DICK VAN DYKE ON DAYS RUN

Legendary actor Dick Van Dyke, who made his daytime debut on September 1, found his way to Salem via the show’s longtime leading man, Drake Hogestyn (John), who he met at the gym.

“I used to see Drake almost every day,” begins Van Dyke. “I said, ‘Don’t you ever work?’ — those guys have a lot of days off! — ‘Do you have any parts for old people?’ Well, he took me seriously and went and said, ‘Dick wants to be on the show,’ and they made it happen.”

Van Dyke was introduced as a mystery man at the hospital, marking his first appearance ever on a soap. “After Drake said, ‘Why don’t you come on the show?’, I said, ‘I’d love to have a new experience,’ ” he recalls. “I had never watched a soap opera, really, because I don’t have five days in a row to watch anything [laughs]. So I did four episodes and they cast me as an old man, an Alzheimer’s kind of typecasting, I must say.”