Read more about Smith and Shiftgig below. “It’s on-demand, it’s mobile, and it’s growing like crazy.” “They can now find and confirm shifts directly from their phone,” Smith says. This eventually led to her current role as general manager of Shiftgig, a new app that pairs hospitality workers known as Specialists with shifts at participating businesses all over the city. It was also on Bainbridge Island that Johnson wrote the memoir "Here on Gilligan's Isle."ĮDITOR'S NOTE - Former AP writer Bob Thomas contributed to this story.Smith put those fundamental skills to use in a variety of ways within the tech field, from digital media to marketing and sales, all with an eye toward tourism and hospitality. "We'd lived in Los Angeles for 40 years and just wanted to get away from the heat, the smog and crowds."įrom the island he often took a ferry to Seattle to do voice-overs for radio commercials. "We didn't intentionally set out to move to an island," the actor, noting the irony, told a reporter in 1993. His wife died in 1980, and his son, a prominent Los Angeles AIDS activist, died of AIDS in 1994.Īfter remarrying, Johnson and wife Constance Dane moved to Bainbridge Island, Wash., in 1988. He married actress Kay Cousins after leaving the Army, and the couple had a son, David, and a daughter, Kim. Fellow actor Paul Henreid saw him in a play there and landed him a role as a villain in the film "For Men Only." Until "Gilligan's Island," the ruggedly handsome Johnson often played villains. Upon his discharge, Johnson enrolled at the Actors Lab in Hollywood under the GI Bill. He was discharged as a first lieutenant in November 1945, having earned a Purple Heart and other medals. He joined the Army Air Corps during World War II and served as a B-24 bombardier on missions over the Pacific war zone, breaking his ankles in 1945 when his plane was shot down over the Philippine island of Mindanao. The future actor was part of a family of seven children raised in Ashley, Pa. He also appeared in more than two dozen feature films, including "MacArthur," ''The Greatest Story Ever Told" and cult science fiction favorites such as "It Came From Outer Space." In the 1953 Western "Law and Order," he took part in a gunfight with the film's star, Ronald Reagan.Īlthough he didn't work as often after "Gilligan's Island," Johnson remained active into the late 1990s, appearing on such shows as "My Two Dads," ''Dynasty" and "Newhart." His TV credits included "77 Sunset Strip," ''Gunsmoke," ''Rawhide," ''Wagon Train," ''The Lone Ranger," ''The Twilight Zone," ''Ben Casey," ''Hawaiian Eye" and "Death Valley Days." as Skipper Jonas Grumby and Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer as snooty millionaires Thurston and Lovey Howell.īefore "Gilligan's Island," Johnson had appeared in dozens of films and television shows. Besides Denver, the other stars were Alan Hale Jr. Wells played vacationing farm girl Mary Ann Summers and Louise was sexy movie star Ginger Grant. Johnson, Dawn Wells and Tina Louise were the last of the cast's survivors. But he harbored no resentment for the show, and in later years he and other cast members, including Bob Denver, who had played the bumbling first mate Gilligan, often appeared together at fan conventions. He admitted he had trouble finding work after "Gilligan's Island," having become typecast as the egg-headed professor. Just good, plain, silly fun - that's the charm." "Parents are happy to have their children watch it," he said. In a 2004 interview, Johnson analyzed the show's lasting appeal. One of the most recent of the reunion films was 2001's "Surviving Gilligan's Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three-Hour Tour in History," in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while Johnson and two other surviving cast members narrated and reminisced. But after its cancellation in 1967, it found generations of new fans in reruns and reunion movies. Minnow so the group could get back to civilization.ĭuring its three-season run on CBS, critics repeatedly lambasted the show as insipid. But, as Russell would joke years later, the one thing The Professor never accomplished was figuring out how to patch the hole in the bottom of the S.S. There was seemingly nothing he couldn't do when it came to building generators, short-wave radios and other contraptions from scraps of flotsam and jetsam he found on the island. He played high school science teacher Roy Hinkley, known to his fellow castaways as The Professor. Johnson was a busy but little-known character actor when he was cast in the slapstick 1960s comedy about seven people marooned on an uncharted Pacific island. Johnson died Thursday morning at his home in Washington State of natural causes, said his agent, Mike Eisenstadt.
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