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"The Sergeant's
Hard Climb From The Ranks"
How Ivan Dixon made it from Harlem to Hogan's Heroes TV Guide September 16, 1967 - September 22, 1967 by Author Unknown Pages 35-36
In the late Thirties and early Forties a little roly-poly black youngster who answered to the name of "Fats" Dixon used to pay another kid a nickel a day to occupy his seat in school while Fats was hanging out on the Apollo Theater in the heart of Harlem. It was a vaudeville house in those days and Fats idolized the Negro musicians and the glittery, gaudy lives they led. Between the stage shows were Negro cowboy movies - quickies, with scenery falling down all around the actors - cheapies, shown only in "colored" theaters, mostly in the South. Fats despised those shoddy black Westerns; no dignity, no class. "My idea of a hero was Joe Louis because he beat up white folks and because did it with dignity, a kind of crude grace, the way he'd always step back a little before bombing into them." Now in the late Sixties "Fats" isn't roly-poly any more; a 36 he's 6-feet-1 and 195 pounds of hard sinew. He's know by his given name of Ivan Dixon and he's starting his third season in the continuing role of Sergeant Kinchloe in Hogan's Heroes; he's the recipient of an Emmy nomination for his acting in the CBS Playhouse drama "The Final War of Oily Winter"; he's in the ring with the white folks and he's all class. There was a time of slim chance the boy would ever escape the grinding ghetto. "We were just out there in the streets. I'd have ended up a numbers runner today or be hatching schemes for making big loot for quick pleasures. But I got lucky. I got away at the age of 13." His years on "the block" - 130th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue- were not all that typical. For one thing, there was his extraordinary father, also named Ivan. "I never heard of anybody who called him anything but "Mister Dixon." He was a man of considerable convictions. He was a hero in World War I. When Negro troops were left as a holding action for white troops to withdraw, his whole battalion was wiped out except for him and the 23 men he led. He was awarded the Croix de guerre. "He regularly read the Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish. He used to take me on the double-decker bus to visit Greenwich Village and the Battery Aquarium. He gave me dates, kumquats, and halvah- things the kids on the block never heard of. I think I never got mixed up with drugs because I didn't have to rebel. My father explained everything to me." It was a broken family, though, with the parents separated. As a kid, Ivan worked for his father, making deliveries for his grocery store, meanwhile living at his mother's flat, where he paid his own share of the rent. "I was pretty much independent. I always worked - shining shoes, cleaning up a butcher shop, carrying groceries. My father never had to discipline me. He treated me as an equal. We were working buddies." When it looked as though the slum environment was about to overwhelm the boy, his parents sent him away to a boarding school in a community in North Carolina where his grandfather, the first Ivan Dixon, had been a slave. "I have to admit the South had a positive effect on me. There, I was responsible for my actions, good or bad. I didn't have to behave grotesquely to get recognition. The code of the Harlem streets had been extremely competitive, but in North Carolina I found you didn't have to kill the other guys. There was a sense of somewhere to go together. In Harlem you're never invited to anybody's home to eat, only to drink. It was the opposite in North Carolina. One thing, though - down there. I never knew any white people. I'm not saying I like segregation. But in the South it was easier for me to know what it was I had t fight. The lines were drawn." Ivan Dixon has been fighting - and mostly winning - ever since. He got his B.A. degree in political science and history at North Carolina College. He won a Rockefeller Foundation grant for graduate work in drama at Western Reserve University. He studied at the American Theater Wing in New York. He got his start in television acting in six Studio One productions. But his fight for dignity as a Negro seems to him about the same as in the days of the Apollo Theater - mostly uphill. "Two years ago we had no Negro in a continuing dramatic series on TV and we've still only got a few. Now they're starting to sprinkle a few Negroes in crowd scenes of commercials. My kids try to spot them playing the game of "There's one!" But by the time you look up, they've vanished from the screen." Dixon and his wife, Berlie, whom he met at North Carolina College, live in suburban Atladena Cal., with their four children three of whom bear proud African names. The oldest is Ivan IV, 10; then N'Gai, 8, named for the Kikuyu deity; Kimara, 5, meaning "Child of God" in the language of the Yoruba; and Nomathande, 2, Xhosa for "Mother of Hope." "At home I regularly give my kids lessons in Negro history. This year my oldest boy had to give a report in school on the captains of the ships with Columbus. Ivan let his class in on the fact that a black man piloted the "Pinta." Maybe you don't know that on the Chisholm Trail fully one-third of the 35,000 men were Negroes and Mexicans? Or that many, many of the early cowboys were black? "Berlie said I was overdoing it when I had to straighten out one of my boys; he was the only one in his class to draw a black George Washington." Click on the image to see a larger version.
Last Modified : Fri 16 May 2008 8:13 AM
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