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most people don’t realize that the casually authoritative, detached but engaged, clipped but never agitated, slightly nasally tenor was originally Hale’s. It has been said (though offhand, I can remember only Aunt Paige saying this, and I am unsure of her source) that after Rampart premiered on the radio, applications to police academies doubled and every new flatfoot on the beat was doing his best impression of Jack Hale (a.k.a. Det. Mike Nolan), and you can still hear that voice today—if only faintly, the influence generations removed—in every incarnation of a cop, real or fictional, just as you can still hear the influence of Orson Welles’s stentorian droll in such sundry pop culture artifacts as the animated Transformers movie, and a little cartoon show called Pinky and the Brain , which Chris used to watch and for which I picked up an unashamed affection. When Hale had his first success with Rampart as a radio show in the late 1930s—as the star, producer, writer, and director—he quickly codified the now widely imitated three-act police procedural structure. The plot was always pretty simple. The sergeant, a gruff and cantankerous old-timer, told Det. Mike Nolan (Hale) about a murder in the Rampart District of Los Angeles. Nolan investigated. Nolan found the killer. Plot points were strung together with ironic quippery. The success of the show brought Hale to New Haven, Connecticut, in the spring of 1941 to give a talk at Yale School of Drama. Hale himself had spent a year in his late teens apprenticing at the National Theatre on Broadway, and he was eager to legitimize radio acting to the young Ivy League thespians. My father attended the talk and years later reported that it was “a rather uncomfortable display of insecurity” on Hale’s part. Regardless, onthat same visit, Hale attended a preview performance of the play my father had written for his MFA thesis, a tense domestic drama called Hieroglyphs . This was in the waning years of what we now refer to as Orientalism, but my father’s interest in ancient Egypt was not trendy, fetishistic, or imperialistic. He simply wanted to mine the place for metaphors. The play is about an Egyptologist who comes home from a Cairo expedition to find that his wife and sons have changed in his yearlong absence. He sees that he is no longer a necessary part of their lives, and struggles to make himself needed again. It’s a fantastic piece of work. I’ve read it countless times. I have a copy of it here on my desk, a Xerox of the original, since my constant thumbing over the years began to compromise the integrity of the pages. It’s subtle, nuanced, and even if the main character’s unnecessarily detailed monologues describing the mummification process underscore the fact that my dad was a recent med school dropout (though in my years as an actor, I would use those monologues in auditions), the play is still incredibly perceptive about the ways people ignore and hurt each other, and I’m sure these were the qualities Jack Hale saw in 1941, motivating him to offer my father a job in Hollywood. My father accepted the offer and began spinning murder mysteries for Det. Mike Nolan to solve. But when NBC brought Rampart from radio to television in 1948, its popularity suddenly dipped. Audiences saw that Hale’s body did not match his voice. Hale was a small guy who’d learned at an early age to sound big. There was no hiding his stature on television, though they certainly tried. Hale stood on boxes, while other actors stood in dug-out sections of the floor. The prop department even made Hale a gun that was two-thirds scale to make him look bigger. But all thesetricks just made him look ridiculous. If you don’t believe me, check out Rampart ’s first TV season. There’s a reason why those episodes never come on Nick at Nite. My father is the one who came up with the solution. Give Det. Nolan a