Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Paul Henning, the television writer and producer who created “The Beverly Hillbillies,” which became one of the biggest hits of the 1960s and spawned the popular rural-comedy spinoffs “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres,” died Friday. He was 93.

Henning, who had a series of minor strokes in recent years, died of natural causes at Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, his family said.

After writing for radio’s “Fibber McGee and Molly” in the late 1930s, Henning wrote for George Burns and Gracie Allen’s radio and television shows. He also created, produced and wrote “The Bob Cummings Show,” a popular situation comedy about a wolfish photographer; it ran from 1955 to 1959.

Inspired in part by memories of camping trips to the Ozarks as a Boy Scout, Henning came up with a fish-out-of-water idea for a series that made television history: A “poor mountaineer” unexpectedly strikes oil and moves his newly wealthy family out of a cabin in the Ozarks into a mansion in the hills of Beverly.

“The Beverly Hillbillies,” starring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas and Max Baer Jr., debuted on CBS in September 1962.

The series was immediately attacked by some critics, who did not take a liking to Jed, Granny, Elly May and Jethro and wanted nothing to do with the Clampetts or their “cee-ment pond.”

“If television is America’s vast wasteland,” sniffed one critic, “the ‘Hillbillies’ must be Death Valley.”

“The series aimed low and hit its target,” wrote UPI’s Rick DuBrow.

Even Henning’s wife, Ruth, later conceded to a reporter that she preferred “something a little more sophisticated.”

The average American TV viewer, however, took to the new show like a starving mountain man to a mess o’ possum shanks.

Possum hunting in New Zealand: A practical guide to hunting methods, preparation, and sale of skins
Paul Henning: Reminiscences (New York Times oral history program)

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