Olan Soule

Olan Soule was an American actor who started in theater, joining Jack Brooks' tent show in Iowa, then spent seven years on Chicago stages before moving into radio in 1933. Born in La Harpe, Illinois, he became a radio performer, spending eleven years on Bachelor's Children and nine years playing leads on The First Nighter Program. He played L. William Kelly on Captain Midnight and was the only actor in both its radio and television versions. In Hollywood he built a career as a character actor, appearing in more than sixty films and around two hundred television series and movies, often as lab technicians, newscasters or railroad clerks. His film work included Mr. Krull in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and he had a semi-regular role as criminalist Ray Pinker in the original Dragnet television and radio versions. He voiced Batman in the 1968 animated The Batman/Superman Hour and later Super Friends.