Every year around this time, websites start posting lists of notable folks who've died during the year…and every year, I am rattled to spot a name of someone I knew but didn't know had left us. In this case, it's my old office-mate and pal, Hank Saroyan.
I first met Hank when he was a programming exec at ABC, mostly in Saturday morning. He was smart and sharp and funny…and those are not things I say about everyone at a network who, among his many other functions, has to give me notes and comments on my scripts. An understanding of story was somewhere in his lineage as he was the nephew of the author William Saroyan.
When he left the network, he turned up as a story editor for Hanna-Barbera and that's where we shared an office. He was working full-time, night and day, on the Laverne & Shirley cartoon show and I was coming on one day a week to work on Richie Rich. He had a much harder job as his show had to appease the network folks plus Garry Marshall plus the then-feuding Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams who, in the program's first season, were doing the voices of their characters.
I remember him sitting there, counting the lines of dialogue in the recording scripts to make sure Laverne and Shirley each had the exact same number. It didn't matter if a line was one word or fifty. It didn't even matter if some lines were cut out right after the recording session. It only mattered that when Ms. Marshall and Ms. Williams came in to record their parts — separately, of course — they each had the exact same number of speeches to read. The whole show was a struggle because of things like that.
I worked with Hank on a Hanna-Barbera series called The Trollkins for which he was story editor and also a voice actor. He then switched over to Marvel Productions where he worked on the scripts for Dungeons & Dragons after I left the series and he also cast it and directed the voices…quite well, I thought. He was especially valuable to that studio serving the same functions on Muppet Babies, and he worked on many other shows for them.
Real nice guy. Real smart guy. He died September 23 from cancer at the age of 75 and I totally missed obits like this one that ran at the time. Sigh.