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       Alfie Scopp at his 100th birthday bash in Sept. 2019 with Nan Vernon, daughter of the late Canadian actor John Vernon.

       Karen Hepburn

       As far back as 1954, a newspaper called Alfie Scopp “one of Canada’s top character actors.” He held that distinction for decades. The versatile actor, who died in Montreal on July 24 at the age of 101, wasn’t a superstar, but he never stopped working.

       “He used to say he didn’t make much money, but he always had a lot of work,” his nephew, Kevin Sacks said.

       Mr. Scopp was the seltzer-spraying Clarabell on the Canadian version of The Howdy Doody Show, Avram in Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof and the voice of Charlie in the Box in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, the animated Christmas special recorded in 1964. The program was produced in the United States and Japan, and much of the voice-over work was done in Toronto by actors such as Mr. Scopp, who had decades of experience doing radio dramas on the CBC. They did the voices without ever seeing the animation.

       “We had no idea what the characters looked like. We just invented what we’d thought they’d sound like,” he told an interviewer in 2014.

       Alfred Scopp, always known as Alfie, was born in London, England, on Sept. 15, 1919. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia; his mother was born in England. Alfie was the fifth of seven children, and he said, “Every two years, there was a new baby.”

       The Scopp family moved to Montreal when Alfie was a year old. The family lived in the St. Urbain Street neighbourhood made famous by the novelist Mordecai Richler. The Scopps were poor but happy, he said. Alfie quit school part way through Grade 8.

       “The principal was an antisemite,” Alfie recalled in a 1977 interview with Lorraine Thomson as part of an Actra Fraternal Benefit Society oral history project. “The principal said to me: ‘Scopp, if you weren’t Jewish, what would you rather be?’ I replied, ‘Jewish,’ the class applauded, and the principal never spoke to me again.”

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       Mr. Scopp playing the unfortunate sad sack Pte. Clarence Ball in the hilarious army comedy, Turvey, at the Avenue Theatre in Toronto, Jan. 1957.

       MICHAEL BURNS

       It was the Depression, and young Alfie helped support his family by working as a messenger and in restaurants. In 1940 he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but first had to get his old principal to vouch for him, which he did.

       The air force turned out to be his ticket to show business. Mr. Scopp trained as a mechanic and volunteered for a post at Gander, Nfld., one of the largest airbases in the world at the time, used as a stopover and maintenance base for aircraft being ferried to Britain.

       Thousands of military personnel from Canada, Newfoundland, the United States and Great Britain were stationed there at the time, according to Mr. Scopp. He started doing a vaudeville act, doing comedy where he was billed as the Bob Hope of Gander. He was put in charge of entertainment and began to write for others as well as perform for large audiences.

       One of the people he met at the base was another performer: Sammy Davis Jr. The two remained lifetime friends. The base also had its own radio station, VORG (Voice of Radio Gander) and the 23-year-old Alfie Scopp was recruited to host a program called Jive at Five and a sportscast where he developed a talent for speaking ad-lib.

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       Mr. Scopp was the voice of Charlie in the Box in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, the animated Christmas special recorded in 1964.

       The Canadian Press

       At the end of the war, after almost three years in Gander, he decided his future was as a performer, but not in Montreal. He decided to go to Toronto and attend the Lorne Greene School of Broadcasting, run by the wartime CBC Radio news announcer Lorne Greene, who later became famous as the father on the American television series Bonanza.

       At first, Mr. Greene said there was no room, but he asked Alfie to ad-lib in his studio, and he talked for several minutes about hitchhiking across the United States and Canada. All of a sudden, he was accepted.

       Other people in his class in 1946 included many future stars of American and Canadian television: Fred Davis, the future host of the CBC program Front Page Challenge, the actor Leslie Nielsen, Gordie Tapp, future star of the American program Hee Haw, and actor and comedian Don Harron.

       On his first day at class, Mr. Scopp showed up with a black eye, knocked down by a jealous boyfriend after a dance the night before. The teachers were already famous: John Drainie, Mavor Moore, Lister Sinclair and Andrew Allen, all Canadian drama heavyweights of their day.

