He was just everyone’s dad, wasn’t he? He was Patty Duke’s dad. He took over as Patty Duke’s dad. He played “Bob, the foster father” on an episode of Magnum PI. He was Nancy Drew’s dad. When he wasn’t being a dad, he was being in some way avuncular, to Kurt Russell in several Disney movies for example. It was always disconcerting to see him play a bad guy, as in the mediocre adaptation of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones.

William Schallert had a career going back to the early days of television. While he had ninety-two movie credits, only twenty-five of them are after the ’50s. His first TV credit was in 1951, for a show called Family Theatre. He did a lot of shows with “theatre” or “playhouse” in the title, not to mention an episode of Studio 57. (Also three episodes of Commando Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe, for all you MST3K fans.) He was on a ton of the Westerns that populated TV in the ’50s, and he was one of the many semi-famous people populating Them!

He always said, however, that he was best known for appearing on probably the most famous Star Trek episode of all time; he played Nilz Baris, Federation Undersecretary of Agricultural Affairs. He was responsible for a certain shipment of quadrotriticale, a special form of wheat, which happened to be on a space station with a minor pest control problem. Also Klingons. It’s not where I think of him first, which you can tell by the fact that I made a surprised noise while reading through his IMDb page and got to that one, but I can understand that it would be where a lot of other people do.

Basically, the man spent nearly sixty-five years on television and in movies as a Hey-It’s-That-Guy. His last credit, alas, was an episode of 2 Broke Girls. Still, since the first thing I think of him from is probably those Dexter Riley movies, I guess there’s only so much room I have to judge. He kept working, anyway, playing dads and teachers and authority figures of all sorts. He was the mayor in In the Heat of the Night and a judge on an episode of Quantum Leap. He was Robert E. Lee in North and South: Book II and Sam Clemens on an episode of Death Valley Days. He did a little bit of everything.

And, as is appropriate for one of the great TV dads of all time, he married in 1949, and the marriage ended yesterday, with his death. He was friends with Walter Matthau; he went to high school with Mickey Rooney. He isn’t one of the most mourned deaths of 2016, but then, he has a lot of competition there. Still, he was a heck of an actor with a heck of a career.