Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - My Three Sons

Uncle Charley: This is California- the land of milk and money

Steve: You mean milk and honey.

Uncle Charley: I'm too old for honey-I'll take money.

My Three Sons aired from September 1960 until August 1972 on ABC and CBS.

Second only to Ozzie And Harriet as network television's longest running non-animated situation comedy , My Three Sons had a Disney flavor to it. Fred MacMurray and Tim Considine had starred together in the hit Disney movie The Shaggy Dog, and Don Grady was a former Mickey Mouse Club mouseketeer. Even little Stanley Livingston was a show-business veteran, having appeared in several episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.

The "family" in this case was all-male. Steve Douglas ( Frd MacMurray), a consulting aviation engineer, lived with his children at 837 Mill Street in a medium-sized Midwestern city. A widower, he seemed to spend more time raising his three sons than he did at his job, what with the usual growing pains of boys just beginning to date, going on camping trips, and the other "adventures" of middle-class suburbia. Steve also spent a good deal of time fending off attractive women, who wanted to marry him and take over that lovable, ready-made family.When the series began in 1960, the boys were aged 18 (Mike)( Tim Considine), 14 (Robbie)( Don Grady), and 7 (Chip)( Stanley Livingston). Steve's father-in-law was "Bub" O'Casey( William Frawley),a lovable old coot who lived with them and served as a kind of housekeeper to the clan. When he left after five seasons to take a trip to Ireland (William Frawley, seriously ill, left midway through the 1964-1965 season), he was replaced by his brother, Uncle Charley( William Demarest), a retired sailor whose crusty disposition masked a soft heart.

Others joining the cast in the early years were: Sally( Meredith MacRae), Mike's girlfriend and later fiancée (the first serious romance he had had since his infatuation with the "girl next door," Jean Pearson played by Cynthia Pepper); Robbie's friend Hank( Peter Brooks); and Chip's pals, Sudsy Pfeiffer and Ernie Thompson( Ricky Allen, Barry Livingston). Tramp was the family dog.

By the start of the 1965-1966 season when the show moved from ABC to CBS, Tim Considine had grown out of the role as oldest son and wanted out of the series. In the first CBS episode, Mike and Sally got married and moved east so that he might accept a job teaching psychology on the college level. To re-establish the "three sons," Steve subsequently adopted the orphaned Ernie. Things went along much as before for the next two seasons.

In the fall of 1967, Steve moved the family from the Midwest to North Hollywood, California, where his job had taken him. Although the adjustment was not completely pleasant - many of the Douglasses' new acquaintances were not too friendly at first - there were good sides to the move. Robbie fell in love with Katie Miller one of his fellow students at college, and their romance blossomed into marriage before the end of the season. Katie was played by actress Tina Cole, who had been seen, over the previous few seasons, in a number of "high school girl" roles on My Three Sons. In the fall of 1968, the newlyweds discovered that Katie was pregnant and during that season she gave birth to triplets, Steve Jr., Charley, and Robbie II ( Josephm Michael, and Daniel Todd)- three sons, of course. In 1969, new love finally came to father Steve in the person of widow Barbara Harper( Beverly Garland), one of Ernie's teachers. They were married during the season and Barbara's young daughter, Dodie( Dawn Lynn), joined the family. Even Chip (who was by now 17) got into the act, eloping with his college girlfriend, Polly Williams( Ronne Troup), in the fall of 1970.

Then at the end of the season actor Don Grady left the series. He had grown tired of playing the role of Robbie Douglas and wanted to concentrate on his music career. This sent the producers into a quandry. How would the show fare without him? The following season it was explained that Robbie was sent to Peru to help as a structual engineer on a bridge being built. Katie and her 3 son's however, continued to live at the Douglas home. The series should have had a name transplant...it was now about a much larger family with the emphasis on all members.

As if the sprawling family had not gotten big enough already, Steve's cousin, Fergus McBain Douglas( also played by Fred MacMurray), arrived in the fall of 1971 in search of a wife to take back home to Scotland. A nobleman in his native land, Lord Fergus fell in love with cocktail waitress Terri Dowling( Anne Francis). She felt inadequate to go back to Scotland as royalty, but was eventually persuaded.

In its later years, as the size of the family on My Three Sons grew and separated into individual households, episodes could no longer include the entire group. More and more often, they dealt with the specific problems of only a part of the large cast of regulars, with different members taking the spotlight from week to week.

From December 1971 until a few weeks after the series ended its prime-time run. CBS ran repeat episodes in its daytime lineup.

Here is Fred MacMurray's Obituary from The New York Times

Fred MacMurray Is Dead at 83; Versatile Film and Television Star

By PETER B. FLINT
Published: November 6, 1991

Fred MacMurray, the personable, unassuming actor who starred in some of the best film comedies of the 1930's and 40's and was later the protagonist in popular Walt Disney fantasies and the television situation comedy "My Three Sons," died yesterday at St. John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83 years old and lived in Los Angeles.

He died of pneumonia after being admitted to the hospital on Monday afternoon, said Sarah O'Meara, a family friend.

Reviewers repeatedly praised the charm, credibility and spontaneity of the 6-foot-3-inch-tall, pipe-smoking former saxophonist who had never studied acting. He had a good-guy image in nearly 80 films, but his most noted roles were cads -- a passion-crazed murderer in "Double Indemnity" (1944) and "Pushover" (1954), a deceitful Navy lieutenant in "The Caine Mutiny" (1954) and an exploitative philanderer in "The Apartment" (1960).

