During the decade of the 1970s one of the busiest and most-watched actors on television was John Amos.
Not a bad trick considering the New Jersey native did not start out in television as an actor. He was writing for a local news show when singer-actress Leslie Uggams started working on her variety show. She insisted on having an African American in her writing room. Told there weren’t any, she pulled Amos out of his news copy job and put him to work writing sketches.
About a year later, Amos first gained notice in the background of the WJM newsroom as weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His death August 21 (but not announced until Oct. 1) at 84 leaves only Joyce Bulifant — who played Murray Slaughter’s wife Marie — as the sole surviving adult semi-regular cast member from that series.
Amos appreciated that the show’s executive producers, Allan Burns and James L. Brooks, did not pander to the usual stereotypes when it came to the portrayal of Black characters at the time. He liked, for example, that Gordy was a weatherman, not an ex-football player-turned sports reporter. (In real life, Amos was an ex-football player and a former boxer).
In 1973, during the MTM run, Amos left that series and was soon making an impression on a couple of Norman Lear comedies. He was on Sanford & Son and then Maude before becoming the lead in 1974 in a spin-off of Maude, Lear’s sitcom Good Times.
Amos shot 61 episodes over 1974-76 as James Evans Sr., a middle-aged father of three. The actor, 34 when cast, played older. He was 19 years younger, in fact, than the actress who played his wife on the series, Esther Rolle. Plus he was only eight years older than the actor who played his son, Jimmie “J.J.” Walker.
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The series quickly shot near the top of the ratings. Amos, however, made no secret of his frustration with how the series developed. The big draw became Walker, whose catch phrase, “Dyyy-no-mite!” was repeated in schoolyards across North America.
“The problems began later,” Amos said during a Pioneers of Television interview, “when the writers, I thought became a little lazy and they became more concerned with, I think, how little they could write by having J.J. come into a room and walk funny and wear a chicken hat or something.”
Amos was fired heading into the show’s fourth season, which was fine with the actor. He did not want to be associated with what he felt were a growing list of negative stereotypes. When that season began, viewers learned that James Evan Sr. had been killed off.
Killing Evans off, however, left the series without a dad, and with Rolle playing a widowed family matriarch — a situlation that the actress wanted to avoid when she was the first on cast on the series. It was Rolle who insisted that there be a father figure, and it was she who read with Amos and told the producers, “this one will do.”
Amos didn’t have to wait too long to play a more empowering figure on television. He was part of the all-star cast — which included his former MTM co-star Ed Asner as well as Leslie Uggams — on the groundbreaking 1977 ABC miniseries Roots. The Peabody and Emmy-winning limited series drew more than 130 million viewers, which was more than half the population in America at that time. Amos himself earned an Emmy nomination.
Amos continued to work over the years, showing up on everything from The West Wing to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, Two and a Half Men, The Ranch and The Righteous Gemstones. His feature film appearances include roles in “Coming to America” and “Die Hard 2.” He can be seen in the upcoming series Suits: LA.
Amos was married twice and has two children. Sadly, they appear to be at odds over his estate. His daughter tweeted Oct. 1 that she found out about his passing only when the media did — 45 days after John Amos had died.