       Mr. Scopp started acting, first on stage, then in a long series of dramas on the CBC, first on radio then on television, after CBC TV broadcasts started in 1952. His first real paycheque for a radio drama was $45, which he joked covered 18 weeks of rent; he was paying $2.50 a week for a room.

       There was stage work and reviews, including Spring Thaw, which travelled across Canada. At the start, there was television work, including a one-hour program Mr. Scopp and his colleagues would write and perform live every week. Videotape was far in the future. He filled in his time doing a voice-over on a National Film Board instructional film on accident protection. Work was work.

       One day walking across the parking lot at the CBC building, Mr. Scopp bumped into a friend who had just auditioned for the job of the clown on Howdy Doody. Mr. Scopp called, auditioned and got the part.

       “They gave me a seltzer bottle and said so far no one really knows how to do this. I sprayed everyone, fooling around. And the next day, they called, and I started work,” Mr. Scopp said.

       Playing the clown Clarabell on CBC’s Howdy Doody was perhaps a bit undignified compared to the more serious work, but it was steady, and it lasted for five years. Five days a week. The secret was improvising and being funny. He was a natural.

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       Larry Mann as Cap'n Scuttlebutt and Mr. Scopp as Clarabell, right, on CBC-TV's children program, Howdy-Doody in 1956.

       CBC

       Mr. Scopp worked on The Wayne and Shuster Show, The Barris Beat and a raft of Canadian television programs. He stepped behind the scenes at Front Page Challenge, hosted by his classmate Mr. Davis. The idea of the program was to pick someone who had been in the news and have four panellists ask questions to guess the story or identity of the guest. Mr. Scopp’s job was to chase down guests from around the world. The guest booking of which he was most proud was landing Sir Edmund Hillary, who led the first expedition to reach the summit of Mount Everest, and Jacques Piccard, the Swiss oceanic engineer who helped build vessels for deep-sea exploration. Both on the same program.

       “When I spoke to Jacques Piccard, he was a bit reluctant, but when I told him the other guest was Edmund Hilary, he said, I’ll be there,” Mr. Scopp recalled.

       Mr. Scopp was involved with coming up with the idea for Hee Haw, the country-themed television show that played in the United States. He suggested they use Canadian performers, in particular Gordie Tapp and Don Harron, who played a hayseed, a version of his Ottawa Valley character.

       “I was in Los Angeles with them when they came up with the idea for Hee Haw. They said, ‘Let’s create a country Laugh-In,’ " Mr. Scopp told The Globe and Mail. “They didn’t know anything about country, so I said, get in touch with Gordie Tapp. He knows everything about country, from working on Country Hoedown.’ They called him right away, and Gordie signed on for Hee Haw.”

       Mr. Scopp was instrumental in helping start the career of a young singer who went on to superstar status.

       “I was idly watching a CBC TV show called Pick the Stars. An accordion player was on, and he was followed by this young fella who sang. A few bars into his song, and I yelled to my wife to come see his kid. We agreed he was something special, not so the audience – the accordion player won – we set a rigorous standard in Canada. Anyway, I learned the young singer’s name was Robert Goulet, and he was a student at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. Next day I met with Bob, liked him, and booked him on a show I was writing for, and Bob’s TV career began.”

       After their first meeting, Mr. Scopp landed Mr. Goulet a small role on Howdy Doody. This was long before Mr. Goulet became Lancelot in the Broadway hit Camelot, which made his reputation. Mr. Scopp was the best man at two of Mr. Goulet’s weddings and a pallbearer at his funeral.

       Mr. Scopp was in six major feature films, the most prominent being the Canadian director Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on The Roof. He played Avram, the bookseller.

       Mr. Scopp slowed down when he was about 65 and worked only when it interested him. In his long retirement, he liked to play golf and was a keen follower of the Toronto Blue Jays.

       “My uncle was an avid baseball fan, stretching back to the 1930s. He was a season-ticket holder for the Blue Jays from their inaugural season in 1977 until well into the 2000s and pined away the winters waiting for spring training to start,” Kevin Sacks said.

       Mr. Scopp leaves his sister, Frances Sacks, the mother of Kevin Sacks; his long-time partner, Cheryl Wrye; and extended family.