Jack Garner was the second of three boys including actor James Garner and Charles Bumgarner.
16 Facts About Jack Garner
1.
2.
The boys were sent to live with relatives after their mother died, while Jack Garner's father remarried several times.
3.
Jack Garner was a star athlete at Norman High School, playing on the state championship basketball team in 1945.
4.
Jack Garner played as a minor league baseball pitcher for a team affiliated with the Pittsburgh Pirates for eleven years.
5.
Jack Garner then worked for several golf courses in Florida after leaving the minor leagues.
6.
Jack Garner was a better athlete than I was and a lot more outgoing.
7.
Jack Garner became a longtime member of the Professional Golfers' Association, played competitively, and later became a golf pro at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale, California.
8.
Jack Garner taught Dan Aykroyd, his brother's co-star in the 1996 film My Fellow Americans, to properly swing a golf club for a scene in that movie.
9.
Jack Garner entertained as the lead singer for the Coconut Grove nightclub, located in the now defunct Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles early in his career.
10.
Jack Garner's roles included guest appearances on Love, American Style; The Bionic Woman; The Doris Day Show; Daniel Boone; The Green Hornet; Mannix; Medical Center and Murder, She Wrote.
11.
Jack Garner appeared in The Rockford Files in more than twenty episodes of the show, usually in bit roles, though he assumed the recurring supporting role of the indecisive, fence-sitting Captain McEnroe in the show's final season.
12.
Jack Garner reprised his Rockford Files role of McEnroe in a series of television movies based on the series from 1996 to 1999.
13.
Jack Garner suffered a fall in September 2011, which resulted in a broken hip.
14.
Doctors determined that his heart was not strong enough to withstand surgery to repair the hip so Jack Garner was transferred to a facility for long-term care.
15.
Jack Garner died at a hospice in Rancho Mirage, California, near his home in Palm Desert, on September 13,2011, six days shy of his 85th birthday.
16.
Jack Garner was survived by his former wife, Betty Bumgarner; his daughter, Liz Bumgarner, and son-in-law, Don Dykstra ; and younger brother, James Garner.