Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Lucy Show: Gale Gordon, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance

The Lucy Show aired from September 1962 until September 1968 on CBS.

Tackling a series on her own, without ex-husband Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball firmly established herself as the first lady of American television with this long-running series.

When it appeared in the fall of 1962, The Lucy Show cast its star as Lucy Charmichael, a widow with 2 children, Chris and Jerry ( Candy Moore, Jimmy Garrett), living in suburban Danfield, Connecticut, and sharing a home with a divorce friend ( a first for a sitcom), Vivian Bagley ( Vivian Vance, Lucy's co-star from I Love Lucy), and Vivian's son Sherman( Ralph Hart). Occasionally seen during the first season were Lucy and Vivian's neighbor Harry Connors ( Dick Martin) and Lucy's banker , guardian of her husband's trust fund, Mr. Barnsdahl ( Charles Lane). Lucy was living on a meager trust left by her dead husband. Joining the cast in 1963 was Mr. Mooney ( Gale Gordon), Lucy's new banker who took over Mr. Barnsdahl's position at the bank. Both Lucy and Vivian were desperately looking to snag new husbands and Lucy, in an effort to keep busy eventually went to work part-time for Mr. Mooney at the Danfield First National Bank.

Following the third season, the show's format was drastically changed.In September 1965, with daughter Chris having just gone away to college, Lucy moved to San Francisco where she promptly enrolled her son Jerry in a military academy. Coincidentally Mr. Mooney was transferred to the Westland bank in San Francisco and was again handling Lucy's trust fund. Mooney who had been president of the bank in Connecticut, was a vice-president at the bank in San Francisco, which was run by Harrison Cheever (Roy Roberts). A short while later, Mr. Mooney reluctantly hired Lucy as his perminent secretary. Lucy's children Chris and Jerry were no longer in the cast and Vivian Bagley, no longer a series regular appeared only occasionally as a visitor from the East ( Vivian had gotten married). Lucy's new cohort was friend Mary Jane Lewis ( Mary Jane Croft who had also appeared as Lucy Ricardo's friend , Betty Ramsey on I Love Lucy).

In 1968 Lucille Ball sold her studio Desilu to Paramount. Rather than star in a show she didn't own, she canceled the top ranked series which had finished the season ranked #2 and started a new sitcom called Here's Lucy.

DID YOU KNOW?

It was Desi Arnaz who urged Lucille Ball to return to sitcoms following her interlude on Broadway, in the musical Wildcat where she met and later married Gary Morton ( Lucy and Desi had divorced in 1960 but remained partners at Desilu Productions). Lucy was apprehensive to start a new show without Desi so she had him produce the first few episodes.

Ann Sothern, an old Lucille Ball movie colleague ( they were chorus girls together) and star of Private Secretary and The Ann Sothern Show turned up several times as The Countess, a daffy would be socialite.

William Frawley, the erstwile Fred Mertz returned to the fold one last time in late 1965 in " Lucy and the Countess Have a House Guest" as his final acting appearance. He died in 1966.

Here is Gale Gordon's Obituary from The New York Times

Gale Gordon, TV Actor, 89; Longtime Foil to Lucille Ball

By ERIC PACE
Published: July 3, 1995

Gale Gordon, a character actor known for his comic fussiness and his television sitcom roles opposite Lucille Ball, died on Friday at the Redwood Terrace Health Center in Escondido, Calif. He was 89.

The cause was cancer, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Gordon was praised by critics for "his nifty slow-burn turns" and for being "always amusing in a state of high dudgeon." One of his later roles was the husband's boss in the series "Hi, Honey, I'm Home" in 1991.

But his heyday was an earlier, classic era when, as Frank Rich once suggested in a review in The New York Times, "the cartoon world of Lucille Ball and Gale Gordon" exemplified "the formulas of the old-time television sitcom."

Mr. Gordon played Miss Ball's masculine foil on television, in some ways the onscreen successor to Desi Arnaz, after the couple divorced in 1960. From 1962 to 1968, Mr. Gordon was a principal performer on "The Lucy Show," weekly on CBS, playing Mr. Mooney, a pompous bank executive, opposite Miss Ball's businesswoman and mother of grown children.

From 1968 to 1974, Mr. Gordon was her blustery boss and brother-in-law on the successor sitcom "Here's Lucy." And in 1986 he performed with Miss Ball in the ABC series "Life With Lucy."

His other television work included a co-starring role in "The Brothers" from 1956 to 1958 and roles in the series "My Favorite Husband" and "Our Miss Brooks" in the 1950's and "Dennis the Menace" in the 1960's.

