Eric Fleming

At the age of eight, Fleming boarded a freight train to Chicago to escape his abusive father. After being hospitalized for injuries sustained in a gang fight, he returned to California, where he lived with his mother and worked as a laborer at Paramount. Fleming joined the Merchant Marine before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II, where he held the rank of Master Carpenter in the Seabees. From 1946 to 1957, Fleming performed on stage in Chicago and New York, taking on featured roles in numerous Broadway plays, including "My Three Angels," "Stalag 17," and "No Time For Sergeants." His television career began in the early 1950s with live performances on *Hallmark Summer Theatre* (1952), *The Web* (1950), *Suspicion* (1957), *Kraft Theatre* (1947) (then known as "Kraft Television Theatre"), and other dramatic series. In 1954, he starred in Paramount's film *Conquest of Space* (1955), followed by *Queen of Outer Space* (1958) for Allied Artists. In 1958, Fleming became the star of CBS-TV's long-running western *Rawhide* (1959) as trail boss Gil Favor. He remained with the top-rated show for seven of its eight seasons and had planned to retire to Hawaii, where he had purchased a ranch. He acted in *The Glass Bottom Boat* (1966) in 1965 and was hired by MGM-TV to film the two-part adventure program "High Jungle" in Peru. During the location shooting on the Huallaga River on September 28, 1966, Fleming dove (intentionally?) from a dug-out canoe after paddling it beyond the rapids. His body was lost in the turbulent water and was not recovered until three days later.