Ronnie Schell, Actor on ‘Gomer Pyle: USMC,’ Dies at 94

Ronnie Schell in 2017. Jody Cortes/Getty Images

Ronnie Schell, the stand-up comedian who starred as the wisecracking Duke Slater, the best friend of Jim Nabors‘ character, on the 1960s CBS comedy Gomer Pyle: USMC, died on Friday. He was 94.

Schell died of natural causes at UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Schell also was a prolific voice actor who worked on many cartoons, and one of his more noteworthy gigs was as the animated Peter Puck, who explained the rules of hockey to viewers of NHL games on NBC in the 1970s.

A popular opening act in clubs — he toured with the folk/pop group The Kingston Trio for more than two years — the self-deprecating Schell billed himself as “America’s Slowest Rising Young Comedian.”

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And he played Ann Marie’s (Marlo Thomas) agent on two first-season 1966 episodes of ABC’s That Girl.

Schell appeared as Pvt. Slater for three seasons of Gomer Pyle starting in 1964, then was written out to star in another CBS comedy, Good Morning, World. When that show was canceled after a season, he returned to Camp Henderson, with Slater having earned a promotion to corporal, for Gomer‘s fifth and final season.

After Nabors decided to end the series — then No. 2 in the ratings — to host a CBS variety show, Schell followed him and worked on The Jim Nabors Hour for its two seasons. He also landed supporting roles in such Disney films as The Strongest Man in the World (1975), Gus (1976), The Shaggy D.A. (1976) and The Cat From Outer Space (1978) — he voiced the cat — as well as Love at First Bite (1979).

Schell was born on Dec. 23, 1931, in Richmond, California, and went to Richmond Union High School. He played first base for American Legion and semipro teams in the East Bay, started doing comedy while in the U.S. Air Force and graduated from San Francisco State in 1958 with a degree in Liberal Studies.

While he was still a senior, he left a play in college to perform stand-up at The Purple Onion for $85 a week, joining Phyllis Diller and The Kingston Trio on a bill at the famed North Beach club.

George Fenneman, the announcer on the Groucho Marx-hosted You Bet Your Life — and a fellow San Francisco State grad — saw him perform while scouting Diller, and he invited both to appear on the game show. (In a 2010 interview, Schell told Kliph Nesteroff that when he was on in 1959, he claimed to be an expert on beatniks, won $600 and mentioned the secret word: table.)

Schell’s manager, Dick Link, also handled Nabors and Andy Griffith, and that led to him being cast on Gomer.

“I was working in Fresno at a place called The Hacienda and Dick Link called me and said, ‘Listen, we’re doing a spinoff [of The Andy Griffith Show] and there’s a part for Jim Nabors’ best friend,” Schell recalled. “I said, ‘Great! Is it funny?’ He said, ‘No. But it’s [a lot] of money.’ So, I took a night off from my nightclub act to go down and audition.”

On Good Morning, World, Schell portrayed Larry Clarke, a deejay who hosts an L.A. morning drive radio program called the “Lewis and Clarke Show” with Dave Lewis (Joby Baker). Schell could lean on some real-life experience — he had worked often with San Francisco radio personality Don Sherwood.

Good Morning, World was created by Bill Persky, Sam Denoff, Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard, all behind-the-scenes principals on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and marked the onscreen debut of Goldie Hawn, who would find fame on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In right after her series was canceled.

Schell’s TV résumé also included The Patty Duke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Emergency!, Sanford and Son, Charlie’s Angels, One Day at a Time, She’s the Sheriff and Santa Barbara.

While Peter Puck was explaining just what constitutes icing, Schell knew nothing about the NHL.

“As I got the scripts, I learned about hockey,” he said in 2011. “The problem was for four years I would go on shows and they would interview me. ‘So, you’re Peter Puck! How about those Kings, hey? Aren’t they great?’ ‘Um, yes.’ ‘What do you think of the way the left winger …’ I was at a total loss for years … I was totally in the dark … whenever I did a radio show, they thought I was an expert on ice hockey. They’d ask me these detailed questions, and I would not know a thing of what I was talking about.”

Schell did his act in Las Vegas for more than four decades, and he also was the longtime honorary mayor of Encino, with Phil Hartman serving as his sheriff and John Goodman as his attorney general.

He married his wife, Janet, in 1968 — Jerry Van Dyke was best man at their wedding. In addition to Janet, survivors include two children, Gregory and Christian Schell, and one granddaughter, Chiara.