Summary: 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.
