Well, here’s a wonderful surprise: familiar character actor Bob Hastings (1925-2014) had an old school show biz background as a kiddie performer.
First: you recognize him, right? The first place I can be sure I saw him was in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). He has a small but memorable and highly visible part as the master of ceremonies of the New Year’s Party — he’s the guy who leads the count-down to midnight.
But he also played Lt. Carpenter on McHale’s Navy (1962-1966), which I watched in re-runs as a kid.
And he was also Kelsey the bartender, a recurring role, on All in the Family (1971-1976). These were pretty much his peak visibility years. He was also in several films during these years, like Disney’s The Boatniks (1970) and the Don Knotts movies The Love God (1969) and How to Frame a Figg (1971).
So I totally know who that guy is! But then he turns up in a 1938 Vitaphone musical short called Toyland Casino as 13 year old Bobby Hastings in rustic highland clothes and sings “In the Gloaming”!
Hastings had started out on NBC children’s radio program Coast to Coast on a Bus with such fellow stars as Ann Blyth, Walter Tetley, and Jackie Kelk. After bomber service in World War II, he returned to radio, and perhaps his greatest stardom in the part of Archie in the radio version of Archie comics, which ran from 1945 to 1953.
One of his first recurring tv roles was on Sgt. Bilko, establishing a recurring theme in his career: his characters were frequently in uniform. After the 1980s, most of his acting gigs were voice-overs for animated cartoon series. For example he voiced Batman’s Commissioner Gordon in the 1990s:
Bob Hastings passed away just a couple of years ago! Today is his birthday.
To find out more about vaudeville history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. For more on early film please see my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc
(Travalanche) 
Cool of you to pick up on Hastings playing Commish Gordon on Batman: The Animated Series! Amusingly, Hastings resembled his character–square-headed, solidly built (like another Gordon actor: Pat Hingle). I can easily see him playing the same character in a live-action production.
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He was also the voice of young Clark Kent and Superboy in the Filmation series the Adventures of Superboy in the 1960s
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Very Interesting about Bob Hastings didn’t realise he had been in Show Biz from when he was young ! Enjoyed him in McHale’s Navy too and of course The Poseidon Adventure !
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