FAREWELL HARRY MORGAN

From the Washington Post:

On the small screen, Mr. Morgan was best remembered for “M*A*S*H,” a long-running sitcom set during the Korean War, and for which he won an Emmy in 1980 as Col. Potter, a crusty cavalry veteran.

In the part, he took a seen-it-all approach to his aide, Cpl. Maxwell Q. Klinger, who wore women’s clothes in his quest for a discharge for psychological unfitness. “Soldiers, I’ve seen every dodge in the book,” Potter tells Klinger in one episode. “We had a man who pretended he was a mare — carried a colt around in his arms. Another thought he was a daisy and insisted on being watered every day. Get out of that frou-frou and back into uniform, soldier.”

And

As a hobby, he found work with Washington theater troupes and by 1937 was part of the Group Theatre in New York, which included Elia Kazan, John Garfield and Karl Malden. With that company, he appeared several times on Broadway in minor parts, notably in two Clifford Odets plays, “Golden Boy” and “Night Music,” as well as Irwin Shaw’s “The Gentle People” and Robert Ardrey’s “Thunder Rock.”

More here.

In addition to being a really fabulous character actor who was all over the place when I was a kid, Morgan's biggest role was, of course, as Colonel Harry Potter on M*A*S*H. Even though the show was ostensibly set during the Korean War, pretty much everybody understood that the whole thing was about Vietnam. And it was just about as anti-war as anything I've ever seen on television. It was totally obvious that Morgan was fully on board with the program's political sentiments. I mean, you could tell just from how he played the role--for that matter, it was obvious that the entire cast fully supported what the show was about; this was important work, and they all knew it.

For his M*A*S*H work alone, Morgan gets my respect and reverence as a practitioner of Real Art, but I had no idea until I read the above linked obituary that he started out with the Group Theater. And lots of those guys were communists. That is, Morgan came out of a politically radical scene, and no doubt carried some of those politics with him for the rest of his life. He really was the real deal.

Farewell, Harry Morgan.



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