Don Megowan

General purpose actor Don Megowan began his acting career in 1951 in Robert Parrish's crime thriller The Mob, playing a beefy longshoreman. Usually playing low-mentality thugs, he made several fleeting appearances in Westerns and crime dramas. Larger roles came his way in Disney productions as Colonel Billy Travis in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955) and as Marion A. Ross in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and starting in the second half of 1950s he also became a familiar figure to fans of horror and science fiction -- although pretty much unrecognizable, Megowan played the title role of the land-bound Gill Man in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and that same year was the star -- this time as the hero, the sheriff trying to understand a series of seemingly random, grisly killings -- in Fred F. Sears' The Werewolf; and in 1962, he was the lead in Wesley Barry's The Creation Of The Humanoids, a script that gave Megowan the largest amount of dialogue of his whole career . On television, Megowan was seen as Captain Huckabee on the 1961 syndicated adventure series The Beachcomber, replacing Adam West, who had been cast in the role in the pilot episode. And he later played Lucille Ball's boyfriend, whose indisposition gets her Lucy Carmichael involved in stuntman work, on The Lucy Show. One of the actor's more enjoyable assignments during the '70s was as the gum-chewing desperado in Mel Brooks' Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Megowan died of throat cancer in 1981.