Joby Baker, Pearl Harbor Survivor and Character Actor, Dead at 92

The journeyman performer who shared scenes with Elvis Presley, Jack Lemmon, and three separate Gidgets leaves behind one of Hollywood's more quietly remarkable life stories.

Joby Baker, a character actor with credits stretching from the 1950s into the television era, died at age 92.
Baker survived the attack on Pearl Harbor as a child, a biographical detail that shadowed — and shaped — his public persona throughout his career.
His film work brought him alongside Elvis Presley, Jack Lemmon, and Paul Muni, as well as appearances in multiple installments of the Gidget franchise.
Baker was best known to primetime audiences for his role on the CBS sitcom Good Morning World, which ran in the late 1960s.
No cause of death or specific date has been confirmed in early reports.

The CBS sitcom Good Morning World was never going to topple I Love Lucy in the history books, but it gave Joby Baker a face that Friday-night audiences recognized — and, it turns out, that was plenty. Baker, who appeared in the show's single 1967–68 season, died this week at 92, according to a report published by The Hollywood Reporter.

The headline number is the age. The detail that stops the scroll is what came before the career: Baker was a child in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. He survived. Decades later, he was on a soundstage somewhere in Los Angeles doing scenes with Elvis Presley. That arc — from one of the most catastrophic mornings in American history to the backlot orbit of the King of Rock and Roll — is the kind of biography that would get flagged as too on-the-nose if someone handed it in as a screenplay.

Baker's screen work was the definition of journeyman: reliable, frequently employed, rarely the name above the title. Alongside Presley, he logged time with Jack Lemmon and Paul Muni, two actors who occupied very different registers of mid-century Hollywood, and he turned up in at least three separate productions built around the Gidget character — a franchise that, between films and television, ran across most of the 1960s. Character actors like Baker were the connective tissue of that era's output; they made the leads look like they had a world to move through.

No cause of death or precise date had been confirmed in early reports at time of filing. Baker is survived, per The Hollywood Reporter, by family members whose details were not immediately available.