Raise a Pint to George Wendt

Mailman Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) was the literal USPS-blue-collar worker on Cheers, but his good buddy Norm Peterson (George Wendt), an accountant, was its everyman.

Wendt passed on Tuesday of natural causes. He was 76.

I like to think that Wendt’s predeceased friends and family greeted him at the gates with a hearty, in-concert “George!” — though they’d probably be drowned out by a fan chorus of “Norm!” — and then “Coach” Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto) meets his old TV barfly at the gates with a pint. Hopefully it’s not the same stuff that he, Sam Malone (Ted Danson), Woody Boyd (Woody Harrelson) and the rest of the Cheers (1982-1993) staff used to pour at the fictitious (at the time) Cheers Boston.

Norm spoke about ascension in the final minutes of the Cheers series finale.

“If there’s a Heaven, I don’t want to go there unless my stool is waiting for me,” he tells Malone. “And I’ll tell you what, even God better not be on it.”

Norm was really gonna miss that bar. But what Peterson says next is the real takeaway of the scene.

”I don’t think it matters what you love, Sammy,” Norm says to Malone, the bar’s on-again/off-again owner. “It could be a person, it could be a thing. As long as you love it totally, completely and without judgment.”

Though Sam and Diane (Shelley Long) reconcile in the finale, it is the Cheers bar that Malone loves totally, completely and without judgment.

Norm Peterson loved his beer and his wife Vera. The Cheers patrons and staff loved Norm. Through the show and the character, America loved Wendt.

Wendt was not just some series regular in an ensemble. Only he, Danson and Rhea Pearlman appeared in each of the 275 episodes of Cheers. Wendt was the most-nominated actor on the show: he received six consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series.

So it was fitting when, aside from Sam, who owned the bar, Norm was the final person to exit Cheers Boston on its last night in business. Norm is actually the one who locks up the bar behind Woody (Boyd/Harrelson) to share the moment with Malone.

A continuity error aside (Norm leaves through the same door, which is unlocked, and Malone never re-locks it; a customer then knocks on the unlocked door, prompting Malone to speak the series’ final words, “Sorry, we’re closed”), the Cheers finale is considered one of the best in TV history.

Like Norm, Wendt too loved his beer. Post-Cheers, Wendt served as pitchman for Miller Lite and Meister Brau. He even wrote a book about beer.

“I’m a simple man, I don’t ask for much. Give me a nice comfortable chair, a cool breeze, a ballgame on the radio and an ice-cold beer, and I couldn’t be happier,” 2009’s Drinking With George: A Barstool Professional’s Guide to Beer begins. “Truth be told, if it came down to it, I could live without the chair. A cool breeze is nice, but it isn’t exactly mandatory for a good time. And there are plenty of times when I don’t have access to a ballgame.”

“But a world without beer?” he continued. “I don’t know if that’s the kind of world I want to live in.”

Well, he could have done without the Cheers Boston beer.

Though Hilary Norman Peterson (he was named after his grandfather) always had a beer in his hand or “a quick one” on the way, Wendt almost never drank real beer on camera. None of the cast did. It has been well-documented that the beer served by and to the Cheers cast was non-alcoholic, which is pretty typical of film and TV productions for a variety of reasons, like performance issues, safety concerns and industry guidelines. But the Cheers Boston near-beer was also room temperature (if not outright warm) and flat, and required a pinch of salt just to create a head.

It was “disgusting,” Wendt said, and potentially dangerous.

“There I was slamming those down for a whole day. It not only tastes disgusting, I was afraid of keeling over from high blood pressure,” he told The Washington Post in 1985. “Then I got the knack. I didn’t have to put all those brews away. It only mattered when the camera was pointing my way. It took a couple of years, but now I watch the camera. That’s how I make my money. That’s acting.”

There was one time that he didn’t need to act; just drink, baby.

In the 1993 Cheers series finale, before Norm gives Sam (and the 93 million viewers at home) a little life advice (and some weird stuff happens with the front door’s locking mechanism), Malone, Boyd, Clavin, Carla Tortelli (Pearlman) and Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammar) share a final group farewell at their beloved watering hole. They had real beer for the scene — well, Crane was a Sherry man — and from off camera, Burrows boozed it up with his cast.

After that one last toast, the cast got really toasted. The Cheers cameras may not have been running for that, but The Tonight Show ones were.

The Cheers finale was such a huge deal that Jay Leno brought The Tonight Show (an NBC institution, like Cheers) from Burbank, California to Boston’s Bull & Finch, the real bar that served as the Cheers Boston exterior for each Cheers episode. Leno’s monologue was performed outside in what is now known as Eddie Doyle Square, named after longstanding Bull & Finch bartender Eddie Doyle. (In a deal with NBC, The Bull & Finch itself has since been renamed Cheers Beacon Hill.)

The rest of the special Tonight Show episode took place inside. It was there and then that the Cheers cast really said goodbye to each other — and they were definitely drinking the real stuff.

Cheers, George Wendt.