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Fred Grandy said he ''reached a plateau'' on The Love Boat, so he pivoted to politics
Gopher was a politician, too!
Do you know that quote about Alexander weeping when there were no more worlds to conquer? It must be tough defining yourself by what lands you've vanquished. Especially because, as Alexander realized, there's a finite number of successes one person can attain during a lifetime. What do you do when there's no more success to be had?
That was the conundrum actor Fred Grandy fell into by the mid-1980s. Grandy had been in the business for more than a decade by that point and was a television mainstay. After guest starring in shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Maude, Grandy landed a role as a main character on The Love Boat, where he'd famously play Burl "Gopher" Smith.
However, after 246 episodes on The Love Boat, anybody would've felt a little fatigued (and possibly a little seasick!). At least that's how Grandy felt by 1986 when he looked at seriously switching things up and changing career paths.
In an interview published by United Press International, Grandy says he "reached a plateau, I think, on Love Boat where I've done everything just about that I wanted to do on television and what I really wanted to do was come home and get involved in some way."
That meant returning to his native Iowa and running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. The career change, though, would come at a significant pay cut.
"I feel as though I was lucky enough to accomplish a certain amount of financial security in a short amount of time so it's worth it to me to take that opportunity and plug it back into this race," said Grandy.
Being away from Hollywood for a while was important to the actor, at that stage in his life, and his hometown in Iowa was the perfect place for him to be.
"One of the reasons I'm coming back is the values I learned here are the values I still have," said Grady. He had two children, "and I would like to have them experience more of this environment [Iowa] and it's not unusual to want to come home. Right now in this state, we're trying to get more and more of our people to come home. This is homecoming '86 for Iowa and in a way, my campaign typifies that."
Grandy served for four consecutive terms and returned to regular TV work as Dr. William Ledreau on The Mindy Project in 2014.
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