Peter Lind Hayes

Peter Lind Hayes (June 25, 1915 – April 21, 1998) was an American vaudeville entertainer, songwriter, and film and television actor.

Life and career

Hayes was born Joseph Conrad Lind in San Francisco, California, spent his early childhood in Southern Illinois, and then attended school in New Rochelle, New York.

He appeared in films throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and had a significant television career in the 1950s. He often appeared with his wife Mary Healy, to whom he was married from 1940 until his death in 1998. The couple had two children: Peter and Cathy. In 1946, Hayes opened at the Copacabana in New York. This led to an engagement with the Dinah Shore radio show.

Hayes and Healy were the original singers of the Chevrolet jingle "See The U.S.A. In Your Chevrolet" in 1950. (Dinah Shore later sang the song for Chevrolet starting in 1952.) The couple starred in Zis Boom Bah (1941) and had major supporting roles in the cult fantasy musical film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953).

Peter Lind Hayes may be best remembered for several short-lived television series in which they co-hosted or co-starred, such as The Peter Lind Hayes Show (1950–51), Star of the Family (1950-1952), and Peter Loves Mary (1960–61). He also appeared on the pilot episode of The Match Game on December 5, 1962. He had a considerable reputation as a singer of comic songs, several of which made their way onto record, e.g. "Life Gets Teejus, Don't It".

In 1961, Hayes and Healy co-authored their biography, titled Twenty-Five Minutes from Broadway, published by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. The title was inspired by the name of the George M. Cohan musical, Forty-five Minutes from Broadway, about the community of New Rochelle, New York where the two lived. They owned Columbia Island along the Long Island Sound shore where they rebroadcast a breakfast conversation show. In 2005, the then-current owner of the island sought to demolish the old transmitter building and replace it with a private residence.

In 1964, he appeared in an episode of The Outer Limits, playing the lead role, Dr. Robert Stone, an absent-minded optic engineer and researcher.

Death

Peter Lind Hayes died in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1998.