Charles Winninger(1884-1969)

On TV, one of his most beloved appearances was as a nostalgic guest star on a 1954 episode of I Love Lucy (1951) in which he played an old vaudevillian partner of Fred Mertz's (William Frawley). In the show the two, who once billed themselves as "Mertz & Kurtz," sing a couple of cute ditties: "Oh By Jingo" and "I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad." Later, Winninger joined the entire "Lucy" cast for a musical revue at Ricky's Tropicana Club, where numbers included "On the Boardwalk to Atlantic City," "By the Beautiful Sea" and "I Found a Peach on the Beach." Both Frawley and Winninger were vaudevillians in real life.