I was just thinking of Richard Dawson the other day. The British actor, who came to fame in the U.S. through a role on “Hogan’s Heroes,” but went on to a whole new level of stardom for hosting “Family Feud,” died Saturday in Los Angeles at the age of 79.
Because of the recent “Hatfields & McCoys” miniseries, I was moved to look up the episode where descendents of the real life clans met against one another in “Family Feud” – a perfect way to settle differences that doesn’t involve shooting rifles at one another.
Dawson was a cheeky host – the rare Brit on a U.S. game show for one thing, but also one to quick with a comeback or willing to linger on a double entendre answer with an arched eyebrow.
Most of all, he did something no other U.S. game show host did: He kissed every female contestant. It’s something they all welcomed and all seemed to like. In the nine year run of the show, he kissed somewhere around 20,000 women.
But when he was kissing the descendents of the Hatfields and McCoys in that 1979 episode, I thought that if Richard Dawson was around in Appalachia at the end of the 19th century, the whole feud thing could have been stopped.