Billy Wilder persuaded the affable actor to play the rotters in "Double Indemnity" and "The Apartment" to surprise and shock moviegoers. He did. According to a possibly apocryphal anecdote, Mr. MacMurray was walking in Disneyland one day when an elderly woman approached him and declared: "I always liked you until I saw you in 'The Apartment.' Now I hate you." She is said to have then pummeled him with her purse and stalked off.

"Whether I play a heavy or a comedian," he said, "I always start out Smiley MacMurray, a decent Rotarian type. If I play a heavy, there comes a point in the film when the audience realizes I'm really a heel." A Listing of Main Films

Mr. MacMurray's films include "Alice Adams" (1935), "Hands Across the Table" (1935), "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" (1936), "The Texas Rangers" (1936), "Champagne Waltz" (1937), "True Confession" (1937), "Sing You Sinners" (1938), "Remember the Night" (1940) and "Take a Letter, Darling" (1942).

Others are "Above Suspicion" (1943), "And the Angels Sing" (1944), "Where Do We Go From Here?" (a 1945 musical fantasy that gave the onetime vocalist a chance to sing), "The Egg and I" (1947), "Callaway Went Thataway" (1951) and "There's Always Tomorrow" (1956).

The actor's Disney films include "The Shaggy Dog" (1959), "The Absent-Minded Professor" (1961), in which he invented "flubber," a magical rubber compound that enables people and objects to fly, and "Son of Flubber" (1963).

Mr. MacMurray said he enjoyed film making, remarking: "It's nice to know you can do it again."

"I take my movie parts as they come," he said. "I don't fly into an emotional storm about them. I just do them. I guess I am an offhand comedian in a natural way." 'I'm Lazy in Spurts'

He said he was not "a dedicated actor" because "I'm lazy in spurts -- I'd as soon go fishing or play golf." As a result, he declined many offers to do stage plays and television series. However, he agreed to star in "My Three Sons" when a producer, Don Fedderson, promised he would have to work on it only three months a year. His scenes were shot first, and the other actors did the rest of the scenes later. He was given a high salary and a partnership.

"My Three Sons" focused on a widowed father of three boys and their gruff but lovable maternal grandfather (William Frawley) and later their great-uncle (William Demarest), who oversaw household chores. The artfully produced series became one of the most popular on television, both in the United States and abroad, running in prime time from 1960 to 1972 and many more years in syndication. CBS bought it in 1965, reportedly for more than $7 million.

Mr. MacMurray won many raises at Paramount Pictures, where he spent his first decade in Hollywood. In 1943, his annual salary was nearly $420,000, making him that year's highest-paid actor and fourth-highest-paid American. Frugal by nature, he put his finances in the hands of a manager, made many profitable investments and reputedly became one of Los Angeles's richest citizens. Son of a Concert Violinist

Frederick Martin MacMurray was born on Aug. 30, 1908, in Kankakee, Ill., where his father, Frederick, a concert violinist, was on tour. He began to know financial insecurity at the age of 5, when his parents separated. He spent most of his youth in Beaver Dam, Wis., where he graduated from high school with 10 letters in athletics. In high school and for one year at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis., where he had an American Legion scholarship, he led his own three-piece band, Mac's Melody Boys.

Over the next eight years, Mr. MacMurray was a saxophonist and vocalist with various dance and vaudeville bands around the country and appeared on Broadway in two revues, "Three's a Crowd" and "The Third Little Show," and in a Jerome Kern musical, "Roberta." He won a contract with Paramount and achieved stardom in his first leading role, in the 1935 comedy "Gilded Lily.'

He appeared in a wide variety of roles but gradually specialized in comedy, both sophisticated and farcical. He typically played genial, persistent leading men and became one of the most durable stars.

Mr. MacMurray often appeared with such film goddesses as Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck and Madeleine Carroll, but he said he was no great screen lover. "Sometimes," he remarked, "scenes include people who just say 'Hi' to indicate they're in love. I play those scenes very well."

He was a family-oriented man who lived unflamboyantly and relatively modestly, despite his wealth. His favorite recreations were golf, fishing, painting and cooking.

He is survived by his wife, the former actress June Haver, whom he married in 1954; a son, Robert, of Hawaii, and three daughters, Laurie Sipma of Sacramento, Calif., Kate MacMurray of Los Angeles and Susan Pool of Little Rock, Ark. His first wife, Lillian LaMonte, an actress and model, died in 1953.

For the Fred MacMurray Home Page go to http://www2.powercom.net/~fredmac/

For info on Fred MacMurray's death go to http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/m/Macmurray/fred_macmurray.htm

For the William Demarest Web Site go to http://members.tripod.com/~compmast/demarest/demarest.html

For more on Don Grady go to http://www.meekermuseum.com/grady.html

For the Official Stanley Livingston Web Site go to http://www.stanleylivingston.com/

For the Official Meredith MacRae Web Site go to http://meredithmacrae.com/

For Dawn Lyn's Official Website go to http://www.dawn-lyn.com/galleries.asp

For 2 great reviews of My Three Sons go to www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/mythreesons/mythreesons.htm and http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/overview8.htm#sons