James McEachin, Star of ‘Tenafly' and Perry Mason Telefilms, Dies at 94

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James McEachin, who wrote and produced songs for Otis Redding before turning to acting to portray cops on his own NBC Mystery Movie series and in 18 of the popular Perry Mason telefilms, has died. He was 94.
McEachin died Jan. 11 and was interred last month at Los Angeles National Cemetery.
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The familiar character actor also appeared in four films opposite Clint Eastwood: Coogan's Bluff (1968), Play Misty for Me (1971) — as the deejay Sweet Al Monte — Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Sudden Impact (1983).
All in the Family aficionados know him for his turns as the IRS tax examiner who won't be bribed on the 1972 episode 'Archie's Fraud' and as Solomon Jackson, a Black Jew whom Carroll O'Connor's character invites into his lodge to check off some diversity boxes, on the 1977 installment 'Archie the Liberal.'
A onetime contract player at Universal, McEachin starred as family man Harry Tenafly, a Los Angeles cop turned private detective, in Tenafly, created by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo and Mannix fame.
One of the rotating, once-a-month NBC Mystery Movie shows that in 1973-74 included Dan Dailey's Faraday & Company and The Snoop Sisters, starring Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick, Tenafly was the rare TV series back then to star a Black actor, but it lasted just five episodes.
Later, McEachin played Lt. Ed Brock on the NBC Perry Mason telefilms that starred Raymond Burr (and, after his 1993 death, Hal Holbrook) from 1986-95. And he portrayed another police lieutenant, Frank Daniels, on the first season (1986-87) of NBC's Matlock, starring Andy Griffith.
James McEachin was born on May 20, 1930, in Rennert, North Carolina, and raised in Hackensack, New Jersey. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army in August 1947.
'When I saw those signs saying 'Uncle Sam Wants You,' I swear I thought that bony index finger of his was pointing right at me,' McEachin told the Los Angeles Daily News in November 2021.
McEachin spent more than two years in Japan as part of his first three-year term, then re-enlisted for another three years. As a member of the 2nd Infantry Division, he was wounded in an ambush and left for dead before being rescued. (He was awarded both the Purple Heart and Silver Star in 2005.)
After the service, McEachin worked as a firefighter and a cop in Hackensack, then left for Southern California. Known as Jimmy Mack, he became a songwriter, composer, record producer, talent manager and label owner who worked with the doo-wop group The Furys ('Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart') and Redding, whom he 'brought into the business,' he said in a 2014 interview.
He didn't think he was the 'Jimmy Mack' in the hit 1967 song from Martha and the Vandellas. 'I couldn't have been,' he said, 'even though there are people who say to this day, 'He's just trying to hide from it.' What is there to hide from?' (Songwriter Ronnie Mack was said to have been the inspiration for the tune.)
McEachin was walking along Melrose Avenue one day when someone asked him if he wanted to be in a movie. He asked his wife if she thought he should do it. 'She said, 'Well, you might as well. You've bombed out on everything else you've ever done,'' he recalled with a laugh.
That movie, shot in Bakersfield, California (not in the Deep South, as the poster said), was I Crossed the Color Line (1966), also known as The Black Klansman, produced and directed by Ted V. Mikels.
'I didn't know you had to memorize dialogue,' he said. 'I didn't know that you didn't have to just pose and do things naturally. It took me forever to learn that. Even though I didn't know anything about acting, I knew what bad acting was. I think I had a patent on bad acting.'
However, before the decade was done, McEachin had signed with Universal and appeared in films including Uptight (1968), If He Hollers, Let Him Go! (1968), True Grit (1969) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) and on such TV shows as Dragnet, It Takes a Thief, Adam-12, The Name of the Game, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Hawaii Five-O and Burr's Ironside.
McEachin worked in the 1972 films Fuzz, Buck and the Preacher and The Groundstar Conspiracy before starring on Tenafly.
After showing up on Insight, The Rockford Files, Police Story, Emergency!, Columbo, T.J. Hooker, St. Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote and Hill Street Blues, McEachin signed up for his first Perry Mason movie, 1986's The Case of the Notorious Nun. He stuck around through 1995's The Case of the Jealous Jokester.
He said he turned down a role in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) because he was offended at how his character was written.
In 2002, McEachin played a liberal Supreme Court justice on First Monday, a short-lived CBS drama from Donald P. Bellisario that starred James Garner and Joe Mantegna.
McEachin was appointed a U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador in 2005 to spend time speaking with soldiers and veterans. A year later, he wrote, produced and starred (with David Huddleston, a castmate on Tenafly) in a 23-minute video called Old Glory that the military community embraced.
His one-man play, Above the Call; Beyond the Duty, opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2008 and played L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum three years later. He portrayed Old Soldier, a character who 'pries open tough issues left in the wake of battle, boldly confronting challenges that are facing those serving in our military today while reconciling the spirit of one who has killed in war.'
McEachin also wrote several books, including 1996's Tell Me a Tale: A Novel of the Old South, 1997's Farewell to the Mockingbirds, 1999's The Heroin Factor, 2000's Say Goodnight to the Boys in Blue and 2021's Swing Low My Sweet Chariot: The Ballad of Jimmy Mack, a memoir.
His wife, Lois, whom he married in 1960, died in July 2017.
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