“Baby, if you’ve ever wondered, wondered whatever became of me…” If those words still bring back the soft rock of the theme and the sight of Andy Travis cruising into town, you probably spent a few Monday nights tuned to WKRP in Cincinnati. The CBS sitcom premiered in September 1978 and followed a struggling radio station whose new program director flipped it from elevator music to rock and roll, dragging a staff of lovable misfits along with him.
The show ran four seasons, until 1982, and it never got the respect from the network that it earned from viewers. Reruns made it a cult favorite, and decades later fans still quote Les Nessman’s news reports and Mr. Carlson’s turkey drop. Half of that gang has now signed off for good, while the other half is still out there, and one of them was heard on a very real Cincinnati radio station just this year.
Is Gordon Jump Still Alive?
Gordon Jump played Arthur Carlson, the kindly and hopelessly befuddled station manager whose mother owned WKRP and whose son kept trying to run it into the ground. Jump made “Big Guy” one of television’s great lovable bosses, and he delivered the line that defined the show in the first season episode “Turkeys Away.” After live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter as a Thanksgiving promotion, a stunned Carlson told his staff, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Jump stayed with the character into the 1991 revival The New WKRP in Cincinnati, and he found a second famous role in commercials. In 1989, he took over as “Ol’ Lonely,” the Maytag repairman who sat by a phone that never rang, and he kept the job until he retired from it in the summer of 2003.
He did not have long to enjoy that retirement. Gordon Jump died on September 22, 2003, at his home in the Los Angeles area. He was 71, and the cause was pulmonary fibrosis, according to Playbill and the Associated Press. The station’s slickest salesman would be the next to go, many years later.
Is Frank Bonner Still Alive?
Frank Bonner was Herb Tarlek, the ad salesman in the loud plaid jackets and white belts who never stopped hitting on Jennifer and never closed a deal the honest way. He appeared in 88 of the show’s 90 episodes, and the character was so specific that people still describe a certain kind of salesman as “a real Herb.”
Behind the scenes, Bonner was something else entirely. He directed six episodes of WKRP and went on to direct more than a dozen other series in the 1980s and 1990s, including Who’s the Boss? and Saved by the Bell: The New Class. His daughter, Desiree Boers-Kort, said “he thoroughly enjoyed helping people get to where he needed them to be for the scenes,” according to CBS News.
Bonner had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia about three years before his death. He died of complications from the disease on June 16, 2021, at his home in Laguna Niguel, California, at 79, as we reported at the time. “He was very humble and down-to-earth, and just a nice, kind human,” his daughter said, and Loni Anderson called him “the nicest man I have ever known.” She would lose another co-star only seven months later.
Is Howard Hesseman Still Alive?
Dr. Johnny Fever was the burned-out morning man who came roaring back to life the moment Andy let him play rock records, and Howard Hesseman played him as he had lived it. In a way, he had. Hesseman came out of The Committee, the San Francisco improv troupe, and he had worked Saturdays as a disc jockey on the rock station KMPX before television found him.
Johnny earned him Emmy nominations in 1980 and 1981, and the character was a rare open hippie on network TV. “I think maybe Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine, and maybe a little hard liquor,” he told The New York Times in 1979. Later in the decade he became a different kind of hero to a younger audience as Charlie Moore, the actor turned history teacher on Head of the Class.
Hesseman died on January 29, 2022, in Los Angeles from complications of colon surgery he had undergone the previous summer, his manager Robbie Kass told the Associated Press. He was 81, and he was survived by his wife, actress Caroline Ducrocq. “Impossible to overstate Howard Hesseman’s influence on his and subsequent generations of improvisors,” Michael McKean wrote after the news broke, according to OPB. The receptionist who outsmarted everyone at the station lived three more years.
Is Loni Anderson Still Alive?
Jennifer Marlowe was the highest paid employee at WKRP, and she earned every cent. Loni Anderson played her as the smartest person in the building, a receptionist who refused to type or fetch coffee and who could talk Mr. Carlson out of any jam while fending off Herb with a smile. The role brought her two Emmy nominations, in 1980 and 1981, along with three Golden Globe nominations.
Off screen she became one of the most photographed women of the 1980s. She met Burt Reynolds while making Stroker Ace in 1983, and their marriage and 1994 divorce kept the tabloids busy for years. She found a quieter happiness with musician Bob Flick, whom she married in 2008.
Loni Anderson died on August 3, 2025, at a Los Angeles hospital after a prolonged illness, just two days before her 80th birthday. She was 79. Her death certificate later listed metastatic uterine leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer, as the cause, according to Fox 26 Houston and Deadline, both citing TMZ. “We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear wife, mother and grandmother,” her family said. You can read more about the illness that took her. With her gone, four members of the main cast remain, and the oldest of them is the man who never went anywhere without a bandage.
