The ‘F Troop’ Cast Members Who Are No Longer With Us, Including The Last One To Go

“The end of the Civil War was near when quite accident’ly, a hero who sat in the rear fought the battle in reverse.” If you can still hum the rest of “The Ballad of F Troop,” you probably spent a night a week in the mid-1960s at Fort Courage, where the cavalry ran a souvenir business with the local tribe and the commanding officer could not walk through a doorway without tripping over it.

F Troop premiered on ABC on September 14, 1965, and lasted only 65 episodes, the first season in black-and-white and the second in color. Its ratings were still solid when it ended in April 1967, and it has lived on in reruns ever since. Sadly, the whole main cast is gone now, and the last of them lived to a remarkable age. Here is what happened to everyone at Fort Courage, ending with the last trooper standing.

Is Edward Everett Horton Still Alive?

By the time Edward Everett Horton put on the feathers of Roaring Chicken, the tribe’s ancient medicine man, he had already been a movie star for four decades. He was the fussy, flustered sidekick in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals of the 1930s, and an entire generation of children knew his voice as the narrator of “Fractured Fairy Tales” on Rocky and Bullwinkle. He played Roaring Chicken in six first-season episodes and liked the type so much that he turned up as Chief Screaming Chicken on Batman in 1966.

Horton died of cancer at his home in Encino, California, on September 29, 1970. He was 84. He was the first of the Fort Courage family to go, and the next loss would come from the chief himself.

Is Frank de Kova Still Alive?

Frank de Kova played Chief Wild Eagle, the shrewd Hekawi leader who was always one sales pitch ahead of Sergeant O’Rourke. Off camera he was about as far from the role as an actor could get. He had been an English teacher with a master’s degree from Columbia before he went into acting, and after F Troop he worked in films like The Mechanic with Charles Bronson and voiced a character in Ralph Bakshi’s animated Heavy Traffic.

De Kova died in his sleep at his home in the North Hills section of Los Angeles on October 15, 1981, at 71. His on-screen business partner would follow only five years later.

Is Forrest Tucker Still Alive?

Forrest Tucker was the big, bluff Sergeant Morgan O’Rourke, the real power at Fort Courage and the brains behind O’Rourke Enterprises. Larry Storch later admitted he had hoped to get that part himself. “I was supposed to be Sergeant O’Rourke,” Storch told TV critic Bill Brioux in 1998. “Then they wanted a guy who looked like a polar bear and who could growl and Forrest Tucker was the one.” Tucker, Storch said, then made room for him: “Tucker said, just because I’m the sergeant, there’s no reason why there can’t be a corporal hanging around the fort.”

Before Fort Courage, Tucker had played Professor Harold Hill in a national tour of The Music Man more than 2,000 times. Afterward he headed west again with Bob Denver in Dusty’s Trail and teamed up with Storch once more in The Ghost Busters in 1975. Tucker died of lung cancer at the Motion Picture and Television hospital in Woodland Hills on October 25, 1986, according to UPI. He was 67.

Are Bob Steele & Joe Brooks Still Alive?

Two of the funniest faces in the background were men most viewers never knew by name. Bob Steele played Trooper Duffy, the old soldier who never stopped reminding everyone that he had stood “shoulder to shoulder” with Davy Crockett at the Alamo. The joke worked because Steele really was a piece of Western history, having starred in dozens of B-westerns in the 1930s and 1940s. He died in Burbank on December 21, 1988, at 81.

Joe Brooks was Trooper Vanderbilt, the lookout who could barely see past the end of his own nose. After F Troop he kept working in small parts, including The Bad News Bears in 1976 and Gremlins in 1984. Brooks died in Los Angeles on December 5, 2007, nine days before what would have been his 84th birthday.

Is Don Diamond Still Alive?

Don Diamond played Crazy Cat, Wild Eagle’s long-suffering right-hand man, who was forever stuck explaining the chief’s schemes. Diamond had already spent years in Western costume, as Corporal Reyes on Disney’s Zorro and as El Toro on The Adventures of Kit Carson, and he later popped up in Herbie Goes Bananas.

Unfortunately, our beloved Crazy Cat is no longer with us. The Brooklyn-born actor died of heart failure in Los Angeles on June 19, 2011, at 90, as the New York Times reported. But if this loss was hard to take, the next one hit fans even harder, because she was the youngest person in the cast.

Is Melody Patterson Still Alive?

Melody Patterson was Wrangler Jane, the sharpshooting shopkeeper who was forever trying to drag Captain Parmenter to the altar. She was far younger than anyone watching realized. Patterson was 15 when she auditioned, and she let the producers believe she was older. “So when the producers asked me, ‘You’re eighteen, right?’ I didn’t argue with them,” she recalled in Tom Lisanti’s 2003 book Drive-in Dream Girls.

After the show she married James MacArthur, Danno on Hawaii Five-O, and guest-starred on that series three times. Years later she went back to school and earned a bachelor’s degree from Sierra Nevada College in 1999. Patterson died at a nursing home in Hollister, Missouri, in August 2015, at 66, the Associated Press reported, and Variety gave the cause as multiple organ failure.

Is Ken Berry Still Alive?

Ken Berry, born November 3, 1933, in Moline, Illinois, was Captain Wilton Parmenter, the clumsy hero who won his command by accident and spent the series tripping over sabers and his own flag. He loved every minute of it. “I have never been that happy in my life,” Berry once said, in a quote the Associated Press cited from The Hollywood Reporter, and he called the show “two years of recess.”

That happiness carried him into two more hits. He moved straight to Mayberry as Sam Jones on Mayberry R.F.D. from 1968 to 1971, and then spent seven years as Vinton Harper on Mama’s Family. Berry died at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank on December 1, 2018, at 85. When the news broke, his old corporal posted a short goodbye on Facebook. “Goodnight Captain,” Larry Storch wrote. “We miss you already.”

Is James Hampton Still Alive?

James Hampton was Hannibal Dobbs, the company bugler who could never quite hit the right note. The Oklahoma City native went on to a long and varied career. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Longest Yard in 1974, played Michael J. Fox’s father in Teen Wolf in 1985, and stepped behind the camera to direct his old friend Burt Reynolds in 16 episodes of Evening Shade, according to NBC News.

Hampton died of complications of Parkinson’s disease at his home in Fort Worth, Texas, on April 7, 2021, at 84. When NBC reported his death, it noted that only one of the seven actors who appeared in nearly every episode was still alive.

Is Larry Storch Still Alive?

That last trooper was Larry Storch, the rubber-faced Corporal Randolph Agarn, who could go from scheming to sobbing in a single line and who earned a 1967 Emmy nomination for doing it. Storch was a cavalryman who had never ridden much, and he joked about it for the rest of his life. “All I knew about horses was that they give milk and can bite from both ends,” he said in 1998, in a line the Associated Press repeated in his obituary.

He never stopped working. He voiced Mr. Whoopee on Tennessee Tuxedo, reunited with Tucker on The Ghost Busters, and kept turning up on Broadway, including a 2000 revival of Annie Get Your Gun in which he played Chief Sitting Bull opposite Reba McEntire. We looked back at all of it in our tribute to Storch’s 99-year life.

Storch died of natural causes at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on July 8, 2022, at 99, his manager Matt Beckoff told the AP. With him went the last of Fort Courage. Somewhere, you have to think, Corporal Agarn is still trying to talk the sergeant into one more get-rich-quick scheme, and Captain Parmenter is tripping over the doorway on his way to stop them.