Recognizable for his perennially cherubic countenance and myriad roles of mild-mannered and beleaguered fathers or authority figures on the big and small screen, Dick Van Patten boasted one of the lengthiest and most varied résumés in the acting business. As a child, Van Patten performed alongside giants of Broadway during its Golden Age in some of the theater’s greatest works, became a familiar face nationally in the early days of television, and deftly avoided the “child actor curse” that some of his later co-stars could not, working consistently for six decades. Becoming a patriarch of a