In ’74 or thereabouts I happened to run into David Janssen at LAX arrivals. The luggage carousel, I mean. Late in the evening. I didn’t gawk or try to strike up a conversation, God forbid, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain familiarity with the man. Who didn’t back then?

I walked out to curbside to wait for a friend, and noticed Janssen as he strolled out of the terminal and especially the extremely subtle way that he hailed a cab. He didn’t raise his arm or wave or ask a uniformed taxi commandant to do it for him. It was just the slightest hand gesture, and right away a cabbie flashed his lights to signal acknowledgment. I remember saying to myself, ‘Now that is a cool way to hail a cab!”

Janssen’s life and career peaked with the four-year, 120-episode run of The Fugitive (fall of 1963 through August ’67) in which he played the wrongly convicted Richard Kimble, the doctor who didn’t kill his wife and wound up lamming it for four years before finally nailing the the guilty party, a one-armed man with a grim, gorilla-like face (played by Bill Raisch).

Janssen was only 32 when The Fugitive began filming, and 36 when it wrapped during the summer of love.

It always seemed as if Janssen lived with serious anxiety and ambivalence about…well, everything. Who smokes four packs a day with any expectation that he’ll live a long and healthy life? Plus he drank like a fish. Janssen’s heart gave out at age 48…he didn’t even make it to 50!