Larry Storch, comic actor best known for ‘F Troop,’ dies at 99
NEW YORK » Larry Storch, who played a memorable television oddball on the 1960s sitcom “F Troop” and for years carried a secret in his personal life that was odd in an entirely different way, died Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 99.
His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed the death.
Storch had a long career as a nightclub comic and as a character actor on the stage and the big and small screens. But his other work was dwarfed by the impression he made during the two-season run of “F Troop” on ABC, from 1965 to 1967.
The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in Indian country just after the Civil War, and Storch played Cpl. Randolph Agarn, one of the bigger misfits in a unit full of them. Agarn and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke, played by Forrest Tucker, were constantly hatching moneymaking schemes, most of them involving the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis.
O’Rourke was the brains of the partnership; Agarn provided the idiocy, and Storch’s well-honed comic timing served him deliciously in the role. So did the mimicry skills he had honed in nightclubs, where his act included all sorts of impersonations: In various “F Troop” episodes he played not only Agarn but also assorted Agarn relatives, who somehow found their way to the fort from far-off locales.
“I had cousins who came from Moscow, Mexico, Montreal,” Storch recalled in a 2009 interview.
“F Troop” wasn’t on long. But, like many sitcoms in that era of limited television choices, it burned itself into the minds of those who watched it, perhaps in part because it trafficked in the kinds of stereotypes — especially those hard-drinking, firewater-brewing Indians — that would soon disappear from television.
Storch, in a 2007 interview with The Asbury Park Press, credited Tucker with securing him the role of Agarn.
“I was supposed to be the sergeant,” Storch said, “but when they saw Forrest Tucker dressed in a cavalry suit — he looked like a polar bear — they said, ‘That’s going to be it.’ And Forrest Tucker said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to need a corporal around here, and I think he and I would have good chemistry.’” The “he” was Storch.
When not clowning around on the stage or screen, Storch was party to an unusual secret at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Greve, were married in 1961, she had a biracial daughter, Cross, with a Black performer named Jimmy Cross. Mother and child left Cross soon after June’s birth in 1954, but since the girl was dark-complexioned enough that she could not pass as white, she and her mother began encountering racism. When June was 4, Norma asked friends, a middle-class Black couple in Atlanta, to raise her.
Later, when the Storches were married and living in Hollywood, June would come to visit, and they would explain to friends that she was an abused child of former neighbors and that they had adopted her but that she lived most of the year with Black friends.
“In those days, people were encrusted in prejudice,” Storch explained to People magazine in a 1996 interview. “We saw no reason to rock the boat.”
June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story in “Secret Daughter,” a documentary broadcast on PBS that won an Emmy Award.
The personal story of Storch and his wife has another wrinkle. In 1948, years before they were married, they had a daughter, whom they put up for adoption. After Cross’ documentary came out, the Storches and that daughter, Candace Herman, were reunited.
Lawrence Samuel Storch was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in New York. His father, Alfred, is described in several biographical listings as a real estate agent, though in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post Storch said he was a cabdriver. His mother, Sally, was a telephone operator who later had a jewelry store and ran a rooming house.
Cross, in a telephone interview, said that as a child Storch would pick up voices and accents from the rooming house guests (Orson Welles, he always said, was one) that served him well later as a comedian.
Storch left high school during the Depression when he found that he could make a few dollars doing impressions in the city’s clubs and acting as MC for vaudeville shows.
He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came along, he was a well-established comic in the city and had used his mimicry skills to gain a foothold in radio.