Chamblee54

PG was waiting for Uzi to come over, for their sunday afternoon adventure. PG had been meaning to write about Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, who met his maker July 12, 2011. PG decided to see how much he could knock out while Uzi was coming over. (PG was starting to copy html code into the finished text when Uzi arrived.) Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
Against his better judgement, PG entered “Sherwood Schwartz” into google. Before you could say Skipper, he was on the twitter page of Tina Louise. (Ginger Grant on Gilligan’s Island) .”The official Twitter account of Tina Louise: actress, mother, friend. Still living on an island (Manhattan).” The former “Movie Star” ( and gf of Lenny Bruce) said “Sherwood Schwartz brought laughter and comfort to millions of people. Gilligan’s Island was a family. He will be in our hearts forever.” On April 18, she tweeted “Just saw Philip Monaghan’s amazing art exhibit correlating watching Gilligan’s Island to escape from the sadness of Kennedy’s assassination.”
The first post was at WFMU. “Someone gave me his home phone number a couple of months ago. I called and he was incredibly gracious with his time. He did not have to be, seeing as how I was a total stranger disturbing him at home. I would have liked to have interviewed him for a longer period of time, but an elderly throat kept him from speaking beyond forty minutes. At one point he announced with amusing self-awareness, “I don’t know if you know this, but… I’m pretty old.”
The interview itself was at Classic Television Showbiz. (This site is a dandy place to kill time.) Sherwood Schwartz wanted to be a doctor. As he tells the story, in 1938 medical schools would only admit a certain number of Jews, and he applied after the quota was full. His brother Al was working for Bob Hope, and got Sherwood a job as a writer.
After World War II, Mr. Schwartz worked on radio shows. One of his shows was “The Alan Young Show”. Jim Backus played a snobbish millionaire named Hubert Updike III. This character later took a three hour cruise, under a similar name.
Sherwood Schwartz was on the writer’s team for Red Skelton. When he was asked where he got his jokes, Mr. Skelton “pointed upward and said, “From the big man upstairs.” One night, on television, “The host, I forget who it was, asked him, “How is it that all the other big comics have gone through specials and you continue to do a half hour every single week? How is that possible?” They asked him how does he account for the fact he was the only one left. Red said, “Every week, when I get those lousy scripts from the writers I yawn. And the voice of God tells me how to fix things.” Sherwood Shwartz did not work for Red Skelton after that.
Another show created by Mr. Schwartz was It’s About Time . It had cavemen who were transplanted in modern life, and only ran one season. The star of the show was Joe E. Ross, who apparently was a piece of work. After his TV career was over, he did stand up comedy. “He died onstage while he was doing stand-up. The famous story is that he wasn’t doing too well career wise at that point. He was being paid one hundred dollars to do the show. I guess he had a heart attack in the middle of the show. After the show his wife went to collect the money and they only gave her fifty dollars – because he didn’t finish the show.”