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NARRATOR: For 22 years, Ozzie Nelson wrote,
produced and directed a popular radio and
television series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
It was the story of a family, his own.
Harriet a former singer, dancer and actress and his
wife since 1935 and their two sons,
David and Ricky, who literally grew up before
our eyes on the television screen.
The series captured and held the middle ground of
American family life, a kind of Mr. and Mrs.
Average Family that few knew and everyone wanted.
When the series ended in 1966,
Ozzie Nelson took time out to play volleyball and
write his autobiography titled simply, "Ozzie".
But he couldn't stay his writing hand.
In the fall of 1973 he introduced a new series,
"Ozzie Girls" with the same Ozzie and Harriet but
without his two sons, now grown and pursuing their own careers.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪
JAMES DAY: Ozzie, over the more than 20 years that
you did 'The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet' when it
was so popular, were you ever acutely conscious of
the pattern you were setting for American family life?
Did it ever occur to you that it was more than
entertainment, that you were a kind of model?
OZZIE NELSON: No it really didn't,
and we never set out to do that.
JAMES DAY: I know you didn't set out to do it.
OZZIE NELSON: No and actually it just sort of
eased into that area because when we started
the show, actually it was a band leader and his
vocalist wife and what they were doing at home
because we had found we were touring in Vaudeville
with the band.
It seemed that many more people seemed to be
interested in our home life and at that time
David was born and Ricky wasn't.
So when we started this, it just sort of eased into
the family department.
JAMES DAY: Well you must have been aware over the
years as you met hundreds if not thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands of fans,
didn't they say to you we wish we had a family like that?
OZZIE NELSON: Well yes.
Not so much the parents but we would get a lot of
letters from young people who perhaps looked at our
life on television screen which also was not exactly
a true pattern of what anybody's life would be
because we had to come up with 39 or 40 amusing
things and maybe two amusing things happened to
anyone in a period of six months.
And we got letters from lots of unhappy teenagers
who said if they come out here would we adopt them
and so forth.
JAMES DAY: Did you find yourself giving counsel
and advice to those who wrote to you?
OZZIE NELSON: Well we tried to avoid it.
JAMES DAY: I should think so.
That's a terrible burden to take on and quite apart
from doing a television series.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes and also I think there's a great
danger of those of us who are in the entertainment
business and all of a sudden we're in the public
eye and we get the feel that we're pundits on any
question anybody might ask.
And for instance I'm sure that Marcus Welby must get
a lot of questions on medical situations and
somebody portrays a lawyer and he gets a lot of
questions asked of him on the legal matters.
And we really tried to avoid that,
although many of the letters that we did
receive were nice enough to say that we had brought
up our boys to be quite normal boys,
although they were brought up in the public limelight.
JAMES DAY: Over the years, as the characters became-
I hesitate to speak of you as characters but as
people, you came to be so well established in the
minds of a television audience and you were
writing or was that- you were the head writer on that show.
Did you find your own personal life began to be
a sense of reflection of the show at all?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. Actually sometimes it was a little bit
difficult for us to know where the separation came between
our own lives and our lives at home.
And of course we also had a great deal of problem
not indulging in too much togetherness so to speak
and taking each other for granted because it's a
tough thing when you're with somebody in the day
time and the evening too.
I remember one time I came home and Harriet said to
me do you realize that we're on the set that
you're nice to everybody except me.
And I think that the boys felt a little the same thing too.
So we- I think that we leaned over backwards to
try to give them as much freedom and as much
liberty so they wouldn't be under the dominance of
their parents during the rest of their lives.
JAMES DAY: Because they were under the dominance
of their parent during the time they were on the show
because you were the director of the show. They had to be-
OZZIE NELSON: And that's a very
difficult thing because as I mentioned in the book
there's really no way particularly when Dave and
Rick got married, there's no way of directing your
son and your daughter in law without being a little
bit of an irritating force because you rarely hear
anybody say that a director is a nice guy.
They'll say well he's a so and so but he's a good
director because you're the guy who is telling
people to do something that maybe doesn't fit in
with exactly their idea of how it should be done.
Because the tough part of being a director anyway is
that you have to look at the overall picture where
each actor looks at the script from his own
particular viewpoint.
JAMES DAY: And since you're using your real
life son and his real life wife.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: Then you've got that additional difficulty
of directing them on how to behave toward each
other I should think would be a real complication.
