Maxwell Emmett "Pat" Buttram (June 19, 1915 – January 8, 1994) was an American actor, known for playing the sidekick of Gene Autry and for playing the character of Mr. Haney in the television series Green Acres. He had a distinctive voice which, in his own words, "never quite made it through puberty".

Biography

In 1936, Buttram married Dorothy McFadden. The couple adopted a daughter but divorced in 1946. In 1952, he married actress Sheila Ryan; the marriage ended with her death in 1975. They had a daughter named Kathrine (nicknamed Kerry) born in 1954. Buttram retired from acting in 1980 and made his home in his native Winston County, Alabama. However, he soon returned to California, where he made frequent personal appearances.

Buttram was a staunch Republican who helped Ronald W. Reagan spice up his speeches with political quips. In 1993, Buttram expressed surprise that with the inauguration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore as US President and Vice President, respectively, so many Hollywood actors were "taken with that whole country-boy image they tried to project." According to his niece, Mary Buttram Young of Sheffield, Alabama, "Uncle Pat would always say, 'I'm from Alabama - I can see right through that'."

Buttram died in 1994 at the age of seventy-eight of renal failure in Los Angeles, California. He is interred at the cemetery at the Maxwell Chapel United Methodist Church in the Pebble community near Haleyville, Alabama.

Buttram was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and one on the "Alabama Stars of Fame" in Birmingham.

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