Here's a still from an episode of Get Smart. The man playing Oliver Hardy is E.J. Shuster, the man playing Stan Laurel is Jim MacGeorge and the fellow who looks remarkably like W.C. Fields is Bill Oberlin. Playing Mr. Fields was a sideline for Mr. Oberlin who was mainly an art director and jack-of-many-trades for cartoon studios and puppet shows. He did the sets for Time for Beany, the TV puppet show produced by Bob Clampett. Later, he became a handy person around the Jay Ward cartoon studio. (Jim MacGeorge also worked on Time for Beany as a puppeteer and for Jay Ward as a writer.)
My friend Harry McCracken wrote to jog my memory that it has always been reported that Bill Oberlin built the statue of Bullwinkle 'n' Rocky we were just talking about here. Yeah, I remember hearing that…and it's in Keith Scott's superb definitive history of the Ward operation, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. If you want to know anything about that studio, that's the book to buy.
Which makes me wonder what I'm remembering. I'm quite sure Bill Scott told me Jay was waiting to restore the statue because he couldn't locate the guy who built it and that I didn't recognize the name he mentioned of that person. But I knew who Bill Oberlin was then. I'd met him. I might even have had his phone number and it's unlikely Jay or Bill didn't.
Also at the time, Mr. Oberlin was like 66 years old and not likely to be getting up on a scaffolding on Sunset Boulevard to sandblast and repaint a 14-foot statue. So I'm thinking they were looking for someone else…someone who'd assisted with the physical labor of putting the thing up and maybe had been involved with maintenance work on it or something. Bill Oberlin died in 1994 so we can't ask him. We may not be able to ask anybody.