Larry Storch, who played a memorable television bizarre ball on the 1960s sitcom “FTroop” and carried the bizarre secrets of his personal life in a completely different way over the years, is Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He died on Friday at his home on the West Side. He was 99 years old.
His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed his death.
Mr. Storch had a long career as a nightclub cartoon and as a character actor on stage and on big and small screens. However, his other works were dwarfed by the impression he made during the two seasons of “F Troop” at ABC from 1965 to 1967.
The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in India’s country shortly after the Civil War, and Mr. Stoch played Cpl. Randolph Aghern, one of the major incompatibility of units full of them. Aghern and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan Oruk, played by Forrest Tucker, has always hatched plans to make money. Most of them involved Hekawis, a local Indian tribe.
O’Rourke was the brain of the partnership. Aghern provided an idiot, and Mr. Stoch’s sharpened comic timing helped him deliciously in that role. The same was true of the imitation skills he honed in nightclubs. His actions included all sorts of spoofing. In various “FTroop” episodes, he played not only Aghern, but also various Aghern relatives. Locale. “I wanted to come from Moscow, Mexico and Montreal,” Stoch recalled in a 2009 interview.
“FTroop” didn’t last long. But like many sitcoms in an era when television options were limited, it burned into the hearts of those who saw it. It will disappear from the TV immediately.
In an interview with The Asbury Park Press in 2007, Storch confirmed that Tucker had secured the role of Agarn.
“I was supposed to be a sergeant,” Storch said. “But when I saw Forrest Tucker wearing a cavalry suit, he looked like a polar bear, and Forrest Tucker said:’Wait a minute. I have a corporal around here. You’ll need it, and I think he and I have a good match. “” He “was Mr. Storch.
When he wasn’t a clown on stage or on the screen, Mr. Stoch had a rare secret party at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Grave, got married in 1961, she had an interracial daughter, Mr. Cross, and a black performer named Jimmy Cross. Her mother and child left Mr. Cross shortly after his birth in June 1954, but the girl was too dark to turn white, so she and her mother began to encounter racism. When June was four, Norma asked her friend, a middle-class black couple in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to raise her.
Later, when Stoch got married and lived in Hollywood, June visited and she was an abused child of her former neighbor, who adopted her, but she was black for most of the year. A friend who explained to a friend that he lived with.
“People were prejudiced at the time,” Stoch told People magazine in a 1996 interview. “I didn’t see any reason to shake the boat.”
June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story “Secret daughter” Documentary broadcast on the Emmy Award-winning PBS.
There is another wrinkle in the personal story of Mr. Storch and his wife. In 1948, many years before they got married, they had a daughter and put up with adoption. After Mr. Cross’s documentary was released, Storch and his daughter Candice Harman reunited.
Lawrence Samuel Storch was born on January 8, 1923 in Manhattan. His father, Alfred, is on the list of several biographies as a real estate agent, but in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Stoch said he was a taxi driver. His mother, Sally, was a telephone operator who later ran a jewelry store and ran a room house.
In a telephone interview, Cross said in a telephone interview that as a kid, Stoch would pick up voices and accents from a rooming house guest (Orson Welles, he always said) who later served him as a comedian.
Mr. Storch found that he graduated from high school during depression and could make a few dollars by making an impression at a club in the city or acting as a MC for a yose show. He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came out, he was a well-established cartoon in the city and used his imitation skills to gain a foothold in the radio.
He first caught the attention of television viewers as a guest host of the “Cavalcade of Stars” in 1951, and in 1953 CBS elected him to host a summer exchange show that fills Jackie Gleason’s Saturday night time frame. I was surprised. This was followed by a series of television appearances, including a repetitive role in “Car 54, where are you?” Mr. Storch is also the voice of numerous cartoon shorts of the television version of Koko the Clown, with his friend Don Adams as one of the voices of the 1963 cartoon series “Tuxedo Penguin and His Story.” I formed a team.
Then, in 1967, the “F Troop,” which nominated Mr. Storch for an Emmy Award, appeared. He was steadily active on television until the 1980s and was a guest spot for “Flying Nan,” “Love Boat,” “Love, American Style.” Many other shows. In 1975, he reunited with Mr. Tucker in a live-action children’s show called “Ghostbusters,” in which two men played detectives looking for something creepy. (The show had nothing to do with the later “Ghostbusters” movie.)
One of Mr. Storch’s Navy friends became well known as Tony Curtis, “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Sex and Single Girl” (1964) and “Great Race” (1965). ).
Curtis and Storch said in 2002, a few years later. Stage musical version In the 1959 Billy Wilder movie “Some Like It Hot,” Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe starred. (The show used the 1972 Broadway musical “Sugar” and added new material.) Curtis isn’t his original role as a musician fleeing gangsters in bands disguised as women, but millionaires. Played Osgood Fielding. Mr. Storch played the band manager Bienstock.
The show, which toured the country, never made Broadway, but Stoch made six appearances on Broadway, starting with the 1956 show “The Littlest Revue,” which also starred Joel Gray. He starred in the revival of “Porgy and Bess” (1983), “Arsenic and Old Race” (1986), and “Annie Get Your Gunn” in 1958. (2000) and “Sly Fox” (2004). His other films included Blake Edwards’ “SOB” and the disaster film “Airport 1975.” His vocal talent has appeared not only in McDonald’s commercials, but also in numerous comics (“the most money I’ve ever made,” he said in 2009).
Mr. Storch’s wife died in 2003. Jay, the brother of the actor who used the name Jay Lawrence, died in 1987. In addition to Mr. Cross and Mr. Harman, he is his son-in-law, Larry May, and several books on movies and popular culture. 5 grandchildren. And four great-grandchildren.
Mr. Storch was still in public in his later years. He served in June 2014 Mayor of the day In Fort Lee, NJ, the town he once played.That September He appeared Winner of the Palm Springs Walk of the Stars at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
In 2016, he was honored by Passaic, NJ, which the fictional cooperative Agarn called his hometown. Mayor Alex Blanco said at the ceremony that Passaic was mentioned around the world for the “F Army”. Mr. Storch said he had never been there before, but he chose Passaic as the character’s hometown because he “sounded tough.”
In his later years, Mr. Stoch continued to be active. Facebook page I posted a video on TikTok. He also starred in Wild West City, a western-themed attraction in Stanhope, NJ. His last public placeHe toured the site with a sporty red sedan and hummed it for spectators.
Storch sometimes saw him playing the saxophone, a lifelong hobby, at Central Park. Another characteristic activity stood on his head, even in his later years. “It helps your breathing,” he explained to a Detroit News reporter in 2002 while standing on his head. “Whatever brain you have, blood goes to your brain.”
