Randolph Mantooth, who starred as the goofy but gallant firefighter-paramedic Johnny Gage on Emergency!, the 1970s NBC action show that changed life-saving services as we know it, has died. He was 80.
Mantooth died Thursday at a hospice facility in Ventura, California, his brother, Donald Mantooth, told The Hollywood Reporter. He had been “ill for a number of years and kept getting thinner and thinner,” he said.
Mantooth also had two stints (1987-90 and 1993-95) as Clay Alden/Alex Masters on the ABC soap opera Loving, and he appeared on other daytime serials including ABC’s General Hospital, CBS’ As the World Turns and ABC’s One Life to Live.
Mantooth was just getting started as a contract player at Universal when he was hired in 1971 to play Gage opposite Kevin Tighe as his partner, Roy DeSoto, on Emergency!, created by Dragnet legend Jack Webb and Robert A. Cinader.
When he was told he was going to play a paramedic, the first thing Mantooth said was, “What the hell is a paramedic? At that time, there were only [a handful] in all of California,” he told Amy Harrington in a 2013 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
He said he initially didn’t want to do it because it meant he would have to get a haircut.
Gage and the more buttoned-down DeSoto worked out the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Station 51, interacting often with Rampart General Hospital personnel Dr. Kelly Brackett (Robert Fuller), nurse Dixie McCall (Julie London) and Dr. Joe Early (Bobby Troup, London’s real-life husband).
Emergency!aired for six seasons, from January 1972 through May 1977, then tacked on seven telefilms over the next couple of years. There even was a Saturday morning animated series in 1973-74.
When the show premiered, there were 12 paramedic units in all of North America. In the next three years, 46 states enacted laws that allowed paramedics to practice emergency medicine. Within 10 years, more than half of all Americans were within 10 minutes of a paramedic rescue or ambulance unit.
Experts say that growth simply would not have occurred withoutEmergency!
“When you take life-saving services out of the hospital and into the field, the number of lives that are saved is incalculable,” Mantooth said. “The stars just lined up with this show perfectly for a purpose, for a greater purpose.
“I could be remembered for driving a car that has a name like the General Lee, not that there’s anything wrong with that show. Instead I’m remembered for something that changed emergency medicine, forever. How lucky can any one person be?”
Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe on ‘Emergency!’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Randy DeRoy Mantooth was born on Sept. 19, 1945, in Sacramento. He said he lived in 24 states before he turned 18 because his father, Buck, was a pipeline construction engineer whose job kept the family on the move.
“I was never in any town long enough to really cultivate long-lasting relationships with people, so I was always living in my own little fantasy world,” he said.
His mother, Sadie, was a waitress. After she and Buck divorced, she made good on her promise to give each of her four kids a car when they graduated high school.
Mantooth acted for the first time at San Marcos High in Santa Barbara, then followed his acting friends to Santa Barbara City College and then to New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he changed his first name to the more formal-sounding Randolph.
Famed Universal talent scout Eleanor Kilgallen spotted him in the play Philadelphia, Here I Come — he shared a best actor award with Brad Davis in that — and got him signed to a contract, bringing him to L.A. in 1970.
A scene he did that year with Hal Holbrook on an episode of NBC’s The Bold Ones: The Senator, where his character breaks down during courtroom testimony, was seen by Cinader. Said Mantooth, “From what I was told, he went, ‘That is my Johnny Gage.’”
Put to work on Emergency! alongside such seasoned performers as Fuller, London and Troupe, he and the similarly inexperienced Tighe “were in the same boat,” Mantooth said. “It was more like us against them.”
The pair took paramedic classes, where they learned how to insert an IV, and trained with the fire department. Cinader wanted the show to be funny but told his actors that “when the [station alarm sounds], funny is left at the door. You are now a professional,” Mantooth noted. “We never got away from that.”
He added: “We never went home with Johnny Gage, we never went home with Roy DeSoto, we didn’t hear about Johnny Gage’s drunk father beating his mother. Who cared about that? [The show] was about the job.”
Cinader insisted every rescue on the series had to have been done in real life, so writers combed firefighters’ logs for storylines. Meanwhile, NBC executives made sure that no one would die and no blood would be shown during the first couple of seasons.
Mantooth said that “if I fell off my roof cleaning the gutters, I’d want [Gage] to be there because he knows what he is doing.”
He and Tighe had the same agent, shared a motor home during the entire run of their show and became great friends. The series ended, Mantooth said, because his and Tighe’s original seven-year contracts had expired, Tighe didn’t want to continue and Mantooth didn’t want to go on without him.
When Mantooth raced home in 1978 to find his ranch in the Lobo Canyon area of Agoura Hills engulfed in flames, Tighe was already there, trying to get the animals safely off the property. Tighe later served as the best man at Mantooth’s 2002 wedding to actress Kristen Connors.
Mantooth followed Emergency! by joining the second season of the ABC comedy Operation Petticoat in 1978, followed by work the next year on the ABC comedy Detective School and on the HBO miniseries The Seekers, produced by Cinader.
After guest-starring on such shows as Battlestar Galactica, Charlie’s Angels, The Fall Guy, Diagnosis Murder and L.A. Law, Mantooth was in the middle of getting separated from his wife and wanted out of L.A., so he moved to New York to work on Loving and said he had a blast.
On As the World Turns, he stepped in to play Oakdale chief of detectives Hal Munson after actor Benjamin Hendrickson died by suicide in 2006.
Later, he appeared in such films as He Was a Quiet Man (2007) and Bold Native (2010) and on episodes of FX’s Sons of Anarchy in 2011. A year later, he and Tighe were named honorary fire chiefs by the L.A. County Fire Department.
In addition to his brother, he’s survived by his sister, Tonya.
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Mantooth got emotional talking about how in the ’70s he was saved by paramedics who figured out he had carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a malfunctioning house furnace and how other emergency personnel brought his sister back from the dead after she was injured in a car accident in the ’80s.
“Do I respect paramedics? Do I respect firefighters?” he asked. “There’s a debt I owe them that I probably can’t ever pay back. But I’m gonna try.”