Dick Curtis obit

Actor from Oregon TV history who played trooper in Blitz-Weinhard beer commercials dies at 95

 

He was not on the list.

Dick Curtis, an actor and comedian who famously portrayed an Oregon trooper protecting the border from deliveries of California beer, capturing television viewers’ imagination and helping to popularize the craft brewery movement, died Saturday of congestive heart failure.

He was 95.

Curtis rose to fame as an Oregon cultural icon in the 1980s, after a career in Hollywood television and film, when he starred in Blitz-Weinhard beer commercials as a state trooper who, in the Portland company’s most memorable ad, intercepts a truckload of California suds at the Oregon state line.

“Well now, where you fellas going with all that beer?” Curtis’ character asks the truckers. “You know this is the home of Blitz-Weinhard, and it’s brewed naturally without artificial ingredients? Is yours?”

The commercial ends with a shot of the truck driving out of the state.

“If you’re thinking about a better beer, think about Oregon’s beer,” a narrator says. “There’s no better beer than the beer from here.”

Curtis’ Blitz-Weinhard commercials propelled the company’s sales, including for Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve, later hailed as Oregon’s original craft beer.

Most of the beer Blitz-Weinhard brewed in the 1960s and ‘70s supplied the mass market, said beer historian and author Pete Dunlop. But Private Reserve was special, he said. It was made with high quality ingredients and Cascade hops and “tasted sort of like craft beer,” Dunlop said.

The grandsons of company founder Henry Weinhard ran the business at the time, and they launched Private Reserve as a strategy to retake the beer market from out-of-state brews flooding Oregon and the Northwest thanks to advances in shipping and refrigeration, Dunlop said.

“That beer was a huge success here,” Dunlop said.

So were the ads.

When craft breweries started to open in Portland in the mid-’80s, Oregonians already had a taste of what that might be like, Dunlop said. Craft breweries started to pop up in the blocks around West Burnside Street, the area where the Henry Weinhard brewery had been operating since the mid-1800s in what’s now the Pearl District. Blitz-Weinhard sold to Pabst in 1979 and later to Miller Brewing Co., which closed the Portland location in 1999.

After the commercials’ success, Curtis’ trooper character became a public spokesperson of sorts for causes and other businesses. Curtis made appearances at Fred Meyer events and at the Oregon State Fair, said Paul Jackson, who met and worked for Curtis in Oregon. He also campaigned against smoking in character for the American Cancer Society.

Curtis released an album called “Well now..” with an image of him as the trooper on the cover. For a short time, Curtis also had a daytime talk show on KOIN-TV, Jackson said. He moved to Portland around the height of his Oregon fame, Jackson said.

“I think it’s great that Oregon people embraced that character, because it’s funny and it’s fun,” said Sydney Curtis, the actor’s youngest daughter.

Dick Curtis was born as Richard Byrd Laub and spent his early days in Indianapolis, Indiana, his daughter said. He lived in an orphanage at one point, he said in an interview with a classic television blogger, when his mother was seriously ill and couldn’t take care of him and his siblings. The family moved to Hollywood when he was about 8, Curtis said, and he’d run errands for actors before eventually breaking into entertainment.

“He came from sort of a dark past, of a kid who grew up in the streets and in orphanages, who found his way out. And that was by going to the movies, singing on the streets, going into bars or whatever and just doing an act, doing a song and a dance,” his daughter said. “He always wanted people to feel better.”

Curtis was on the “Andy Griffith” and “Dick Van Dyke” shows, and according to IMBD voiced characters in a 1966 episode of “Batman” and in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Motormouse and Autocat.” He acted in the 1980 movie “Motel Hell” and in the 1971 comedic western “Support Your Local Gunfighter.” He had three daughters.

In a 1990 column for The Oregonian, writer David Sarasohn called Curtis “one of the best-known faces in Oregon” from the previous decade.

“Curtis and his grin were the perfect symbol for the Oregon attitude at the time, the satisfaction about ‘livability’ and the crotchetiness about newcomers,” Sarasohn wrote.

The commercials, Jackson said, perfectly summed up Oregonians’ thoughts about home not just beer: “They captured the anger, the provincialism of Oregonians at the time, which is, ‘Don’t come up and ruin our beautiful state.’”

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