For years, Jack Garner appeared in the same television world as his younger brother James without usually being identified as family. In more than 60 episodes of The Rockford Files, he passed through scenes as a policeman, a worker behind a counter or another face in Jim Rockford’s Los Angeles. Later, he took the recurring role of Captain McEnroe.
The brothers’ shared screen time came after a difficult childhood. Jack Edward Bumgarner was born in Norman, Oklahoma, about two years before James; their brother Charles completed the family. Their mother died when James was four, and their father, Weldon, was unable to keep the boys together at first. They were sent to live with relatives and later reunited with their father. James would write about mistreatment by their stepmother and leaving home while young.
The brothers took different routes into adulthood and entertainment. James served in Korea before turning to acting and becoming a star through Maverick, films and The Rockford Files. Jack played minor-league baseball in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, worked in golf and sang with the house band at Los Angeles’s Coconut Grove. By the late 1960s, he was also picking up television parts, appearing on programs including Gunsmoke, Daniel Boone, The Doris Day Show and The Bionic Woman.
When The Rockford Files began in 1974, Jack was an experienced working actor. His many small appearances helped give the show’s setting a sense of recurring life: Rockford’s world included police officers, service workers and other people who might cross his path from week to week. The series did not explain why Jack’s face might reappear in a different occupation. He simply returned when another role called for him. Captain McEnroe, the superior of Dennis Becker, became one of his more recognizable parts.
The collaboration extended beyond the series. Jack appeared in James’s Bret Maverick and in films including Sunset, Maverick and My Fellow Americans. He also returned for the Rockford reunion television movies in the 1990s. His family connection brought him into productions alongside James, but Jack had built a career of his own over decades of television work.
Jack died near Palm Springs in September 2012. His career was far smaller in scale than James’s, but their repeated work together left an unusual record of two brothers sharing a fictional world after being separated as boys. To the public, James was the star at the center of the frame. To Jack, he remained “Babe.”
