Alan A. Armer, 88, an Emmy Award-winning television producer whose series included “The Fugitive” and “The Untouchables,” died Sunday of colon cancer at his home in Century City, Calif.
Armer was a retired longtime professor in what now is called the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Cal State Northridge.
In a more than two-decade career that began in Los Angeles during the live TV days of the late 1940s, Armer was a producer on the 1950s series “My Friend Flicka,” “Broken Arrow” and “Man Without a Gun.” From 1960 to 1963, he was an executive producer on “The Untouchables,” the Prohibition-era series starring Robert Stack as the crime- fighting Eliot Ness.
As the producer of “The Fugitive,” starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, Armer took home an Emmy when the show won for outstanding dramatic series in 1966.
Frank S. Emi, 94, the last surviving leader of a group of World War II internees who protested the drafting of Japanese-American men in internment camps, died Dec. 1 in West Covina, Calif.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles grocer was among the thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were regarded as threats to national security and sent to remote detention camps.
For Emi, who had to abandon his business, his home and most of his belongings for a cramped barracks at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, the incarceration was a calamitous turn. But like most of his fellow evictees, he accepted the upheaval with resignation. “Shikata ga nai,” (it cannot be helped), became the common refrain.
Two years later, Emi had a different slogan: “No more Shikata ga nai.” When the federal government decided in early 1944 to reopen the draft to Japanese- American men, Emi joined six other Heart Mountain internees to oppose the order. They formed the Fair Play Committee, which dared to ask how they could be ordered to fight for freedom abroad when they were denied it at home.
The seven leaders of the movement were convicted of conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act. Emi — who had a deferment because he was married and had children — served 18 months at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan. Los Angeles Times
