Ronnie Schell, who played the best friend to the title character on the 1960s sitcom “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and whose gradual ascendancy in show business earned him the title of “America’s Slowest Rising Comedian,” died Friday. He was 94.
Schell died of natural causes at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He had been hospitalized after a recent fall, according to publicist Harlan Boll, who spoke to Schell’s son Gregory.
Schell played Marine Pvt. Duke Slater opposite star Jim Nabors for three seasons on the popular CBS show.
He left during the fourth season to star as a DJ in his own sitcom, “Good Morning, World.” But it flopped after 26 episodes, and Schell returned to “Gomer Pyle” for its fifth and final season. By then, his character was promoted to corporal.
Schell was tagged with the “slowest rising” label by San Francisco radio personality Don Sherwood.
“It was Sherwood who coined the phrase because everybody I worked with moved on ahead,” Schell told The Mercury News in 2011, citing Phyllis Diller and the Smothers Brothers as newcomers who later hit it big.
Schell’s co-star on “Good Morning, World” was Goldie Hawn, who became a regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and won a supporting actress Oscar in 1970.
“I always say it’s been mighty lonely in the middle,” he told the San Jose, California, newspaper.
But Schell found steady work, and sometimes outlasted his contemporaries who scored early success and later stopped or were no longer around.
Born Ronald Ralph Schell in Richmond, California, on Dec. 23, 1931, he joined the U.S. Air Force out of high school and served four years. He got into entertaining in the military and later at San Francisco State University, where he graduated in 1958.
While appearing in a college play, he received an offer to appear for two weeks at San Francisco’s Purple Onion comedy club, a booking that stretched to five months. Diller and the Kingston Trio shared the bill.
The Kingston Trio hired him as an opening act for their nationwide college tour.
Schell honed his comedy act at the famed hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, where Woody Allen and Mort Sahl got their starts. Schell performed his comedy act in Las Vegas for over 40 years.
He worked as a writer and sketch performer for Sherwood’s radio and television shows in the San Francisco Bay area.
“I didn’t get the big break, but I got many little breaks,” he told San Francisco State’s online alumni spotlight.
Schell appeared on a 1959 episode of the TV quiz show “You Bet Your Life,” demonstrating a comic barrage of beatnik jive talk for host Groucho Marx.
In 1962, he left the Bay Area for Los Angeles and two years later was hired for “Gomer Pyle.”
He had dozens of television guest credits, including “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Patty Duke Show,” and in later years “The Love Boat,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Saved by the Bell,” “The Golden Girls,” and “Yes, Dear.”
Schell was the voice for the hockey puck-shaped character on the “Peter Puck” cartoons, which aired during televised NHL games in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Schell appeared in television commercials for Shakey’s Pizza.
His more than 24 film roles included “The Shaggy D.A.,” “Love at First Bite” and “Jetsons: The Movie.”
His extensive voice-over work included “Goober and the Ghost Chasers,” “The Skatebirds,” “Battle of the Planets” and “The Smurfs.”
Schell served as comedy adviser to actor Richard Dreyfuss in the 2019 Netflix film “The Last Laugh.”
He is survived by his wife Janet Rodeberg, sons Gregory and Christian, and granddaughter Chiara.
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