrol.”


Commander Corry was charged with fighting 30th century space-dwelling marauders on behalf of the United Planets, blasting off from his home base on the man-made planet Terra, located halfway between the orbits of earth and Mars.


His trim uniform, a lightning bolt emblazoned on the chest, was lurid red, but viewers at home never knew it, as TV in those days was strictly black and white.


Although “Space Patrol” was aimed at children, the show set a precedent in both look and plotlines for outer space adventure series that followed, most conspicuously “Star Trek.”


Commanding the spaceship Terra V seems to have come naturally to Kemmer, a native of Reading, Pa. He was a World War II fighter pilot whose first acting experience came after he was shot down while on his 29th mission, in 1944. Interned at a prisoner of war camp in France, Kemmer joined fellow Americans to put on a show for British prisoners: He played Hildy Johnson in “The Front Page.” Kemmer later briefly escaped and was recaptured, and was eventually liberated by forces under General Patton.


Back stateside, Kemmer used the G.I. Bill to take acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he took leading roles before being cast in “Space Patrol,” at first a daily 15-minute show on KTLA in Los Angeles. The show was an instant hit – within a year it was picked up by the ABC network and switched to a weekly half-hour format. In New York it could be seen Saturday mornings on WJZ, rebroadcast on kinescope tapes.


Despite its success, production values reflected the “let’s put on a show” ethos of early television. Uniforms had been inherited from the film “Destination Moon” (1950). While it had a crew of a half-dozen, the Terra V had but two seats that had no seatbelts – natural enough in an age when cars didn’t, either. A periscope was used for viewing space.


The backstage crew, some of whom doubled as villains when a crowd was needed, could sometimes be glimpsed walking around the set, and during one tense moment, viewers were surprised by the sight of several kittens sitting on the spaceship’s hull.


Scripts were often rewritten to plug advertisers and premium giveaways, and advertisements were delivered live by the same actors who, in a previous scene, might have been fighting alien monsters. Kemmer often told the story about his sidekick Cadet Happy, played by Lyn Osborn, who occasionally forgot his lines. “He would look at me and say, ‘Well, what do you say, Commander?’ and I would have to fill in until he could pick up his lines.” Kemmer said he played Commander Corry “as straight as I could. You don’t play down to children.”


Other cast members included the exotic Nina Bara as Miss Tonga, a former villainess converted to a cooperative crewmember thanks to the “brainograph,” and Jack Narz as the announcer who intoned at the start of each show, “high adventure in the wild reaches of space … missions of daring in the name of interplanetary justice.” Narz went on to host the long-running game show “Concentration.”


As a mark of the show’s popularity, a crowd of 30,000 youngsters gathered in 1951 in Los Angeles for a charity fundraiser featuring the cast of “Space Patrol.” The show was a pioneer not just in depicting outer space but also in merchandising it. Kemmer’s image appeared on everything from plastic ray guns to suspenders, with sales estimated in the millions.


As a result of a dispute over the show’s ownership, “Space Patrol” was canceled in 1955. Kemmer was a frequent guest on other television shows, including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Maverick,” and “The Twilight Zone,” in which he played opposite William Shatner in the 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He moved to New York in the early 1960s and took long running roles on soap operas such as “The Edge of Night” and “The Secret Storm.” Kemmer played District Attorney Dick Martin #2 on “As the World Turns” for 12 years starting in 1966.


He continued to have fond memories of playing Commander Corry. “Space Patrol is the most important thing I’ve done, obviously,” he told the Asbury Park Press in 2002. “Because so many people have told me that the show set them on the right track and gave them the right values when they were growing up. One engineer at NASA told me that he first got interested in space because of our show. So it had an importance that I never knew existed.”



Edward Kemmer
Born in Reading, Pa., October 19, 1920; died November 9 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan of the effects of a stroke; survived by his wife, Fran Sharon, and three children, Jonathan, Todd, and Kimberly.


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