My Three Sons

As in Episode # 121 earlier in this season its a real revelation to see blonde haired actress Ronne Troup as an uncredited extra. Ronne appears in the background as one of the girls at Robbie's friend's costume party. For the non-initiated, the actress would become a series regular and end up playing Chip's future wife in the eleventh season of the show, which at this particular point was about seven years away.

Actor Hank Jones makes the first of seven appearances on the series as a school friend of Robbie's. Hank emailed me and was gracious in recalling incidents from his vast memory bank, which I am happy to put in the notes section of the shows he appeared in. He says that "In 1963, I was commuting between the San Francisco bay area and Hollywood (I was still going to Stanford University at the time). I drove eight hours in one direction and then back every weekend. I think my first MTS was to be filmed the day John F. Kennedy was shot, November 22, and I still had to make the trip and we carried on with the filming. My 'saving grace' on the program was dear "Dell" (Adell Sliff the show's Dialogue director). She showed me the ropes, as the show was my first real acting job. Dell showed me how important it was remembering just where my hands were and what I was wearing and all that stuff so that all the shots would match when it was edited into the final product". The former actor who retired from acting in 1981, is now a highly respected genealogist, a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and the author of a number Genealogy books, the most recent being 'Psychic Roots: Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy'. His roots to genealogy date back quite a while. As to his 'other life', apart from genealogical research, Hank had been in the entertainment field since he began his career as co-star of the old daytime "Tennessee Ernie Ford" TV show on ABC, logging 400 appearances on the program ("I heard the song 'Sixteen Tons' until it came out my ears!" he says); and during this period, he also recorded albums on RCA and Capitol Records. Hank then began a twenty year career as an actor in films and television. He was a featured player in many of the Walt Disney films of the 1960's and 1970's, which still come back to haunt him on television and Video today! However, his recollection of working on this TV series gives full due to the 'MacMurray Method'; his scenes acting with Fred MacMurray were often actually his 'reacting' to lines of dialogue as spoken off-camera by the aforementioned script girl, Adell Sliff! Fred was very rarely there. Close ups and two-shots of actors often being achieved after Fred's work was completed! The producers also had a hard and firm rule that MacMurray should only ever be in scenes with his own boys. Other boys or bit part actors could not be relied upon to come back months later and look the same as scenes that had already been shot. Don Grady was once quoted as saying that many times, the crew would hold a mop on a stick to approximate where the kids should be looking if MacMurray wasn't actually speaking to them in the scene which he would be inserted into at a later date. They even joked by calling the prop "Fred MacMop!" In addition Hank says that when he was first taken to meet Producer Ed Hartmann, he was outside Hartmann's office on the Desilu lot with his agent Elliott Wax of the William Morris agency. Up walked actor Robert Young, another client of Elliott's. Hank then recalls that Elliott said to him "Hank I'd like you to meet Robert..." and I jumped right in and blurted out: "Oh, I'd know Mr. Taylor anywhere!" Elliott turned green and Young just laughed, but Hank was absolutely mortified. Finally, he remembers that William Frawley seemed very old on this episode. "I remember him being almost 'led' around the set by the chief extra on the show and gently put on his mark." For further information regarding the extraordinary work and career of Hank Jones, please feel free to go to his website, www.hankjones.com

This episode is important for the first appearance of incidental background music by Frank DeVol, that would soon become almost as famous (and hummable) as the show's original theme - the music that underscores the opening shot of the Douglas house that will be used literally hundreds of more times on upcoming episodes in different variations - from the next Season and well into the Color Years of the show.