Roc actor, Carl Gordon, dies at 78

Best known as the patriarch on _Roc_, Gordon was a late-blooming actor who found success on stage and in front of the camera...

From The New York Times:

Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78.

The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said.

To television viewers, Mr. Gordon was best known as the patriarch on “Roc,” a situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991. In a highly unusual move, Seasons 2 and 3 were televised live, an approach to sitcoms that had been attempted rarely if at all since the 1950s.

The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man:

“Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem,” Andrew declared in one episode. “His real name is Abdul Mustafa.”

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