Bill and Joe have a visitor from the Department of Animal Regulation who tells about a rash of lost dogs reported recently from a shopping center. What got his attention was that in the months before this rash started, there was only one dog reported missing from the same area, now they have had dozens.
Before they can act, the officers need to get approval from the captain, since missing dogs is not normally a police activity. In many of these Dragnets, while Joe always mentions the name of "the boss" in his beginning narration, we often don't even see the captain or, if we do, he's on screen for about 10 seconds or so. This is one of the rare episodes where the captain plays a role that stands out in the episode.
Captain Ken Green at first doesn't even look up from doing paperwork, as he seems to not be about to let them look for dogs, but as they tell him why they think this is something to look into, the captain starts remembering a favorite German shepherd he had for 16 years. He sits back in his chair, and smiles at how his beloved dog would bring him the mail each evening, but wouldn't give it to him until he got his ears scratched. Bill has trouble getting him to answer a question as the captain is lost in his happy memories. All of us pet owners can easily smile at that scene, thinking about some of our favorite pet memories.
Bill and Joe go to interview one dog owner, who is building a castle-like doghouse for his dog's birthday present. He tells about how important his dog is to his invalid wife and how he hopes someone will find him. He tells about a neighbor who had her dog also jump out of the window of her car when she was parked at the same shopping center. She got her dog back.
On interviewing her, and then after telephone interviews with others, they learned much the same story: The dogs were left in the cars with the windows open a crack, and when the owners returned, they found the doors still locked and the window down farther than they remembered. It seems if they place an ad in a local paper, someone brings back the dogs, claiming they found it somewhere, and they received a nice reward-up to $500. The description of the person who returned the dogs indicated two different men.
Bill and Joe suspect someone is taking the dogs from the cars and housing them until a reward is offered. The lady they interviewed second happened to note the license plate of the guy who brought her dog back, because the letters were the same as her Afghan Hound Association-AHA.
With those letters, plus a description of the car, our guys were able to find records showing one car that might match, and go to the address of the owner. When they ring the doorbell, dozens of dogs inside start barking. Through the window they see numerous dogs. Almost at that time, a man comes up, leading a dog, and rudely tells them, "Whatever you're selling, I'm not interested." He proceeds to be rude after they tell him they are policemen and insists he is innocent.
They take him downtown and after he is fingerprinted, with a print matching one taken from a victim's car, they know they have him. Others stake out the house for his partner. Joe gets a call from the first man they interviewed, saying someone responded to his ad about the dog and will be there in half an hour.
Bill and Joe rush over and hide behind the car in the guy's garage-next to the dog house castle, and here comes his dog and the man wanting his $200 reward. Because of the rewards received, the two suspects were convicted of grand larceny.
Now throughout the show, Bill kept trying to sound like he knew dogs but he constantly misidentified the breed, and showed no knowledge of anything about the breed-where they came from, etc. He finally got a book from the police library to learn about them. He then tries to stump Joe showing him various pictures, while covering up the text telling the breed. Joe immediately identified each picture's breed. Bill finds out why when Joe tells him he read that book, in fact, requisitioned it for their library some months ago when they had a case (one shown on an earlier episode) involving dogs trained to snatch purses. He chides Bill for "finally" getting up to speed. Bill tries once more to stump Joe with another picture from the book. Joe doesn't get this one, and Bill, as he closes the book and they get up to leave, says he's surprised Joe didn't know this one, because it's "one of the most popular breeds around." Joe pauses long enough to reopen the book and finds the page Bill was one, and he reads the breed is "so rare, it is now considered to be extinct."
Captain Green was played by Art Gilmore. This Tacoma, Washington-born actor is worth noting. On the first Dragnet series in the 50s, he played Captain Harry Didion in 12 different episodes. On the 1967-70 run, he played a Lieutenant Moore one time, Captain Mert Howe 5 times, Captain Lambert twice, Captain Harry Nelson, Captain George Milemore, Captain Colwell, Captain Larry Walton, Captain Ken Green, and Captain Hugh Brown once each.
Furthermore, the role of Captain Hugh Brown was usually played by another actor named Art, last name Balinger. Balinger played Brown 11 times. He also played this episode's named captain Ken Green once and had five other characters on the series. It appears producer Webb used as his captain whichever actor was hanging around the commissary on the day of shooting.
The two Arts have something else in common: Both born on the West Coast in the 1910s and died in a different West Coast state in the 2010s, a bit short of their 100th birthdays. Gilmore had some other interesting roles, beginning with being a radio announcer-voice only-in the Hitchcock 1942 movie Saboteur, which starred Robert Cummings. His next role was in Yankee Doodle Dandy as none other than the voice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He reprised that role in another film in 1943. His voice was used for radio announcers many times, including The Winning Team, the baseball biography of Grover Cleveland Alexander, which starred Ronald Reagan.
Gilmore was narrator in 101 episodes of The Roy Rogers Show, and the regular announcer/narrator on several other short-lived TV series in the 1950s, but is better remembered as the narrator on 156 episodes of Highway Patrol. He also served as an announcer on 469 episodes of the Red Skelton Hour. When Adam-12 was added to Jack Webb's empire, Gilmore played a lieutenant in 14 episodes and a captain in one. He was even in 8 episodes of The Waltons-all as a radio announcer from 1976-78. That was his last role until 2001 when he played his final role in something called Moonbeams, when he played the voice of The Moon.
This had all the good Dragnet elements-interviews with regular people, an interrogation of a suspect, a mini-stakeout and arrest of a suspect, and more Gannon funniness than almost any other episode. That makes it a 9 in my book.
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