Ozzie was a man who knew how to re-invent himself

During a period that was to last twenty years, the Nelson Family--Ozzie, his wife Harriet Hilliard, and their two sons, David and Ricky--were regarded as the preeminent icon of the ideal nuclear family. From his bandleading days of the mid-1930s through his reign, a generation later, as the bumbling patriarch of television's best known family, Ozzie Nelson was able to conflate, reduce and transform the professional activities of his family's personal reality into a fictional domestic banality.

Best known for their long-running television series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, the Nelson family began their successful togetherness with the marriage of saxophone-playing Ozzie to his "girl-singer," Harriet in the 1930s. Ozzie's deliberate hesitancy and self-deprecating humor were the perfect foil for the sweet and sassy Harriet, who interrupted her songs with sarcastic banter. During the 1940s, Ozzie, Harriet and their band were regulars on radio's Red Skelton show, and in 1944 when Red was drafted into the army, they took over his time slot. For Skelton, the Nelsons stuck to their big band routines with occasional married-couple skits providing non-musical breaks, but when Ozzie conceived the pilot for his own program he decided to venture more into the realm of domestic comedy, writing a script based on his own family life.