OZZIE NELSON: You bet. And I think it was more of a
difficult situation for us then if we had been playing
characters. I know every once in a while we would have a
dream sequence or something where we'd be
able to put on a costume or a beard and it was so
much easier to act under those circumstances because
the hardest acting in the world is portraying yourself.
JAMES DAY: Many actors, as a matter of fact,
go into acting because of the masks, so to speak.
They can hide their real selves.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: You expose your real selves.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. That's right.
Mine was a reasonable character,
reasonable extension and we were not fully
conscious of this specifically but we felt
it as sort of a part of a burden that we were
carrying and as far as the scripts were concerned we
had to be careful whereas the scripts had to be a
reasonable exaggeration, nevertheless they always
did portray in a general form our thinking on
certain things.
For instance, several people in a tour that I
recently made promoting not only the book but our new show
'Ozzie's Girls' they said are you going to change your
standards from 'The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet'?
And I said well I couldn't very well do that because
it would be dishonest.
For instance, in Maude he was an alcoholic in one of
the scenes and she had an abortion in one of the scenes.
Well this would be totally dishonest for us to
portray this kind of thing.
I portray a person who is a little over the edge who
is an ice cream freak which I am to a certain degree.
But we have taken I think we've tried to take the
general characteristics that are attributable
usually to husbands and extend to them as far as I
was concerned and as far as wives were concerned
and extended them to Harriet's character.
JAMES DAY: One criticism that's been spoken of the
show, and it's a mild one it seems to me,
is that the show was a more accurate picture of
New Jersey in the '20s than Los Angeles in the '50s.
Now of course you grew up New Jersey.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: And it would I suppose be- since you were
the writer it would be bound to be reflective of
your own life, your own past as well as your
present I should say.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes, I think so.
And I think that it's very difficult for anybody
who's writing to keep his own thoughts and keep a
great deal of himself out of his writings and I not
only use the pattern of my relationship to David and
Ricky but also I was- I have a brother who is very
much younger than I am but I also have a brother
who's a year and a half older.
And I patterned a lot of the thoughts and a lot of
the happenings actually from things that did
happen to my brother and me back in New Jersey.
JAMES DAY: You said in your book it was a very
happy childhood.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: You speech very fondly of your father and
said you tried to pattern your life after your father's life.
OZZIE NELSON: That's right, yes.
JAMES DAY: What was there about your father
that made him such a hero to you?
OZZIE NELSON: Well he was a very kindly and very
understanding man and this sounds like a far
departure but he had some of the same fine traits
that Harriet has.
And that is there are a very few people I think
who have two standards where their own standard
of conduct is higher than the standard of conduct
they demand of others.
And I think this was something that my father had.
He was very tolerant of the conduct of others but he was
very circumspect as far as his own conduct is concerned.
And Harriet's pattern of life has been pretty much
the same that she's very lenient as far as judging
other people but as far as her own conduct is
concerned she's very severe about- very harsh
about her own conduct.
And so as I say, I have tried to think back.
I really didn't appreciate my father because he died
at that time because he died on my 21st birthday
and I think that young men have a tendency not to
forgive their parents until they get to be a
little bit older and realize what the problems
are that confront parents.
JAMES DAY: I would judge that scouting was a major
influence in your life as well.
You were an Eagle Scout at 13.
Now did that set an all time record?
OZZIE NELSON: Well at that time. I don't think they ever
kept the ages but I didn't know any kids with-
JAMES DAY: But you weren't eligible to be a
scout until you were 12.
OZZIE NELSON: 12 yes.
JAMES DAY: So to become an Eagle Scout- I was a Scout
myself so I know that to become an Eagle Scout in
one year is most remarkable.
You must have gone into it with enthusiasm,
energy and everything else.
OZZIE NELSON: Well, yeah, as I said,
I had a lot of help from my brother who is a year
and a half older than I was and so while he was
taking all the tests I was sort of taking them along with him.
So most of the time I just waited for the time to
expire when I could move to another test and also
scouting was a very big thing in those days,
particularly in the small towns and the town I was
brought up in, Ridgefield Park,
is a kind of town that seems no longer to exist.
But it had all of the community spirit.
And also when I was- radio just came in when I was in
high school and talking pictures came in a little
bit later and television of course wasn't there.
So the scouting was the thing that most kids went into.
