Film and theatre producer Gene Persson died 6 June 2008 of a heart attack. Born Eugene Clair Persson on 12 January 1934 in Long Beach, California, he was a child actor, first appearing as Jackie in Swell Guy in 1946. He later appeared as a “Kettle kid” in four comedies about Ma and Pa Kettle, and in the 1950s, appeared on television in programs such as The Walter Winchell File and Dragnet.
Persson began producing later in the 1950s, starting with plays by LeRoi Jones (who was later known as Amiri Baraka). He produced two of Jones’s angry, racially charged plays off-Broadway: The Toilet and The Slave. He’ll probably be best known for producing the racial drama Dutchman and the children’s musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, both of which opened within weeks of each other in New York City in 1967.
Persson’s genre credits were as an actor: he appeared in Bloodlust! (1961) and Earth vs. the Spider (1958).
Persson divorced his first wife, Shirley Knight, in 1969, after ten years of marriage. He met his second wife, Ruby, when she auditioned for the part of Lucy Van Pelt in a San Diego production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. “He hired me on the spot,” she said. “We went out once and ran off to Vegas.” He is survived by his wife and three children, Lukas Persson, Markus Persson, and Kaitlin Hopkins.