G. D. Spradlin, who...

...had quite a career before he became an actor, died at age 90:

Gervase Duan Spradlin was born on Aug. 31, 1920, in Pauls Valley, Okla., and grew up on a farm. A son of schoolteachers, he earned a degree in education from the University of Oklahoma in 1941 and then taught history. In World War II he served in the Army Air Forces in China as an air traffic controller. After his discharge he returned to the University of Oklahoma and earned a law degree in 1948.

He went to work for the Phillips Petroleum Company, first as head of its legal department in Caracas, Venezuela, then in Oklahoma City. In 1951, he teamed up with a geologist to drill their own oil wells. Mr. Spradlin made a fortune, retired in 1960 and spent a year and a half sailing in the Bahamas with his family.

It wasn’t enough. “Being rich changes surprisingly little,” he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1967. “You still have to have an absorbing interest in life, something to do to make you feel alive.”

He ran Senator John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in Oklahoma in 1960, and he himself ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Oklahoma City in 1965. That year he earned a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Miami.