Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Television’ Category

This is one of my favorite Christmas sitcom episodes. Ozzie Nelson is just not feeling the Christmas spirit, and decided he wants to keep things simple this year. No Christmas lights on the house, and the Christmas tree can wait. He finds himself tricked into singing with a group of carolers, but that’s all he’s going to do. But then he gets talked into playing Scrooge in the Men’s Club production of A Christmas Carol, and playing Santa at the Christmas Eve party at the orphanage. He finds himself practicing saying “Christmas! Bah, humbug!” and singing the bass part of “Deck the Halls” while climbing the ladder to hang those lights, and getting more and more worried about how he’s going to fit everything in. But Harriet, David and Ricky pitch in and help, and everything works out just fine.

This is the 1956 Christmas episode of the Ozzie and Harriet program, as rebroadcast in 1964 with an introduction and postlude. We get to see how the Nelsons changed in the intervening eight years, and see David and Rick’s wives and children, and hear the dreamy Rick sing “The Christmas Song.”

“The Bob Cumming Show” (known as “Love That Bob” in reruns) was a racy 1950s situation comedy starring Bob Cummings as California fashion photographer Bob Collins, surrounded all day (and most nights) by beautiful models. He’s the coolest guy in town, but instead living in a bachelor pad he lives with his widowed, respectable sister Margaret (played by Rosemary DeCamp) and her teenage son Chuck (played by Dwayne Hickman). Margaret and Bob’s sensible secretary Schultzy (played by Ann B. Davis) do their best to keep bachelor Bob out of trouble.

“Grandpa’s Christmas Visit” was broadcast on December 22, 1955, during the show’s second season. Grandpa Collins comes from Joplin, Missouri, to visit Bob, Margaret and Chuck. He looks an awful lot like an older version of Bob, and has the same way with the girls, and, as you might imagine, much merriment ensues…

Grandpa’s Christmas Visit from the Internet Archive:

Gart Williams is a New York advertising executive who is burnt out. His boss, Oliver Misrell (All-Over Miserable?), is a tyrant whose motto is Push-Push-Push, and his wife Jane is a cold, selfish woman who doesn’t care if he’s happy as long as he keeps making money.

After a terrible day at the office, Gart gets on the commuter train home to Connecticut. It’s dark and snowy outside, and the weary Gart drifts off to sleep. When he wakes up, the conductor is calling out the stop for Willoughby. The train has been transformed into something from the nineteenth century, and when he looks out and sees a summer afternoon in a small town of 100 years ago, with a band playing, a couple of barefoot boys walking by with fishing poles, and a horse-drawn wagon waiting at the station. When he questions the conductor about the town, he’s told it’s a quiet place where a man can slow down and “live his life full measure.” When he goes to the steps to look out, the train jars back into motion, and Gart wakes up in his seat, back in the present.
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Gale Storm, best-remembered from her 1950’s program “My Little Margie,” died on June 27 at the age of 87.

Born Josephine Cottle, her career began in 1940 when she won a national talent contest called Gateway to Hollywood. The official prize was a movie contract RKO contract under the name Gale Storm. She fell in love with contest’s male winner, Lee Bonnell, who she married in 1941.

In the 1940s, Gale Storm appeared in many B movies but her big break came in 1952, when “My Little Margie” premiered as a summer replacement for “I Love Lucy.” Both shows were set in Manhattan and revolved around madcap women and their crazy schemes which often involved dress-up and deception, always backfired and both amused and exasperated the men in their lives.
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