Carl Gordon, who started his acting career well into his adulthood, died on Tuesday (07-20-10) at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78. The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said.

Gordon was best known as the patriarch on “Roc,” the situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991.

The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man:

“Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem,” Andrew declared in one episode. “His real name is Abdul Mustafa.”

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