Early in the 1950's, he had regular parts in seven weekly radio programs, including "Our Miss Brooks," "The Alice Faye-Phil Harris Show," "The Dennis Day Show" and the long-running "Fibber McGee and Molly." In that show he played Mayor LaTrivia, whose wrath always ended in a sputtered "McGee!"

Among the films in which Mr. Gordon appeared are "Here We Go Again" (1942), "A Woman of Distinction" (1950), "Don't Give Up the Ship" (1959), "Visit to a Small Planet" (1960), "Sergeant Deadhead" (1965) and "Speedway 85" (1968).

Mr. Gordon, a native New Yorker, was named Charles T. Aldrich Jr. at birth. His mother was an actress, his father a vaudevillian. He attended schools in New York and England.

His wife, the former Virginia Curley, an actress, died a few weeks ago. He is survived by a sister, Judy Wormser.

Here is Mary Jane Croft's Obituary from Variety
Published on August 31, 1999

Mary Jane Croft Lewis
By JILL PESSELNICK

Mary Jane Croft Lewis, an actress who worked opposite Lucille Ball on the TV series "I Love Lucy," "The Lucy Show" and "Here's Lucy," died Aug. 24 of natural causes at her home in Century City. She was 83.
Lewis played Lucy's neighbor Betty Ramsey on the 1957 season of "I Love Lucy." She went on to portray Mary Jane Lewis, a character with her own name that helped outwit Lucy's boss Gale Gordon on both "The Lucy Show" (1962-68) and "Here's Lucy" (1968-74). She also appeared on Ball's final TV special in 1979.

Lewis first began acting on radio in the late 1930s, working on dramas such as "Lux Radio Theatre," "One Man's Family" and "I Love a Mystery." She was also heard on the radio version of "Ozzie and Harriet."

In the 1950s she entered into TV acting, and from 1956 to 1966, she played Clara Randolph on "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."

Her late husband was Elliott Lewis, a producer of "The Lucy Show" who was also a mystery novelist and an actor. Her only son, Eric Zoller, was killed in the Vietnam War.

Here is Dick Martin's Obituary from The New York Times

Dick Martin, ‘Laugh-In’ Host, Dies at 86
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: May 26, 2008

Dick Martin, a veteran nightclub comic who with his partner, Dan Rowan, turned a midseason replacement slot at NBC in 1968 into a hit that redefined what could be done on television, died Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86 and lived in Malibu, Calif.

The cause was respiratory failure, a family spokesman, Barry Greenberg, said. Mr. Martin had lost one lung to tuberculosis as a teenager, and in recent years he had used an oxygen tank for much of the day.

“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the hyperactive, joke-packed show that Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan rode to fame, made conventional television variety programs seem instantly passé and the sitcom brand of humor seem too meek for the times.

The show was a collage of one-liners, non sequiturs, sight gags and double-entendres the likes of which prime time had rarely seen, and it proved that viewers were eager for more than sleepily paced plots and polite song-and-dance. “Laugh-In” quickly vaulted to the top of the television ratings, and it spawned an array of catchphrases: “Sock it to me,” “Here come da judge” and Mr. Martin’s signature line, “You bet your sweet bippy.”

“People are basically irreverent,” Mr. Martin said in 1968, explaining the appeal of the show. “They want to see sacred cows kicked over. You can’t have Harry Belafonte on your show and not have him sing a song, but we did; we had him climbing out of a bathtub, just because it looked irreverent and silly. If a show hires Robert Goulet, pays him $7,500 or $10,000, they’re going to want three songs out of him; we hire Robert Goulet, pay him $210 and drop him through a trap door.”

Though Mr. Martin had a respectable career in nightclubs before “Laugh-In” and enjoyed success as a television director after the show went off the air, his five years on “Laugh-In” elevated him to a different level of fame. The show won the Emmy Award for outstanding variety or musical series in both 1968 and 1969, and the special guests who dropped by to deliver one-liners included Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Cher, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Johnny Carson and, memorably with “Sock it to me?,” Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan, who died in 1987, became international stars; in 1972 they were hosts of a variety show staged before Queen Elizabeth II at the London Palladium.

Thomas Richard Martin was born Jan. 30, 1922, in Battle Creek, Mich. His father, William, was a salesman; his mother, Ethel, a homemaker. In the early 1930s the family moved to Detroit, where Dick’s teenage years included the bout with tuberculosis, which would keep him out of the military.

