All About Aaron Ruben

I usually don't quote a lot from other people on this blog but I decided to make an exception. My pal Vince Waldron, author of the highly-recommended-by-me The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, wrote and posted this piece on Facebook. It's about a great…well, I was going to call the man "a great unsung comedy writer" but he has been sung…just not enough. It's all about Aaron Ruben, a gent I was pleased to know casually and to admire from afar.

Here is what Vince wrote about Aaron and I'll follow it up tomorrow here with my own Aaron Ruben story…

Today, we pay tribute to Aaron Ruben, the late writer, producer and all-around good guy who was born on this date, March 1, in 1914. Although Aaron would earn the undying gratitude of classic TV fans the world over for his stint as head writer, story editor and producer of the first five seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, fans of this page may be surprised to learn that the producer also played a significant role in boosting the career of a young Dick Van Dyke.

That's Aaron pictured with Dick in the photo below, which was taken in late 1957, at the filming of the Phil Silvers sitcom Sgt. Bilko, a series that Aaron often directed (although he didn’t direct either of the two episodes of Bilko in which Dick guest starred.) Aaron obviously saw a great deal of promise in the lanky young actor.

In 1958, Aaron Ruben served as sketch comedy director of The Girls Against the Boys, the Broadway revue that first brought Dick to the attention of New York’s theatre world. Of even more significance to fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show, that revue also put the talented young performer on the radar of Aaron Ruben’s good friend, Sheldon Leonard, who would remember the comic mastery that Dick displayed in that show three years later, when Sheldon was looking for an actor to play a writer named Robert Petrie in a new sitcom he was developing with Carl Reiner.

But in 1957 — four years before Dick made his television breakthrough with Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1961 — Aaron wrote and produced a variety show pilot for Dick that was to be called — wait for it! — The Dick Van Dyke Show. Although that first attempt at a Dick Van Dyke Show never made it to prime time, Aaron Ruben’s faith in Dick’s gifts was not easily shaken.

A couple of years later, he wrote The Trouble With Richard, a sitcom pilot for Dick in which the actor played a luckless bank teller. Like Dick’s earlier pilot, The Trouble With Richard failed to find a buyer, and it wound up airing just once, as a standalone entry on The Comedy Spot, a summer anthology series that basically served as a dumping ground for unsold TV sitcom pilots.

Of course, the failure of Dick’s second attempt at TV stardom turned out to be a lucky break, since it left his calendar open when Sheldon Leonard finally came calling a few months later to offer Dick the starring role in a new series that would also be titled The Dick Van Dyke Show. This second Dick Van Dyke Show did get picked up, and actually worked out quite well for the actor.

Aaron Ruben didn’t fare too badly, either. Not long after The Trouble with Richard fizzled, Sheldon Leonard once more came to the rescue when he tapped Aaron to serve as head writer and producer of a new series Sheldon was assembling to showcase a stage, film and recording star named Andy Griffith. And so, as fate would have it, Dick Van Dyke and Aaron Ruben spent the next five years working on neighboring stages on the Desilu Cahuenga lot, where Dick filmed The Dick Van Dyke Show a few hundred feet from the soundstage where Aaron was bringing Mayberry to life each week on The Andy Griffith Show.

At the end of a brilliant five-year run writing and producing The Andy Griffith Show, Aaron proved that his sense of timing was as sharp as ever when he left that series at about the same time Don Knotts moved on. Aaron spent the next few years producing Gomer Pyle, USMC, an Andy Griffith Show spin-off that he masterminded as a vehicle for Jim Nabors, a popular supporting player on Andy’s show.

Aaron Ruben would be reunited with Dick Van Dyke for one final venture in 1969, when the writer teamed with Carl Reiner to craft the script for an ambitious feature film about an aging silent movie comedian that Carl would direct. Although The Comic failed to catch fire at the box office, the film is warmly remembered by all involved, not least because it afforded Dick Van Dyke one of his strongest big screen roles.

After The Comic, Aaron returned to television, where he distinguished himself as the producer of the first two and half seasons of "Sanford and Son, followed by a stint as writer and producer of the Don Rickles service comedy, CPO Sharkey. He would later serve as a creative consultant on Matlock, which reunited the scribe with Andy Griffith, who played the show’s title character.

By the early ‘90s, Aaron began to taper off his television commitments and ease away from a career that spanned more than five decades. But he was by no means ready to retire. In fact, Aaron would undoubtedly have agreed that he did some of his most important work after he stopped collecting weekly paychecks for writing TV shows.

In his final decades, the enormously successful Beverly Hills comedy writer and TV producer devoted much of his time toiling in the farthest reaches of Los Angeles’ family services system, where his long history of volunteer work with troubled kids eventually earned him a position as a court-appointed special advocate for abused and abandoned children in Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court.

But despite the seriousness of his work on behalf of the city’s least powerful citizens, Aaron maintained a healthy comic perspective on his efforts. "I have this fantasy," he told Daily Variety in 2003, "that once a year, St. Peter appears before God and they go over the list of people that they’re ready to take and my name comes up. God says, 'Is he still doing that work with the kids? Ah, let him stick around a little longer.'"

Aaron Ruben passed away on January 30, 2010, just a few weeks shy of his 96th birthday. The television legend is fondly remembered by fans the world over, who treasure the writer for giving voice to the sheriff of a small town where nothing bad ever seemed to happen. But Aaron will be equally remembered by the countless young people who were able to navigate places far more challenging than Mayberry, thanks to the efforts of a gifted writer who volunteered to speak a few well-chosen words on their behalf.

Thanks to Vince Waldron for permission to quote the above here. And like I said, I'll share with you tomorrow, the story of my own encounters with the quiet-but-very-impressive Aaron Ruben.