Michael Burns was Blueboy in an episode of Dragnet, Blueboy was a drug addict who always had to get higher & higher.
Oh, Michael Burns was all over the tube in the 1960s and 70s. It was a real feast for us little girls with Michael Burns crushes. :) He pretty much grew up on the tube.
I also remember him as a crazed sniper in a Hawaii Five-O episode. :)
Every now and then I'd get an urge to e-mail him at his Mount Holyoke e-mail address to say, "Oh, Michael Burns, I had such a bad crush on you way back when" but I managed to suppress it each time. :)
He married the then-president of Holyoke and in 2002 they retired to an historic horse farm in Kentucky, which they restored and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Some bio information:
Career
Burns was born in Mineola, Long Island, New York. He graduated summa cum laude in 1976 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. and earned his M.A. in European history at the same institution. He entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1977, and earned his Ph.D. in Modern European history.
Actor
Burns was a well-known child actor, starring on the television program Wagon Train, as orphaned "Barnaby West" during seasons 4-8. He also co-starred with Glenn Corbett, Ted Bessell, and Randy Boone in a 19-episode NBC comedy/drama It's a Man's World in the 1962-1963 season. Burns played 14-year-old Howie Macauley, who lives on a houseboat called the Elephant on the Ohio River with his older brother Wes, played by Corbett. Bessell and Boone were the two other young men living with them. The program was hailed by its viewers and critics for its portrayal of restless youth but was quickly cancelled because of low Nielsen ratings.
Burns appeared with James Stewart in the film, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. He appeared as a guest star in over thirty-five series in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly Westerns, including CBS's Gunsmoke, NBC's The Road West, and ABC's The Legend of Jesse James. During his twenties, Burns appeared in several films, most notably in That Cold Day in the Park in 1969.
Historian
He became a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in 1980 and authored books on the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s. Upon his retirement in 2002, he was honored by Mount Holyoke as Professor Emeritus.