Chet Allen

Perhaps best remembered as TV's first Amahl in Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), Chet Allen was also a member of the famous Columbus Boychoir (now the American Boychoir) during that period. Although he made a few other notable appearances over the years, most notably in the film Meet Me at the Fair (1953) with Dan Dailey and Scatman Crothers, and as one of Ezio Pinza's sons on his TV series, Bonino (1953) when his voice changed, so did his life, for the worse. Like many another former child star, he drifted from job to job and, in his case, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. When Menotti himself visited him in Columbus, about a year before his death, he found a bitterly unhappy young man for whom life had been a series of disappointments. "No one could have helped him enough," Menotti would later say. In 1984, at the age of 44, Chet Allen killed himself by taking five times the fatal dosage of the prescription anti-depressant he'd been taking.