I wonder how many people can remember what they were doing on May 12, 1969, nearly 51 years ago now. It was a Monday, and the big news story that day was that our new President, Richard Nixon, was pressing Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas to resign from the court. (Fortas did, which gave Nixon the opportunity to appoint his successor.)
That night, at 8:00 PM on NBC-TV there aired a half-hour program called Anderson & Co. This was the season when summer replacement shows began (that was a thing back then), and young me assumed I was watching the first of a summer series, possibly something that would continue if it were popular enough. Alas, though I quite liked the show, this was the one and only airing of a failed TV pilot, and I would never get another chance to watch even this one episode, let alone more. But the fact that I still have fond memories of it fifty years later speaks well of the show, and I’m sorry it never got any farther along into production.
The show was set in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, and when it began I thought at first I was watching a TV adaptation of Life With Father. Even at the age of 11, I was already familiar with Clarence Day, though not familiar enough to know that Life With Father had already been adapted into a TV series before I was born (in 1953.)
Still, the creators of the show obviously were also familiar with Clarence Day and were cribbing from him. Anderson and Co. was about the owner of a fictional New York department store of the same name, Marshall Anderson, played by Fred Gwynne, previously the star of The Munsters, and before that, Car 54, Where Are You? Marshall Anderson had a wife, Augusta, and eight children, each of which had a name beginning with the letter A. And the joke here is that the large and boisterous Anderson family is a whole other Anderson & Co. It was meant to be a situation comedy, but if the tone of the pilot was any indication, it was going for quiet character humor, not slapstick and hijinks.
As far as I can remember, the plot of the pilot episode went like this: Augusta is out with her brood of children one day and finds she’s missing some trifle, so she makes an unplanned visit to her husband’s store, children in tow, but one of the children knocks something over, causing a commotion and drawing Mr. Anderson out of his office. He chews Augusta out publicly for not managing the children properly, and she leaves in a huff. Still lacking her trifle, she decides to take the children to the store of her husband’s arch-rival. It’s a Macy’s and Gimbel’s thing. I don’t remember the name of the competing store, so I’ll just call it “Smith’s.”
Anyway, she and the children are shopping in Smith’s, when this catches the eye of a newspaper photographer, who snaps a picture, which appears on the front page the following morning. “Hey, look! Mrs. Gimbel shops at Macy’s.” That kind of thing. Mr. Anderson has to pretend publicly not to mind, though privately he is furious with his wife. The story resolves very neatly when a few days later, a similar photo appears in the same paper, headlined “Mrs. Smith Returns the Favor.” It seems the Smiths were good sports, or else decided this was a great publicity gimmick, and sent Mrs. Smith and a photographer to recreate the earlier picture in reverse at Anderson & Co. Problem solved.
Anderson & Co. was created by Jean Holloway, a TV writer with a long career, most recently as a staff writer for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Gene Reynolds produced the show and directed the pilot. He would go on to great success as a producer for M*A*S*H. Child actor Teddy Eccles played one of the Anderson children, and would play the lead in the feature film adaptation of My Side of the Mountain, which was released just six weeks later. Eleven-year-old me was very jealous of Teddy Eccles, I can tell you that.
I regret that Anderson & Co. never got any farther. It might have turned out to be very successful. It had the right ingredients, and with Gene Reynolds at the helm with his trademark sly and bittersweet humor, who knows where it might have led? It seems strange to lament the failure of a half-hour sitcom pilot fifty years later. But this is what it’s like when you get old. You collect memories, like kids collect bugs or bottlecaps. Here’s an item from my collection I’m particularly fond of.