September 16: Happy Birthday Paul Henning & Linda Kaye Henning

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2017/09/16/...-paul-henning/

Paul Henning (1911-2005) is a name that many people today probably don’t recognize, but he had a noticeable impact on popular culture in the 1960s. He began his entertainment career as a writer, first for radio, then for a number of TV series such as The Bob Cummings Show. In 1962, Henning created a series that ranked #1 in the Nielsen ratings during its first two seasons on the air; it told the story of a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed…

A year later, Henning followed The Beverly Hillbillies up by creating another “ruralcom,” this one in an actual rural setting—Petticoat Junction. In 1965 came a spinoff of the latter series, Green Acres, for which Henning, although not the creator, was an executive producer. There were periodic crossovers between the three series. All three series remained fairly popular through the end of the sixties, albeit with slowly declining ratings, until they were all canceled in CBS’s “rural purge” at the beginning of the 1970s.


One of the stars of Petticoat Junction shared a birthday with Paul Henning—none other than his own daughter, Linda Kaye Henning, who is 76 today (she is the redhead in the clip above). She played Betty Jo Bradley, one of three sisters who helped their widowed mother run the Shady Rest Inn in Hooterville. It is also sometimes said that Paul Henning modeled the character of Elly May Clampett on Beverly Hillbillies after Linda.