posted 11-16-2004 09:26 PM         

Ed Kemmer, who played the steel-jawed Cmdr. Buzz Corry on the popular 1950s SF TV series Space Patrol, died Nov. 9 in New York after suffering a stroke on Nov. 5, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 84. Kemmer died at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, the newspaper reported.

Television was still a novelty when Space Patrol debuted on March 9, 1950, as a 15-minute show that aired live five days a week on Channel 7 in Los Angeles. By the end of the year, a weekly half-hour Space Patrol was being broadcast live on the ABC television network, where it ran until 1955, the newspaper reported. Kemmer was ideal for the heroic lead role of Corry, who policed the solar system as commander of the 30th-century battle cruiser Terra V.

But Kemmer was also a real-life hero, having been a World War II fighter pilot who spent 11 months in a German prisoner of war camp. After the war, he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse on the GI Bill, the newspaper reported. After Space Patrol, Kemmer played villains in episodes of Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and Maverick. In the early 1960s, he played a Cape Canaveral flight engineer on the live soap opera Clear Horizons on CBS and eventually moved to New York in 1964 and spent the next 19 years as a regular on the soap operas The Edge of Night, As the World Turns, All My Children, Guiding Light and others, the newspaper reported.