WES D. GEHRING

Growing up in Gary, Indiana, Mladen Sekulovich, known to film and television fans as Karl Malden, re­ membered that a “double thick malt and a double feature; that was about as close to heaven as you could get.” Born in Chicago on March 22, 1912, the young Malden, the son of a Serbian immigrant father, had to work for everything, even before the Great Depression of the 1930s. His father, Petar, had initially toiled in the Gary steel mills before a job-related injury forced him to find work delivering milk in a horse- drawn wagon. Malden often assisted his father in these well-before-dawn milk deliveries. After Malden graduated from high school in 1931, he also risked injury for three years working in a Gary steel foundry.

Malden later described his father’s actor’s drive is also apparent in the title he became the popular hour-long ABC series legacy as instilling in him a “fierce work selected for his autobiography, W hen D o I The Streets o f San Francisco-. “Michael, ethic.” He applied this blue-collar mindset S tart? you’re going to learn a lot. You’re never to his acting. Indeed, throughout his long Another son-of-an-immigrant/school- going to be able to keep up with the pace career Malden was fond of likening an of-hard-knocks actor, Kirk Douglas, that Karl sets.” Years later, upon Malden’s actor’s work to “digging ditches— some­ shared in his memoir, The Ragman’s Son, death on July 1, 2009, Michael Douglas times they’re deep and sometimes they’re how pleased he was that his son, Michael, wrote an obituary for his former costar for shallow but we keep digging them.” The would be working with Malden on what T im e magazine. In the piece, he wrote that

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