They had I don't know how many Boy Scout troops in
this little town and everybody just waiting
until he was big enough and old enough to be a Boy
Scout and then we went away to Scout camp and
took the various tests there.
JAMES DAY: That took you to Europe, your first-
OZZIE NELSON: Yes I went to Europe with
the first Boy Scout Jamboree which was a very
fortunate thing and I was very happy that I wrote a
diary on the tour because it enabled me to remember
a lot of things and also my brother went on the tour too.
He was an Eagle Scout and he kept a diary.
So that gave me a lot of material for the book
during that particular period.
JAMES DAY: Athletics I judge was also a major
influence upon your life.
You were in athletics in a very early age and very active in
a wide variety of athletics- football and swimming.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes well there once again in the
small town I was brought up in it was most of the
boys there were athletically minded and my
father was a very good athlete.
So our little bedroom that my brother and I lived
together in was sort of like a miniature gymnasium
and we used to have the weekly boxing bouts and my
father used to box with us and I think most of the
kids in that particular town were very much
athletically oriented.
JAMES DAY: Were you a large boy?
OZZIE NELSON: No, I was rather small.
JAMES DAY: So it did I suppose limit the parts
you played in athletics.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes it did.
I was- fortunately however, on our little high school
team, which turned out to be in my last two years in
school we were undefeated, we lost one game.
We were undefeated my senior year.
And we had a lot of other bigger boys and so I
played quarterback in those days.
The quarterback's function was a little different.
It was mostly handing off and catching punts and
things of that sort.
And so as long as I was surrounded by a lot of
other big boys to run interference the small
stature didn't seem to bother too much.
JAMES DAY: But you did very well at Rutgers when
you went there playing Varsity football.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
Well I went down to Rutgers- I really don't
think I would gone to college if it hadn't been
for football and well it seems strange but I just
experienced my 50th anniversary of my
graduation from high school.
I don't know where the time has gone.
But in that period of time,
like 50 years ago, there really weren't as many
kids going to college as there are nowadays.
I say I wouldn't have gone.
Probably that's not quite true.
Let's say that that was one of the impelling
forces that I had in the back of my mind.
JAMES DAY: Your coach at Rutgers I gathered was a
great influence upon you as well and you refer to
him as sort of a second father.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. He was really an outstanding man.
He was of the old school. He was a rough
and ready guy and a very rugged man but Sandy was,
I say, of the old blood and thunder school and he was
a locker room orator and as I said in one-
JAMES DAY: You coached for a couple of
years after that at Rutgers.
Were you a locker room orator also?
OZZIE NELSON: I'm afraid I was.
JAMES DAY: Did you pattern yourself after him?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes, I'm afraid to a certain degree
and that was during the time of when Knute Rockne
was coaching at Notre Dame and that was the thing.
You gave this fiery orator and no matter what they
say nowadays they still come on and do a pretty
good job of talking, even in the pro ranks,
although they're reluctant to admit it.
JAMES DAY: You have I guess been in show
business almost all of your life.
Your parents were amateur entertainers,
were they not?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: And you grew up more or less in a musical world.
As a matter of fact, I was looking through an old 0:15:10.976,1193:02:47.295 OZZIE NELSON: Yes, I did.
book the other day and I say photograph and it said
a typical musical evening with the family around the
1920 or in 1915 and that was typical of our family.
Almost everybody played some sort of an instrument and sang.
JAMES DAY: What as yours?
OZZIE NELSON: Well I studied the violin for a
very short time.
I studied it for a while and I thought I was doing
very well and then all of a sudden I learned that
there was more than one position and that defeated me.
And along about that time the ukulele became very popular.
So I got a ukulele and then I tuned that up like
a banjo and then saxophones became popular
so I started playing saxophone.
Contrary to general belief,
people who are not familiar with music,
if you can play one instrument usually you can
play almost any instrument with a little trying.
So most of the kids that the musicians that I went
with could play various instruments.
JAMES DAY: That may encourage enough kids to
play the ukulele.
OZZIE NELSON: Well of course nowadays it's the
guitar and- everyone plays the guitar and-
JAMES DAY: You started off with small musical groups
when you were, what, in high school I suppose?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. Our band was a two piece orchestra,
if you can call it two piece group a band,
and there's another boy that played really
excellent piano and I played banjo and then I
also brought along my violin.
