John Amos was onscreen pioneer

LOS ANGELES — There is something unusual in the fact that more than a month passed before the death of actor John Amos, 84, was announced Tuesday. But a powerful personality takes a while to come to a full stop.

A Golden Gloves champion, a college football player and a minor league football player before transitioning into entertainment — first as a Greenwich Village stand-up, then writing for Leslie Uggams’ 1969 variety show, and finally graduating to the screen — Amos was built to play authority figures (or anti-authority figures). Roles across his long, busy career have included reverend, inspector, captain, sergeant, doctor, coach, sheriff, pastor, mayor, deacon and, notably, Adm. Percy Fitzwallace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 22 episodes of “The West Wing,” prestige television before the letter. (When Amos met then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Powell’s first words to him were “Percy Fitzwallace? What kind of name is that for a brother?”)

Even “Gordy the weatherman,” as many of us first knew Amos, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” fit the bill. “Gordy was articulate,” Amos recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “I liked the fact that he was a meteorologist [rather than a sportscaster] ‘cause it implies that the man could think, above X’s and O’s.” (In a running joke, he’d be mistaken for a sportscaster.)

And, of course, in the part for which he is arguably best known, he played a father — not the comic dimwit whose children are all smarter than he, but a caring, responsible and strict figure where it mattered. Amos was only 34 when he was cast as James Evans, Sr., in the 1974 “Maude” spinoff “ Good Times” — reflecting his innate maturity, he was 19 years younger than Esther Rolle, who played his wife. (He had played a version of the part in a few episodes of “Maude.”)

In keeping with the Norman Lear house style, loud hectic moments and fits of temper alternated with quiet, reflective, more emotional ones, like “The Honeymooners” but with comments about class and race. It demonstrated the actor’s range, but Amos began to sour on the show as he felt the focus shifting to the low comic antics of Jimmie Walker as slacker son J.J. — “Dyn-o-mite!” you might remember — and said so: “I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days,” he said in the same Academy interview. Eventually the writers “got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes” and, after the third season, Lear let him go. James died offscreen.

But “Roots” was around the corner; as the older version of LeVar Burton’s Kunta Kinte, it was a part for the history books, and opened the door to dramatic parts.

Because of the time in which he was born, it fell to Amos to be something of a pioneer. He was one of a few Black students to integrate his New Jersey elementary and middle school, where he was asked if he had a tail. He married his first wife, Noel J. Mickelson, the mother of his two children, who was white, in 1965, two years ahead of the Loving v. Virginia decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage. And he got started as an actor in a time when substantial parts for Black actors were harder to come by, and the idea of colorblind casting was a thing of the far the future.

TV is where he mattered most. Perhaps my favorite Amos role was as bush pilot Buzz Washington in the 2006 Alaska-set Anne Heche comedy “Men in Trees.”