Just thinking out loud ...

Randy DeRoy Mantooth was born on Sept. 19, 1945, in Sacramento. He said he lived in 24 states before he turned 18 because his father, Buck, was a pipeline construction engineer whose job kept the family on the move.

"I was never in any town long enough to really cultivate long-lasting relationships with people, so I was always living in my own little fantasy world," he said.

His mother, Sadie, was a waitress. After she and Buck divorced, she made good on her promise to give each of her four kids a car when they graduated high school.

Mantooth acted for the first time at San Marcos High in Santa Barbara, then followed his acting friends to Santa Barbara City College and then to New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he changed his first name to the more formal-sounding Randolph.

Famed Universal talent scout Eleanor Kilgallen spotted him in the play Philadelphia, Here I Come — he shared a best actor award with Brad Davis in that — and got him signed to a contract, bringing him to L.A. in 1970.

A scene he did that year with Hal Holbrook on an episode of NBC's The Bold Ones: The Senator, where his character breaks down during courtroom testimony, was seen by Cinader. Said Mantooth, "From what I was told, he went, 'That is my Johnny Gage.'"

Put to work on Emergency! alongside such seasoned performers as Fuller, London and Troupe, he and the similarly inexperienced Tighe "were in the same boat," Mantooth said. "It was more like us against them."

The pair took paramedic classes, where they learned how to insert an IV, and trained with the fire department. Cinader wanted the show to be funny but told his actors that "when the [station alarm sounds], funny is left at the door. You are now a professional," Mantooth noted. "We never got away from that."

He added: "We never went home with Johnny Gage, we never went home with Roy DeSoto, we didn't hear about Johnny Gage's drunk father beating his mother. Who cared about that? [The show] was about the job."

Cinader insisted every rescue on the series had to have been done in real life, so writers combed firefighters' logs for storylines. Meanwhile, NBC executives made sure that no one would die and no blood would be shown during the first couple of seasons.

Mantooth said that "if I fell off my roof cleaning the gutters, I'd want [Gage] to be there because he knows what he is doing."

He and Tighe had the same agent, shared a motor home during the entire run of their show and became great friends. The series ended, Mantooth said, because his and Tighe's original seven-year contracts had expired, Tighe didn't want to continue and Mantooth didn't want to go on without him.

When Mantooth raced home in 1978 to find his ranch in the Lobo Canyon area of Agoura Hills engulfed in flames, Tighe was already there, trying to get the animals safely off the property. Tighe later served as the best man at Mantooth's 2002 wedding to actress Kristen Connors.

Mantooth followed Emergency! by joining the second season of the ABC comedy Operation Petticoat in 1978, followed by work the next year on the ABC comedy Detective School and on the NBC miniseries The Seekers, produced by Cinader.

After guest-starring on such shows as Battlestar Galactica, Charlie's Angels, The Fall Guy, Diagnosis Murder and L.A. Law, Mantooth was in the middle of getting separated from his wife and wanted out of L.A., so he moved to New York to work on Loving and said he had a blast.

On As the World Turns, he stepped in to play Oakdale chief of detectives Hal Munson after actor Benjamin Hendrickson died by suicide in 2006.

Later, he appeared in such films as He Was a Quiet Man (2007) and Bold Native (2010) and on episodes of FX's Sons of Anarchy in 2011. A year later, he and Tighe were named honorary fire chiefs by the L.A. County Fire Department.

In addition to his brother, he's survived by his sister, Tonya.

In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Mantooth got emotional talking about how in the '70s he was saved by paramedics who figured out he had carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a malfunctioning house furnace and how other emergency personnel brought his sister back from the dead after she was injured in a car accident in the '80s.

"Do I respect paramedics? Do I respect firefighters?" he asked. "There's a debt I owe them that I probably can't ever pay back. But I'm gonna try."