October 15, 1951: "I Love Lucy" Premieres

October 15, 1951: The pilot episode of I Love Lucy airs on CBS. The title explains the plot: "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub." Fred (William Frawley) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) are celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary, and Lucy (Lucille Ball) and Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) want to do something nice for, and with, them. Lucy and Ethel, as the title suggests, want to go to a nightclub, but Ricky and Fred want to go to a fight card at Madison Square Garden.

They come to an agreement. A stupid agreement. They set each other up with dates. Except all of Lucy's old boyfriends are married or otherwise busy, and Ricky, upon Lucy's claim that it was an American tradition, had long ago burned his "little black book." They end up calling the same woman, an old friend who "has connections to all the women in town." Since Ricky called her first, this friend tells Lucy, and so the couples are set up with... each other. Except Lucy and Ethel are in disguise. And Ricky and Fred don't recognize them at first. But Lucy gives them away, and she and Ethel get dragged to The Garden.

Not yet 3 years old, Tony Thomas must have seen this episode (and others) at some point, and, when he became a TV producer like his father Danny and his sister Marlo, based half the episodes of Three's Company on it (and those others).

I Love Lucy aired for 6 seasons, concluding on May 6, 1957. It was produced by Desilu Productions -- run by the couple themselves, Lucille Désirée Ball and Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III. Never before, and not again for a long time thereafter, did either a woman or a nonwhite person have that much power over the production of a television show. And the only reason the show stopped is because their marriage broke up.

The show became beloved on reruns, including, in the New York market, on then-independent station WNEW-Channel 5. But the show was very predictable. I can sum it up in 30 seconds:

Ricky, in his Cuban accent: "Lu-cy! I'm home!"

Lucy: "Ricky, can I be in the show?"
Ricky: "No, Lu-cy, you can't be in the show. Fred, you're cheap!"
Lucy: "Ethel, you gotta help me get into the show!"

Ricky: "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!"

Lucy: "Wahhhhhhhh!"

Actually, "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!" is one of those quotes that everybody presumes was said, but never was. A few times, Ricky told Lucy, "Explain yourself!" And while, on the other great CBS sitcom of the 1950s, The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden threatened to send Audrey Meadows' Alice Kramden to the Moon a few times, sometimes with the dramatization, "Bang! Zoom!", he never combined the two.

My guess is, like so many other non-quotes -- James Cagney's "You dirty rat!", Mae West's "Come up and see me sometime," Johnny Weismuller's "Me Tarzan, you Jane," Cary Grant's "Judy, Judy, Judy," Humphrey Bogart's "Play it again, Sam," William Shatner's "Beam me up, Scotty!" -- someone thought they heard it a particular way, and included it that way in a parody, and that's what people ended up remembering.

One time, one of Lucy's scams worked, so Ricky decided to get back at her, and he said, "Now, we're Igual-Pascual. That's Spanish for 'Even-Steven.'" (Actually, the Spanish form of "Steven" is "Esteban.")

Still, along with its CBS contemporary, I Love Lucy is one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time.

William Frawley died in 1966, Vivian Vance in 1979, Desi in 1986, and Lucy was the last to go, in 1989.

I Love Lucy ran until 1957, canceled because the Arnazes' marriage broke up. From 1962 to 1968, Lucy starred in The Lucy Show. And from 1968 to 1974, CBS aired Here's Lucy. Unlike her 2 previous shows, on this one, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. played Lucy's on-screen children. The reason the later shows also ran 6 seasons was not a coincidence: As she owned her own production company, Lucy wanted to make sure there were enough episodes to make money in syndicated reruns before she quit.

In 1986, ABC gave her a 4th sitcom, Life With Lucy. She insisted on complete control, and got it. But she was 77 years old, and practically deaf. Even worse, she was culturally tone-deaf. She hired her old writers, and they were no more in tune with the times than she was. Nor was her old friend Gale Gordon, who had been her co-star in The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy.

She couldn't rely on Frawley, who died in 1966; Vance, who died in 1979; or Desi Sr., who was ill, and died within weeks of the show's debut. Nor did she ask Desi Jr. or Lucie to take part.

The show bombed. It got so bad that Audrey Meadows, the other great sitcom redhead of the 1950s, was asked to come out of retirement and play Lucy's sister. (She had recently come full circle by playing a tart-tongued mother-in-law on Too Close for Comfort.) That didn't work, either: It was the 8th episode to air, on November 15, 1986, and it was the last, with 5 episodes left in the can, never to see the light of day. After 35 years and 1 month, an era had ended.

The network canceled the show, and they couldn't even tell her. They had to tell her husband, Gary Morton, a comedian she'd married in 1961, and had produced her later shows with her, and let him tell her.

This was not the show-biz equivalent of Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters at age 46, or Gordie Howe being a legitimate NHL All-Star at age 51. This was Joe Louis coming back and getting knocked out of the ring by the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano, or Muhammad Ali getting pounded by Larry Holmes. A little more than 2 years later, on April 26, 1989, she was dead.

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October 15, 1951 was a Monday. The baseball season ended 5 days earlier, with the New York Yankees beating the New York Giants in the World Series. Football season was underway, but there was no Monday Night Football back then. And the NBA season didn't begin until October 31, Halloween.

But the entire NHL -- the misnamed "Original Six" -- was in action that night. The New York Rangers beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, 2-1 at the Boston Garden. And the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings played to a 4-4 tie at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.