Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Room 222: Cast Photo

Room 222 aired from September 1969 until January 1974 on ABC.

Schoolroom comedy-drama about Pete Dixon ( Lloyd Haynes), a black history teacher in an integrated big-city high school. An idealist , Pete instilled his students at Walt Whitman High with gentile lessons in tolerance and understanding. The number of his homeroom was 222, but wherever he went he was surrounded by a cluster of kids. They loved him for his easygoing manner and willingness to side with them when he knew they were being short-changed by the system. Seymour Kaufman ( Michael Constantine) was the cool, slightly sarcastic principal, Liz McIntyre ( Denise Nicholas) Pete's girlfriend and a school counselor, and Alice Johnson ( Karen Valentine) an eccentric student teacher ( in the second season she was promoted to full-fledged English teacher). The rest of the regulars were students. They included frizzy-haired Bernie ( David Jolliffe), jive-talking Jason ( Heshimu), girl-next-door Helen ( Judy Strangis), Richie ( Howard Rice), Al ( Pendrant Netherly), Pam ( Ta-Tanisha) and Larry ( Eric Laneuville).

The program was highly regarded for tackling current problems relevant to today's youth ( prejudice, drugs, dropping out, etc) and it received many awards and commendations from educational and civil rights groups. Its sense of reality was heightened by the fact that it was based on , and partially filmed at , 3000-student Los Angeles High School.

An Article from Time Magazine

Showing What's Wrong
Monday, Mar. 16, 1970 Article

Stereotype No. 1: High school teachers are fussy, frightened and old, hiding from the world in a cloud of chalk dust. Stereotype No. 2: High school principals wear three-piece suits, stern expressions and are totally devoid of humor. Good shows often result from giving the lie to stereotypes, witness ABC-TV's Room 222, which features a handsome black history teacher (Lloyd Haynes) and a rumpled, comfortable principal (Michael Constantine), whose strongest trait is a sense of underplayed humor. It works; in the current season, Room 222 has appeared consistently among the ten top-rated programs, and deserves it.

"If there's a formula for Room 222, I guess it is to show something that's wrong," says Haynes of the series, "and maybe show how to help it." Out of this notion have come some pertinent and moving moments of television drama. Life within the confines of any school is not all light or dark, and neither is life in Room 222. "If you have a serious situation, you want to give it the full weight it deserves," says Constantine. "But if you play it like Hamlet, you'll be left standing with drama all over your face."

Teaching, Not Preaching. Striking a balance between humor and concern, Room 222 manages to teach moral lessons without being preachy. A new teacher, straining stolidly to be as hip as his students, is joshed into the realization that he will get along much better if he is just himself. Students petitioning for the replacement of an elderly teacher who is using an archaic teaching approach in a marriage-preparation course are gently prodded into more understanding of their teacher. A few episodes do deal with weightier stuff: the problems of a militant black youth involved with a middle-class black girl, the dilemma of a Mexican-American boy who balances his academic limitations against his ambitions and decides to reject his counselor's recommendation that he go to college.

From time to time, the show has run into problems—first of all, the network's own attitude. "They are frightened of our being too heavy, and are distrustful of their being too comedy-ish," says Producer Gene Reynolds. "The powers in TV-land want to know whether it is comedy or drama; it is very difficult for them to twist their imaginations to encompass both," says Constantine. The show is billed as a "comedy-drama," but the show's originators managed to persuade the network to eliminate a standard but bothersome sitcom laugh track. "Our humor is too subtle for it," Reynolds explains.

Says Constantine of his role: "There came a point where I refused to do another joke because I felt my character was being written like a clown. One week I came very close to asking to be let out of the entire series because there had been a couple of weeks like that." Hence, there are seemingly endless bull sessions between cast and producer to work out better dialogue and clearer confrontations between characters. One day Haynes vehemently announced: "These scenes are so far away from reality! There's no attempt to get any sort of realism in the dialogue between the black actors." Result: there's more realism now.

Here is Lloyd Haynes' Obituary from The New York Times

Lloyd Haynes, 52, a TV Actor And a Co-Star of 'Room 222'

Published: January 5, 1987

Lloyd Haynes, an actor who was best known for his portrayal of the history teacher Pete Dixon in the Emmy Award-winning television series ''Room 222,'' died of lung cancer Wednesday in Coronado, Calif. He was 52 years old.

''Room 222,'' which was shown on ABC from September 1969 to January 1974 and is still in syndication, was one of the first television programs to concentrate, in a compassionate and fairly realistic manner, on problems that affected urban youth - such as drugs, dropping out and racial prejudice. A popular and critical success, the series won many awards from educational and civil-rights groups.

Mr. Haynes was born in South Bend, Ind., and studied acting at the Film Industries Workshop and Actors West in Los Angeles. He served in the Marine Corps from 1952 to 1964 and then as a public-affairs officer for the Naval reserve, with the rank of Commander.

He also appeared in several films, including ''Ice Station Zebra'' and ''Good Guys Wear Black.'' More recently, he played the role of Mayor Ken Morgan in the daytime soap opera ''General Hospital.''

For more on Room 222 go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_222

For three great reviews of Room 222 go to http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/room222.htm and http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/R/htmlR/room222/room222.htm and http://www.nostalgiacentral.com/tv/drama/room222.htm