I don’t know if it’s that we knew he was in poor health or if it was actually the day he died—the day he died, September 11, 1987, was a Friday, and I can see having started school on the following Monday—but I remember talking about him at Disneyland with my family. We’d go shortly before school started, and I remember quite clearly heading toward the main gate and talking about what we called “Lorne Greene” years. He’d done a series of dog food commercials for Alpo, and in one, he told us how old his dog was and say, “that’s 98 to you and me!” I don’t even really remember him for the commercials, just the conversation. I’m a little sorry for this, because he really did have a great career.

He got his start in radio, which is hardly surprising. With that voice, he was really ideal for it. He was a camp counselor who taught drama, initially; he went to school for chemical engineering and ended up in the drama department instead. Queens University, which he attended, had a radio workshop, and that’s where he discovered his passion. He went to work for the CBC; apparently, Canadians called him the Voice of Doom. The CBC would use his rich, deep voice to announce serious news, so if you heard Lorne Greene, you generally knew it was serious, it seems.

In fact, it seems that any number of people we’ve talked about before got their start in the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts; some 90% of its alumni went on to actual careers in the industry over its seven years of existence. On the other hand, the school lost money the entire time of its existence, so he closed it down, sold the building, and moved to the United States to break into the American television industry. Which obviously went quite well for him.

Apparently, he’s the only person to do every episode of both the original Battlestar Galactica and Galactica 1980. But that’s only a total of 31 episodes, to my great surprise. I could’ve sworn there was more of the original Galactica than that, given its cultural footprint. Still, what’s considerably more impressive to me is his over 400 episodes of Bonanza. Now, I don’t watch Bonanza any more than I watch Battlestar Galactica, but that’s not the point; the point is that this is a man with serious television history.

So yeah, I feel a little guilty that I think of him from a conversation with my family when he died. There’s a lot to Lorne Greene, and that’s even before you get into the people who got their start with his support. (Leslie Nielsen? James Doohan? Les Lye!) He might like that I remember him for his association with dogs; going over those commercials made my family observe that he sure seemed to have a lot of them. It still feels a little reductive of a long and distinguished career.

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