Actors - Al Hodge

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	Actors - Al Hodge

Albert Hodge (April 18, 1912 to March 19, 1979) was an American actor best known for playing the DuMont Network's famous space adventurer Captain Video from December 15, 1950 to April 1, 1955. He also portrayed the Green Hornet on radio from that series' beginnings in January 1936 until January 1943.

Al Hodge grew up in Ravenna, Ohio, and made a name for himself in both athletics and acting at Ravenna High School. He graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1934, having focussed mainly on drama. After touring with a troup of actors, he accepted a job at WXYZ in Detroit, in 1935. In addition to playing Britt Reid, the Green Hornet, he also wrote and delivered daily editorials, narrated football games, wrote ad copy, worked as an early disc jockey, and produced radio dramas and documentaries. During the last days of World War II he served in the Navy, winding up bedridden for a year with pleurisy.

In the late 1940s he found work in New York City in a variety of radio and early TV roles, before taking the role of Captain Video from Richard Coogan. After the collapse of the DuMont Network in the spring of 1955, Hodge continued in the role of Captain Video, as a children's show host, from 1955 to 1959, seen only in the New York City area. His last such appearance was as himself in a short-lived 1961 local series, Al Hodge's Space Explorers.

Hodge moved to California where he guest-starred on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mannix, Tightrope, Hawaiian Eye and other similar drama/detective series. But he was soon back in New York City, working during the late 1960s and early 1970s at increasingly low-paying jobs--- eventually, as a security guard.

He largely dropped from sight after 1975. For the next four years he lived in a small room in a cheap hotel, a room crammed with collectable items from his career as Captain Video. He died there, alone, in 1979. As late as 1978, Hodge told reporters that he was almost always recognized on the street, and greeted by name, as "Captain Video."

Almost nothing is known of Hodge's private life. He was married three times and had only one child, Diane, a product of his first marriage. He and his third wife, Virginia, a former showgirl, are buried side-by-side at Kenisco Cemetery in Westchester County, NY.

External links and references:

Glut, Don and Jim Harmon. The Great Television Heroes. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ISBN 0385051670. Chapters 1 and 5.

Glenn Garvin, Reason, March 2005.

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