At 20 Mr. Martin, with his older brother, Bob, headed for Los Angeles with hopes of breaking into show business. He worked fitfully as an actor, a comic, and as a writer for radio shows like “Duffy’s Tavern,” but he was plying another trade, bartending, one day in 1952 when the comic Tommy Noonan brought in Dan Rowan, a former car salesman with showbiz aspirations of his own. Mr. Noonan introduced the two, and they quickly found their shtick — Rowan the sophisticate, Martin the laid-back lunk. They took their act on the road, inching up the club-circuit pecking order.

“It had no real highs or lows, it was just straight-ahead work,” Mr. Martin recalled of those early nightclub years in a 2007 interview. “I don’t think we ever failed. We didn’t zoom to stardom, but we always worked.”

Some of that work was on the small-time television programs that had sprung up in local markets — “Every city had a show like that: ‘Coffee With Phil,’ whatever,” Mr. Martin recalled — and the duo achieved a comfort level in the medium that proved useful once they became nightclub headliners. National television shows came calling, including Ed Sullivan’s, where Rowan & Martin made at least 16 appearances.

Mr. Martin also had a recurring role on “The Lucy Show” in the early 1960s, playing Lucille Ball’s neighbor, Harry Conners. But it was his work with Mr. Rowan that held the big payoff: the two had appeared on Dean Martin’s variety show on NBC, and — this being the era when stars took the summer off but their shows didn’t — in 1966 they were asked to be the hosts of “The Dean Martin Summer Show” for all 12 episodes.

“They were so high-rated that NBC said, ‘We want you to do a show for us,’ ” Mr. Martin recalled in 2007, and that led to a pilot for “Laugh-In,” which was broadcast Sept. 9, 1967. The show was well regarded — it won an Emmy as the outstanding musical or variety program — and when “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” began to falter in midseason, Rowan & Martin got their shot at a series. Replacing that spy drama, “Laugh-In” made its debut on Jan. 22, 1968.

The show, partly the brainchild of the producer George Schlatter (who would later get into a court battle with Mr. Rowan and Mr. Martin over the rights to it), pushed the envelope of topical humor, something “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” had begun doing the year before. “Laugh-In,” though, was more interested in creating a frenetic pace than in creating controversy. To do so it relied on a cast of young, largely unknown comics like Judy Carne, Henry Gibson and Jo Anne Worley — a risky approach that one writer who logged time on the series, Lorne Michaels, would use when he shook up television anew in 1975 with “Saturday Night Live.” And, just as with the “S.N.L.” cast, a few “Laugh-In” alumni went on to impressive careers, most notably Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.

“Laugh-In” stayed No. 1 through its first two seasons, garnering 11 Emmy nominations in 1969 for Season 2. The novelty, though, began to wear off, and by 1973 it was no longer on the air. A string of specials in later years revisited the format but without the jolt that the show’s first two seasons caused, and a 1969 film featuring Mr. Rowan and Mr. Martin, “The Maltese Bippy,” was panned. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, called it “a movie that cheapens everything it touches.”

Mr. Martin’s friend Bob Newhart helped him transition to the director’s chair. He directed a number of episodes of the long-running “Bob Newhart Show,” as well as episodes of shows like “Archie Bunker’s Place,” “Family Ties” and Mr. Newhart’s later series. Mr. Martin also continued to act, playing roles on shows like “The Love Boat” and “Diagnosis Murder,” and turned up frequently on game shows and celebrity roasts in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his occasional film roles was an appearance in “Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver,” a 1998 comedy directed by his son, Richard Martin.

In the early “Laugh-In” years Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan were as opposite offstage as they seemed to be onstage. Mr. Martin, whose 1957 marriage to Peggy Connelly ended in divorce in the early 1960s, was the swinging bachelor, Mr. Rowan the quiet family man. But in 1971 Mr. Martin married Dolly Read, a former Playmate of the Month who had appeared in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” After divorcing four years later, they remarried in 1978. She survives him, as do Richard Martin and, from his marriage to Ms. Connelly, another son, Cary, as well as one grandchild.

Despite the fame and wealth that “Laugh-In” brought, Mr. Martin always retained a fondness for the earlier part of his career.

“My life has been divided into three parts in the show-business world: nightclubs, television, and then I was a director for 30 years of television shows,” he said in a 2006 interview on “The O’Reilly Factor.” “And I think the most fun I ever had was nightclubs. I loved nightclubs.”

For The Lucy Lounge go to http://lucylounge.suddenlaunch2.com/

For The Gale Gordon Archive go to http://www.geocities.com/gale_gordon/