Dan Rowan

Daniel Hale Rowan was born on July 22, 1922, on a carnival train near Beggs, Oklahoma, where he was given the surname David. His parents, Oscar and Nellie David, performed a singing and dancing act with the carnival. Rowan was orphaned at eleven and spent four years at the McClelland Home in Pueblo, Colorado, before a foster family took him in at sixteen and enrolled him in Central High School. After graduating in 1940, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles and secured a position in the mailroom at Paramount Pictures, where he developed a relationship with studio head Buddy DeSylva. Within a year he had advanced to become Paramount's youngest staff writer.

During World War II, Rowan served as a fighter pilot in the 8th Fighter Squadron, 49th Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Forces, flying a Curtiss P-40N Warhawk bearing AAF Serial Number 42-104949, now registered under civilian designation N537BR. He shot down two Japanese aircraft before being downed and seriously wounded in a separate engagement over New Guinea. His military decorations include the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal, and the Purple Heart.

Following his discharge, Rowan returned to California and formed a comedy partnership with Dick Martin. Initially Martin served as straight man and Rowan as the comic, but the arrangement failed because Martin struggled to deliver lines that were not themselves funny. The two reversed roles and found consistent work in nightclubs. The established comedy team of Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall maintained a friendly relationship with Rowan and Martin, occasionally sending them as substitutes when Noonan or Marshall could not fulfill nightclub engagements and sometimes supplying them with written material. Rowan also appeared on Broadway in 1923 in the musical Adrienne.

In 1958, Rowan and Martin made their film debut in the western comedy Once Upon a Horse, written and directed by Hal Kanter. No further film offers followed, and the pair returned to nightclubs and television. Rowan was at one point a serious candidate to host The Hollywood Squares, but Peter Marshall, by then estranged from Rowan over a dispute stemming from Tommy Noonan's illness and death in 1968, took the position specifically to prevent Rowan from obtaining it. Marshall later learned that Rowan had never informed Martin he was being considered for the role.

In the summer of 1967, Rowan and Martin hosted a television comedy revue for NBC. The network subsequently picked up the program as a midseason replacement under the title Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which ran through 1973 and became a national phenomenon. On the show, Rowan played straight man to Dick Martin, and the series won the 1969 Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety or Musical Series. At the height of the show's popularity, the pair starred in the 1969 film The Maltese Bippy, which was a commercial failure. Rowan also made two appearances as an actor on The Love Boat: a two-part 1977 episode in which he played Alan Danver, husband of Barbara Danver portrayed by Juliet Mills, and the October 30, 1982 episode "Command Performance," in which he played Matt Heller, a father estranged for twenty years from his ex-wife Jenny Heller, played by Marion Ross, and his daughter Beth Heller, played by Eve Plumb.

Rowan married Phyllis J. Mathis, the 1945 Miss America first runner-up, in 1946. They had three children — Thomas Patrick, Mary Ann, and Christie Esther — before divorcing. In 1963 he married Australian model Adriana Van Ballegooyen; that marriage also ended in divorce after eight years. In 1974 he married model and television spokeswoman Joanna Young, and the two remained married until his death.

Rowan retired in the early 1980s and divided his time between a residence in Englewood, Florida, and a barge in the canals of France. He reunited briefly with Martin for appearances on the NBC 60th Anniversary Show in 1986. That same year, a collection of correspondence between Rowan and author John D. MacDonald was published under the title A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974. In his forties Rowan had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which required insulin dependency. He died of lymphoma on September 22, 1987, at his home in Englewood, Florida, and his body was cremated. He was portrayed by Jonathan Whittaker in the 1995 HBO film Sugartime.