Is Richard Sanders Still Alive?
Les Nessman covered news, sports, weather, traffic and the all-important farm report from an office made of masking tape lines on the floor, and he made sure everyone knocked on the imaginary door. Richard Sanders played him for the whole original run and wrote several episodes too. “He was just a stickler for the rules,” Sanders told The Seattle Times in 2007. “He was like the straight arrow.”
That famous bandage, a different one in almost every episode, was a running gag Sanders embraced from the start. “So I said ‘That’s perfect! Every week I’ll come out with a different injury,'” he recalled. He also credited the real rock songs on the soundtrack as “the thing that made it different than any other show about radio that had ever been on.”
Sanders returned as Les on The New WKRP in Cincinnati from 1991 to 1993, and his later credits included Men of Honor and the voice of Bernard in the cult video game Day of the Tentacle. His last screen credit came in 2006, and he has been retired from acting since, living quietly in Woodinville, Washington, according to Wikipedia. Born on August 23, 1940, Richard Sanders is still alive today at 86, and death record databases and a recent Looper roundup both list him among the living cast. The next survivor walked away from Hollywood by choice.
Is Jan Smithers Still Alive?
Bailey Quarters was the shy, brainy one at WKRP, the woman who fought her way out of the filing room and onto the news desk. Jan Smithers had already been famous once before the show. In 1966 she landed on the cover of Newsweek for its issue on American teenagers, a photo shoot that launched her career.
After WKRP, Smithers did guest roles on The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. She married James Brolin in 1986, and their daughter Molly arrived that same year. Her last film, Mr. Nice Guy, came out in 1987. “She changed my life. I really longed to be her mom,” Smithers told Newsweek in 2016, adding, “I had Molly and wanted to be in the country and get away from that world.” She and Brolin divorced in 1995.
What followed was a life few fans would have guessed. Smithers spent years traveling to India, where “I learned to meditate there, and I changed a great deal. I got out of myself,” she said, and she became an outspoken voice for solar energy and against nuclear power. She lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a few years before returning to California, and she joined her castmates for a 2014 reunion at the Paley Center for Media. Born July 3, 1949, Jan Smithers is alive at 77, and she still guards her privacy. “People don’t even know I’m an actor!” she said. Our story on the life she built after television has more. The man who played Venus Flytrap, meanwhile, never stopped working.
Is Tim Reid Still Alive?
Venus Flytrap was the smooth late-night DJ with a secret past, and Tim Reid helped build him. Reid told creator Hugh Wilson that the first version of the character was one-dimensional, and the honesty won him the part and a creative partner. He later wrote the season two episode “Family Affair.” Looking back, he remembers the show as a rebel. “All the network executives hated the show, because we were always doing things that made them uncomfortable,” Reid told CBS 6 in Richmond in July 2026. “We were #1 when we got canceled.”
Reid’s career after Cincinnati is the busiest of the bunch. He spent years as Downtown Brown on Simon & Simon, starred in the critically adored Frank’s Place, and played Ray Campbell for six seasons of Sister, Sister. With his wife of more than 43 years, actress Daphne Maxwell Reid, he built New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1997.
Born December 19, 1944, Tim Reid is alive at 81 and spends much of his time mentoring film students at Norfolk State University. He still dreams of directing more. “What I truly desire to be is an excellent director,” he said this summer, and he lives by advice Clint Eastwood once gave a fan: “Never let the old man in.” That leaves the man who walked into WKRP first.
Is Gary Sandy Still Alive?
Andy Travis was the cowboy boot-wearing program director who rolled into Cincinnati, ripped up the playlist and tried to keep a station full of eccentrics on the air. Gary Sandy, a Dayton, Ohio, native, saw Andy as the calm center of the storm. “Don’t pull focus. Just do the job,” he told Radio Ink of his approach. After the show, he guest-starred on Murder, She Wrote, and L.A. Law, but the stage became his real home. He has appeared in more than 100 theatrical productions, including a turn as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway. He has also spoken about his romance with Loni Anderson.
Then, in 2026, the fiction caught up with him. On the morning of May 4, a Cincinnati station called The Oasis flipped its format and became a real WKRP, nearly 50 years after the sitcom first aired, and the first voice listeners heard was Gary Sandy’s. “I’m tickled that the Oasis is WKRP now. They put on a fantastic product,” he told Radio Ink, calling it “a real feather in my cap here that there is such a thing.”
Born December 25, 1945, Gary Sandy is alive at 80, and the response from fans told him what the show still means. “Everybody, everybody is really tickled,” he said, adding that his Facebook account “just blew up.” After all these years, WKRP is on the air in Cincinnati, and Andy Travis is still behind the microphone.
