"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: A LITTLE DABBS'LL DO YA

Allan Melvin isn't the only actor who can connect 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' to 'The Brady Bunch'......

This is a really simple connection that can't be proven and should prove hard to argue against. Why? Because who would want to argue against loveable old Dabbs Greer?

In 'The DVD Show' episode "The Attempted Marriage", Dabbs played the Army chaplain of Camp Crowder, Missouri, where he married Rob Petrie and Laura Meehan.

In the Toobworld view, after he got out of the Army, he accepted a position in his Church as minister to the flock in Los Angeles, California.  There he married architect Mike Brady to Carol Ann Taylor Martin, thus combining their families of three boys and three girls (the youngest one in curls) respectively into 'The Brady Bunch'.

Not long after that, he took another posting - this time in the Mid-West, as pastor in the third Rome, Wisconsin. (I don't remember off-hand now, but I think he must have officiated over the marriage of somebody on 'Picket Fences', probably the wedding between Sheriff Jimmy Brock and Dr. Jill Langston before the series began. (After all, they had two young boys by the time the series started. Not that it really mattered, but shhhh! You don't talk about such things in the context of 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'!)

Thanks to his long-running role on 'Picket Fences', we at Toobworld Central can make the claim that his Army Chaplain in 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' and his minister in 'The Brady Bunch' had a name - the Reverend Henry Novotny.

For more about Dabbs Greer, click here.  (And if you like the idea that Reverend Novotny was descended from Reverand Alden of 'Little House On The Prairie', or that perhaps Reverend Alden's soul was "born to re-run" as Novotny, I'm open to the idea....)

BCnU!