Jay Hammer (born November 16, 1944) is an American actor best known for his long run as Fletcher Reade on CBS Daytime's Guiding Light from March 1984 until March 1998. He returned briefly in the Spring of 1999, and again made an appearance as the show ended in 2009.
Other roles include The Blue Knight, Kojak, Mannix, Sons and Daughters, Emergency!, and Adam-12. His theater credits include off-Broadway productions of Passing Through From Exotic Places and Serenading Louie. An earlier soap opera role was that of ranch forehand Max Dekker on Texas.
Hammer had a notable credit role as Allan Willis during the 1978–1979 season of The Jeffersons. Allan was the son of mixed-race couple Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover and Roxie Roker).
Hammer was married for a time to former Guiding Light head writer Pam Long, and they had two children together. Hammer himself wrote for Guiding Light using the name Charles Jay Hammer. He graduated from the University of the Pacific.
Famous quotes containing the words jay and/or hammer:
“People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)