In Memory of Former Child Star Rusty Hamer ('Danny Thomas Show'): 3 Decades After His Tragic Death

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With the comic timing of a vaudeville professional, a pre-teen Rusty Hamer would deliver dialogue with quipping zingers on Danny Thomas' famed 1950s-'60s TV sitcom, first titled, Make Room for Daddy, then The Danny Thomas Show.

In 1970, Hamer reunited with some of the original Daddy cast (including Thomas, Marjorie Lord as Kathy, the show's second TV wife), and Angela (Lost in Space/Sound of Music Cartwright as Linda for Make Room For Granddaddy, a reboot of the original series. Hamer's character, also first-named Rusty, was by then a married medical student. But the show only lasted one season.

Decades later, Hamer would committ suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot at only 42 years old. This is his tragic story.

A Closer Look

Rusty Hamer was born Russell Craig Hamer on February 15, 1947, in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was the youngest of three sons born to shirt salesman Arthur Walter (who died when Rusty was 6) and former silent screen actress Dorothy Hamer (nee Chretin).

In 1951, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where Rusty and his brothers, John and Walter, were encouraged by their parents to perform in local theatre productions.

Shortly, thereafter Rusty found fame as the TV version of himself on Make Room For Daddy.

However, by the time he was 20 years old, years after the fame subsided from the various Thomas shows, a bitter and despondent Hamer was employed by a Los Angeles messenger service.

Upon eventually moving to southwest Louisiana, Hamer's found work delivering newspapers, offshore for Exxon, and periodically at his brother John's restaurant.

Unlike Rusty, John was not interested in Hollywood, and left the acting business when he was 17 years old. As he once observed, "I did not enjoy the industry. I felt the people in it - the majority were confused in their own lives."

Sadly, those perplexed individuals included his own brother Rusty. As John further once assessed, his sibling wasn't "really been happy since his early 20s."

"But he didn't show any signs [that he would kill himself]. It was just all of a sudden."

John noted that Rusty suffered debilitating back pain but refused to see a physician.

Then John made a gruseome discovery: his brother's body in the trailer where he lived near DeRidder, Louisana, 40 miles north of Lake Charles.

John relocated to DeRidder to open a cafe and Rusty followed him in 1976 to be near their mother Dorothy, who by then was living with John and suffering from Alzhiemer's.

John believed Dorothy's poor health was too much to bear for Rusty, adding to the former child star's despondency.

In the End

In the end, the glamour, glitter and spotlight of Hollywood ultimately proved dimming and deadly for the once-vibrant and quick-witted Rusty Hamer.

The only saving grace is the immortal joy the young actor brought to and continues to bring to the TV audience by way of his benchmark role in the Danny Thomas history of sitcoms.