The Los Angelinos have dubbed Knox's area "the homeless district." Tourists don't go there, and even Americans hesitate to venture there, at least on their own and particularly at night. Since a few weeks back, Terence Knox lives there, in a big loft in an industrial building converted to an apartment.

Second surprise, which maybe explains part of the first: the sergeant of "Tour of Duty" fought, as an amateur boxer, in fifty-seven fights. Even for a professional, that is a great score. He lost only one fight, and won the amateur championship title in the US, the Golden Gloves.

Still interested in sports, and still unmarried as he approaches 40, he moved to Hollywood about ten years ago, earning his living as a clerk at a bookstore specializing in erotica. Not all that strange. After all, he holds a Literature degree.

"As a boy, I dreamed of becoming an actor, but my father worked in construction and my mother was a typist, and in Richland, the small town where I was born (in the extreme northwestern part of the US) you realized early on that certain dreams were hard to realize. So I pursued more 'serious' studies instead."

All the same, Terence Knox managed to land a role that made him famous in the US before "Tour of Duty": that of Dr. White in the soap opera "St. Elsewhere," a doctor whose private life is an encyclopedia of vices and human perversions.