One of the most improbable hit television shows ever -- "Mr. Ed" -- was bidding "adieu" that year -- while another, "Hogan's Heroes" -- was debuting. What does drug use have to do with that?

Just this: The odds are great that whoever first pitched the idea of a show about a talking horse was smoking something stronger than Newports. The same can be said for whoever first uttered the line "Hey, let's make a comedy about a prisoner-of-war camp set in World War II."

Don't bogart that joint, indeed.

The most memorable thing about 1965's shows for me wasn't the talking horse, though: it was a talking character in "Hogan's Heroes'."

Ivan Dixon was the actor who played Kinchloe, the communications wizard who was always fixing the prisoners' two-way radio and who could mimic his German captors' voices.

His role wasn't a standout one in the ensemble cast, but in 1965 seeing any black dude on television who wasn't bucking and dancing -- as so many of them do now -- was unusual. Among the top 10 shows that year were "Gomer Pyle, USMC," "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Bonanza." Blacks on those shows were scarcer than talking horses, unless you count Hop Sing.

(This was, however, also the same year Bill Cosby shared starring credits with Robert Culp on "I Spy," making him the first black actor to star on a dramatic series.)

Dixon is famous to most people for his "Hogan's" role and for starring roles in critically acclaimed movies such as "Nothin' but a Man." The theater troupe at N.C. Central University, which he attended, is known as the Ivan Dixon Players.

Hollis Shaw of Durham and George Johnson of Wake Forest, though, remember him as a classmate at Lincoln Academy in Gaston County in the 1940s.

Dixon died last month at 77, and most obituaries mentioned Lincoln Academy as an afterthought.

To Dixon, Johnson, Shaw and the thousands of other black kids who attended Lincoln over the decades, though, the years spent at the boarding school were the defining ones of their lives.

Dixon was a high school dropout in New York -- headed down the destructive path most dropouts find themselves on -- when his mother sent him to Lincoln Academy. Dixon's daughter, Doris Dixon, with whom I spoke several weeks before her dad's death, said he often credited the school with saving his life.

Shaw, a retired clinical psychologist, was at Lincoln at the same time as Dixon. "He was so convincing playing a lawyer in a play ... that our teacher told him he should be a lawyer," Shaw recalled. Of course, it was also the teacher, Mary Owen (whom Dixon, Shaw and Johnson visited last year in Nashville, Tenn.) who had initially convinced Dixon to try the stage.

She was 93, Shaw said, and "one of the last surviving teachers from Lincoln. She was just as sharp as ever and remembered many of the things we'd done" at the school. The teacher was proud of all of them he said, not just their more famous classmate.

That's the feeling you get when you talk to any of the Lincoln alumni.

Johnson of Wake Forest and Shaw of Durham said they saw nothing unusual about being taught Latin and proper etiquette in a school right next to cotton fields where their contemporaries toiled.

Lincoln Academy exists now only in pictures and in the memories of those former students from around the country whose parents felt they thought needed more formal education than was available.

The need for such schools still exists, though, but not just to teach black boys which fork to use with their salads. It could probably help teach them to stop killing each other.