When I tuned the E string to E flat so I could slide
up and down it sort of like a musical saw and
because my brother occasionally played piano
with us too and he could only playing E flat and B
flat so we had to tune that down.
We made all sorts of adjustments.
JAMES DAY: Ozzie, I suppose the first time I
became conscious of Ozzie Nelson's orchestra is when
you began to play at the Glen Island Casino and
broadcast on radio.
The thing I did not know was that you were still in
law school and Glen Island Casino was one of the
biggest places from which to play in the whole country.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. Well Glen Island Casino,
our band was the first band to play there.
It started us and I guess we started Glen Island
Casino because after us it was a whole series of name bands.
But we started Glen Island and it sort of overlapped.
I had to take a night off from Glen Island Casino to
graduate from law school.
The three things sort of converged.
I was coaching football at Lincoln High School and I
had the dance band that was doing very well and
then I was in law school and I really didn't know
which way to turn.
And I figured that I would stay with the dance band
until I had accumulated enough money to study law
and open up an office but I think it's a little late now.
JAMES DAY: It didn't work out, did it?
OZZIE NELSON: No. However, I think it's been a great value
during the years because sitting around with a group of
people I will lay a couple of res ipsa loquitur on them
so they don't realize how much I forgotten and it's
amazing how many times I've been sitting in a
group and what little I remember has come in handy.
JAMES DAY: I also recall in those days you had a
vocalist named Harriet Hilliard with whom you
sang boy/ girl duets. Whatever happened to her?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. Well she became
Harriet Nelson and right, you bet.
Well the reason I did that,
the reason I started to have a vocalist with the
band was because Rudy Vallee,
if you recall, was a tremendous- he was a
tremendous name in those days.
It's hard for people nowadays to realize what a
tremendous name Rudy was.
But if you recall, the girls loved him and the
guys hated him.
And so I didn't like that idea very much,
and I thought maybe rather than to sing the songs to
the girls that the guys brought to the dance if I
could have an attractive girl on the bandstand and
sing songs to her, musical comedy fashion,
it might work out. And so-
JAMES DAY: It worked out.
OZZIE NELSON: It worked out, yes.
JAMES DAY: You went for- in those days bands like
yours traveled constantly I suppose and there were
dance halls everywhere.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes, well it was sort of a distinction
between ballrooms and dance halls.
And in other words, the ballroom was sort of a
little more high class.
A dance hall was sort of like Roseland and those-
a dime a dance.
But most every community usually it was outside the city.
For instance, it would be Allentown,
Pennsylvania, Pottstown, Pennsylvania,
Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Redding,
Pennsylvania, Hershey, Pennsylvania.
They would have these huge ballrooms where the young
kids who were college typed kids and working
class kids of a very- they were very orderly places
and as I say the dance halls are more as we used
to call them in those days the sharpies but these
were very nice places to play.
And actually the nice part about it,
there weren't enough name bands to go around in those days.
There are more places to play then there were name
bands to fill them.
So as a result, when you decide to go out on a
summer tour you could pretty much say I would
like to play here, here, here and here and if you
were fortunate enough to have the status of a name
band, you could pretty much name your spots.
JAMES DAY: Do you suppose they'll ever come back?
OZZIE NELSON: No, I really don't.
JAMES DAY: That's a part of our past.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes. I really think so.
I know when we had our dance band we used to see
a clipping in the paper every year,
there was a notification that the Dancing Masters
Association of America had met,
convened and decided that the waltz was coming back.
But the waltz never came back and but the waltz was
always with us.
Now I do think for instance Doc Sevrinson's
band or several of the big organized bands now are
playing fabulous big band music.
I think just fantastic.
But you couldn't take an organization on the road.
You just couldn't afford to take an organization on the road.
JAMES DAY: Do you ever hanker to go back to music?
OZZIE NELSON: Not a great deal.
I must say that every once in a while I will listen
to some music and say to Harriet I kind of miss the
connection with it.
Of course when Ricky was very young,
when he was in his teens, I more or less got
brainwashed as far as rock music was concerned and I-
JAMES DAY: Are you thoroughly brainwashed now
about rock music?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes, if it's good.
I like any kind of music.
I like anything from Dixieland to any type of
music at all as long as it's well played.
But I think sometimes those of us in my
generation have a tendency to take the best of the
music of my vintage and compare it to the worst of
today's music which is not fair.
There was a lot of bad music played then.
