Jack Webb

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John Randolph "Jack" Webb (April 2, 1920 – December 23, 1982) was an American actor, television producer, director and writer. Born in Santa Monica, California, Webb grew up poor in the Bunker Hill slum section of Los Angeles. He was a graduate of Belmont High School in Los Angeles. After serving as a crewmember of a B-26 Marauder in World War II, he starred in a radio show about a waterfront character who operated as an unlicensed private detective, Pat Novak for Hire which imitates, almost to parody, the hard-boiled style of such writers as Raymond Chandler. viz. "She drifted into the room like 98 pounds of warm smoke. Probably his most famous motion picture role was as the combat-hardened drill instructor on Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in the film The D.I. Webb had a featured role as a crime lab technician in the 1948 film He Walked by Night. It was this film that gave Webb the idea for Dragnet. Webb met singer and actress Julie London and they married in 1947 and raised two children. They later divorced. Beginning in 1968, in concert with Robert A. Cinader, Webb produced NBC's popular Adam-12. He was working on scripts for another revival of Dragnet in 1983 with Kent McCord as his partner, when he died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 62. He was interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. Webb was given a funeral with full police honors.