R.I.P. Randolph Mantooth

The star of 'Emergency'—and my lunchbox—passes

Randolph Mantooth wasn’t exactly a household name, but for people who grew up in the 1970s, he is a familiar face.

Mantooth, who died on Thursday, starred as John Gage, a firefighter and paramedic, on Emergency!, which aired weekly on NBC from 1972 to 1977 and continued as made-for-TV movies until 1979. He later starred on soap operas and became an advocate for real-life heroes.

He’s also the person on the left of my grade school Emergency! lunch box (above), which escaped the dumpster fate of all my other lunch boxes because Mom stored her cookie cutters in it for about three decades. Here’s the other side of the box, with Mantooth’s character on the right:

The episode that made the biggest impression on me was one where Gage and his teammate, Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe) help a victim in a polar bear costume who is suffering from heatstroke. See my barely—ahem!—serviceable screenshot.

This is moments before Gage removes the mask and utters the immortal line, “Uh, Roy, this ain’t no man.” The victim is indeed a woman in a two-piece bathing suit. Because network TV.

According to the Hollywood Reporter:

When the show premiered, there were 12 paramedic units in all of North America. In the next three years, 46 states enacted laws that allowed paramedics to practice emergency medicine. Within 10 years, more than half of all Americans were within 10 minutes of a paramedic rescue or ambulance unit.

Experts say that growth simply would not have occurred without Emergency!

That’s a pretty cool legacy. R.I.P. Randolph Mantooth.