Ron Masak, Sheriff Mort Metzger on ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 86

Ron Masak, the familiar character actor who as Cabot Cove Sheriff Mort Metzger was the beneficiary of Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving prowess on the last eight seasons of Murder, She Wrote, has died. He was 86.

Masak died Thursday of natural causes at a hospital in Thousand Oaks, his granddaughter Kaylie Defilippis told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Chicago native appeared six times on Police Story, five times on Bewitched and four times on Webster and also showed up on everything from The Flying Nun, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Magnum, P.I., The Rockford FIles, Columbo, Falcon Crest and Cold Case during his six-decade career.

In February 1960, the everyman actor portrayed a harmonica-playing soldier on “The Purple Testament,” the 19th episode of The Twilight Zone, and had a turn as a nutty Dracula-like count on The Monkees in 1968.

On the summer 1973 ABC sitcom Love Thy Neighbor, based on a hit British TV show, Masak and Joyce Bulifant portrayed a husband and wife who discover they’re not as open-minded as they thought when a Black couple (Harrison Page, Janet MacLachlan) move in next door.

Masak made his big-screen debut in the John Sturges espionage thriller Ice Station Zebra (1968), starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, then appeared opposite George Hamilton in Evel Knievel (1971) and as a bartender and friend of Barbara Eden’s character in Harper Valley P.T.A. (1978).

A Hollywood columnist once dubbed Masak “The King of Commercials,” and he served for 15 years as a pitchman for Vlasic pickles, voicing the animated, bow-tied stork that sounds a lot like Groucho Marx.

After playing a couple of other characters on the series, Masak joined the Angela Lansbury-starring Murder, She Wrote in 1988 for its fifth season after the previous inept Cabot Cove sheriff, Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), left Maine to live with his sister in Kentucky. (In reality, Bosley had departed to star on NBC’s Father Dowling Mysteries.) 

He appeared as Metzger on 41 episodes of the CBS show through 1996, with his character — who had quit the New York Police Department in search of a quieter work life up north — driving around town in a red 1976 Cadillac Eldorado. 

Masak’s daughter Kathryn (one of his six kids) played Metzger’s deputy, Lynn Olsen, on a handful of episodes.

Ronald Alan Masak was born on July 1, 1936, and raised on the South Side of Chicago near Comiskey Park. His father, Floyd, was a salesman and musician and his mother, Mildred, a merchandise buyer.

“I was the class clown, I was the showoff in school,” he said in 2011. “I once had a teacher tell me if she could have stopped laughing at me, she would have failed me.”

Masak grew up wanting to be an athlete and at age 16 was scouted by baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. He said the Chicago White Sox offered him a contract for $8,500, but he turned it down.

After graduating from Kelly High School, Masak, inspired by Larry Parks in The Jolson Story (1946), got into acting at Chicago City College and while serving as a military policeman in the U.S. Army.

He did lots of impersonations early in career, and in 1956 he sang “Hard Headed Woman” as Elvis Presley on The Spade Cooley Show.

In 1968, Masak portrayed an inexperienced salesman opposite legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi in the motivational short film Second Effort, and he went on to work on similar projects with James Whitmore, Burgess Meredith and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda (1982’s Ya Gotta Believe, which he wrote and directed).

(A big fan of the Dodgers, Masak suited up as a catcher for Hollywood Stars games at Dodger Stadium for more than three decades, had season tickets for some 40 years and often drove players to the ballpark. Steve Garvey is the godfather of one of his kids and Steve Yeager was a neighbor.)

In the mid-’70s, Masak took over as the voice of the stork in the Vlasic commercials from Pat Harrington Jr., who had stepped aside after being hired to play handyman Dwayne Schneider on the CBS sitcom One Day at a Time.

“I was doing my impression of Pat Harrington’s impression of Groucho Marx,” he said in a 2020 interview. “By the end of my run, I was just doing me with Groucho readings.”

He also did TV spots as Lou Costello and commercials for such products as Zenith televisions, Rice-a-Roni, Glad sandwich bags, Spray & Wash and Ford automobiles.

Masak had top billing in the 1974 family film The Man From Clover Grove, was a regular on Match Game and hosted Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons from Los Angeles for years.

He wrote about the interactions he had with famous folks over the decades in his 2015 book, I’ve Met All My Heroes From A to Z.

In addition to daughter Kathryn and granddaughter Kaylie, survivors include his wife, Kay, whom he married in September 1961; their other children Tammy, Debbie, Christine and twins Michael and Robert; nine other grandchildren; and two cousins, actors Michael and Mary Gross.

Masak said President George H.W. Bush once asked him just where Cabot Cove was. “I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s somewhere between Kennebunkport and Universal Studios.’”