Dabbs Greer

Robert William "Dabbs" Greer (April 2, 1917 – April 28, 2007) was an American character actor in film and television for over 60 years. With nearly 100 film roles and appearances in nearly 600 television episodes of various series, Greer may be best remembered as series regular Mr. Jonas in Gunsmoke, as Coach Ossie Weiss in the sitcom Hank, and as series regular Reverend Robert Alden in Little House on the Prairie. Greer may be better known to later audiences as the 108-year-old version of the character played by Tom Hanks in 1999's The Green Mile. Early life Greer was born in Fairview, Missouri, the son of Bernice Irene (née Dabbs), a speech teacher, and Randall Alexander Greer, a druggist. Not long after, the family moved to the larger Anderson, Missouri, southwest, when Greer was an infant. At the age of eight, he began acting in children's theater productions. He attended Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, where he was a member of Theta Kappa Nu. Career After moving to Pasadena, California, in 1943, he became an administrator and acting instructor at the Pasadena Playhouse. His film debut was as an extra in the 1938 film Jesse James, which was filmed mainly around Pineville, Missouri. He told the Neosho Daily News in 2002, "They were paying $5 a day – a day! – to local people for being extras. That was really good money in those days, more money than we had seen in a long time." (The equivalent of $105 in 2022.)