EAST RIDGE, Tenn. — Family and friends will gather in East Ridge next month to remember Dennis Haskins, the Chattanooga native who spent years as the bow-tied Principal Richard Belding on the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell.
Chattanooga Funeral Home will hold a visitation in its East Chapel from 4 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 12. Father Mike Nolan will lead the memorial mass the next morning, Friday, Nov. 13, at 11 a.m., inside Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. The burial will be private. Both services take place in East Ridge, at a church that shares its name with the Catholic grade school he attended as a boy.
Haskins was 75 when he died on Sept. 27 in Burbank, Calif., at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center. His obituary says he had been living with Parkinson’s disease.
His ties to the area ran deep. He went to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic School as a boy and finished at Notre Dame High School with the class of 1968. After a short stay at the University of Tennessee he came home to UTC, where he tried out for basketball, joined Kappa Sigma and got pulled into drama classes at the urging of his basketball coach.
His first paid acting job was a small Dukes of Hazzard role, playing a character named Elmo Smith. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and picked up roles on Magnum, P.I., Archie Bunker’s Place and Hardcastle and McCormick before landing the Belding role, which he first played on Good Morning, Miss Bliss.
Before acting took over, he also handled management and booking work for musical acts, including the group Overland Express.