There's a lot of bad music played now but there's
also a lot of absolutely fabulous music played now.
I don't know where this great musicianship is coming from.
But I know on New Year's Eve Harriet and I spend
our usual exciting New Year's sitting back and
watching television because nobody-
JAMES DAY: You too.
OZZIE NELSON: Yeah we do. I don't think anybody-
you can't win on New Year's Eve. If you go out
you wish you'd have stayed home and vice versa.
And I know I don't even know the name of the group
but there was Guy Lombardo playing on one of the
stations and on the other station there was a
fantastic rock group playing with just fabulous
musicianship and it was really thrilling to hear.
So and I enjoy still Lawrence Welk when he's
playing certain things, not all of it.
But I enjoy any kind of music that is well played.
JAMES DAY: How do you feel about the trends with
today's young people?
You have some of your own of course and they have
some of their own now.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: Their view towards antiestablishment,
their kind of anti-intellectual
pro-sensory experience, how do you feel about those things?
OZZIE NELSON: Well I think it all levels off and I
think for instance the so called "hippie syndrome" I
think if it hadn't have been picked up by the
press and by newspapers and magazines and
television I think would have died its natural
death and I think that they discovered like every
generation discovers that if there are five people
and you've got food for five people,
if ten sit down at the table somebody has got to
bring in some food or five don't eat.
And I think that however that the hippie syndrome,
as an example of something from the young people,
that the hippie syndrome did us all a lot of good
because I think that many of us were so oriented
toward business type of success that we began to
realize that maybe there is more to life than just
this striving and maybe we should enjoy some of the
things that we have.
And I think that that was an extreme and I think the
same as the destruction that took place on the
campus I think reflected the thinking of a very few people.
But I think sometimes even those things work out to
the ultimate good and I do think that young people
are aiming toward honesty and integrity.
The only thing I resent is when they claim that they
invented it because I think integrity has been
around for a long time.
Its' just that unfortunately in many high
places we don't find it.
And I think it's all leveling- I think we can
learn a lot from young people and I think they
can learn a lot from us.
And one of the things we stopped doing our show
that Harriet and I miss tremendously was the
report that we developed with young people because
of doing that show.
JAMES DAY: You really felt you had that report with them?
OZZIE NELSON: Of course I don't think that- I think
it's ridiculous- I think the person in my age group
who has long hair and tries to act like a young person this
to my mind is something that I can't understand.
I think you can have report and still you can
be an older person and that person can be a
younger person.
I mean report in the best possible way. You're not a pal.
You are an older person but that person respects
your rights to think the way you want and you
respect his right to think as he wants as long as
neither one interferes with the other person's
right to do the same thing.
JAMES DAY: You work very hard as producer,
director and head writer on 'The Adventures of Ozzie
and Harriet' for many years and then you took time off.
OZZIE NELSON: Yes.
JAMES DAY: Now you're back working again.
Do you feel a compulsion to work?
Are you happy only when you're working?
OZZIE NELSON: I think probably that- so not only
when I'm working probably but I'm happy only when I'm busy.
I like to be doing things. I say this-
JAMES DAY: Weren't you busy playing volleyball?
OZZIE NELSON: Yes, I was and I say this and yet I
am a voracious reader and it's gotten to a point
however now I always get a lot of books at Christmas
and on my birthday and now however the only
difference when we're doing the show is when I
start reading I feel very guilty and I have to read
very late at night sort of surreptitiously when
nobody is watching me.
But yes I suppose there's a certain compulsion to be
doing things I guess, to be a part of things.
I hate to reach this point where you just sit in the
sand and the whole world goes by.
I think that's good to go to a place like we have
fortunately in Laguna Beach where you can
recharge your batteries.
But as a lifestyle I'm not quite ready yet to step
away from the mainstream.
JAMES DAY: Ozzie, in 30 seconds a question,
why do you think your show was so successful?
OZZIE NELSON: Well I like to think that it was
successful because people were able to relate to
what we were doing and going back to a thing,
we have always made a sincere effort to keep our
show honest.
For instance, when the boys were small boys we
never had their dog killed by an automobile or things
that would embarrass them.
We tried to keep it within the framework of what a
normal family I think should do and I would like
to think that people's ability to relate to our
show and integrity or honest which we strive for.
JAMES DAY: Thank you very much.
OZZIE NELSON: My pleasure.