Alan Alda is selling the combat boots and dog tags he wore to portray wisecracking surgeon Hawkeye on M*A*S*H.
The pieces will be auctioned to raise funds for the actor’s centre dedicated to helping scientists and doctors communicate better.
Heritage Auctions is offering up the props in Dallas, Texas, on July 28.
Alda, 87, said he wore the boots and dog tags for the 11-series run of the show about a Korean War medical unit.
His character, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, was a talented surgeon who helped ease the stress of working in a war zone with quick quips and practical jokes.
When the show ended in 1983 with an episode written and directed by Alda, it attracted the largest US audience for any TV show in history.
The boots and dog tags, given to Alda by the costume department, “made an impression on me every day that we shot the show”, said the actor, who won five Emmys for his work on the sitcom.
Over his long career, Alda has also been a writer and filmmaker and has worked on Broadway and starred in films.
He currently hosts a podcast on communicating called Clear+Vivid.
“There’s an old belief among actors that when you put the shoes of the character on, it’s easier to believe you’re the character and I think the boots had that effect on me,” Alda said.
After receiving the dog tags, Alda realised they did not carry his character’s name but the names of two men he thought had likely been real soldiers.
“I saw those names every day,” he said.
“It was an interesting experience to put them on. I wasn’t dealing with props. I was dealing with something that put me in touch with real people.”
The dog tags carried the names of Hersie Davenport and Morriss D. Levine.
Research conducted by the auction house revealed that both men were discharged from the Army in 1945.
According to Heritage Auctions’ research, Davenport died in 1970.
Levine, whose first name was misspelled on the dog tag with an extra S, died in 1973.
Joshua Benesh, Heritage’s chief strategy officer, said the boots and dog tags have an “incredible” provenance since they have been with Alda since the series ended.
“It was pretty thrilling that what he chose to keep was something that endured with him episode after episode, season after season, throughout the entire run of M*A*S*H,” Mr Benesh said.
Alda said he kept both items on a shelf in his office and then stowed in a closet.
Auctioning them off after all of these decades made sense to him.
“I saw this as a chance to put them to work again,” he said.
The money raised from the auction will go to the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, a facility he helped start to help scientists and doctors communicate better by applying improvisational exercises and communication strategies.
While hosting the long-running PBS series Scientific American Frontiers, Alda realised how much his skills as an actor and improviser prepared him for interactions with scientists.
The essence of improvisation, he said, is being connected to the person you are talking to.
Alda, who announced in 2018 that he has Parkinson’s disease, said he uses some of the same acting skills to deal with the disease’s effects.
The condition, he said, is “a little like improvisation: It gives you something you didn’t expect”.
But, he said, “if you work on it, you get somewhere”.
“It’s an opportunity. I solve a lot of puzzles and a lot of problems just getting my shirt on and that kind of thing that I wouldn’t ordinarily have to face,” Alda said.
“But if I take it as a game and see how I can win it this time, it’s more interesting.”
