Napier was 75, and reportedly collapsed in his Bakerfield home before being transferred to a local hospital, where he passed away.
Born in the mid-late 1930s in a Kentucky small town, Napier (pictured) was in his mid-30s when he worked as a roving correspondent for Overdrive, a job he’d taken after appearing in the 1970 flick Moonfire, a trucking movie produced by then Overdrive editor and publisher Michael Parkhurst. My Channel 19 predecessor, Andy Duncan, wrote a comprehensive review of that flick when it became available on DVD in the year 2008.
Roger Ebert called him “that character actor with a smile like Jaws,” and he built a career on his tough-guy / menacing-authority-figure roles. Just this year, too, in January Napier released a memoir, Square Jaw and Big Heart, available via Amazon in print and Kindle editions.
For more about Napier, read Lucinda Coulter’s Overdrive Retro piece, featuring a picture of Napier with singer Red Simpson taken during an Overdrive radio hour event in 1971, when Simpson’s “I’m a Truck” was a top-ten hit.