1968 was not an especially good year to be 16 years old. I well remember the exceptional discord and violence that seemed to envelope society at every level. At 16 one naturally desires to be filled with hope in the future and the summer of ’68 evoked anything but hope. It did produce its lighter moments, however, and one of those happy moments was the release of a charming movie starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda called “Your, Mine, and Ours.” The story revolves around an engineered romance (Van Johnson playing Cupid) between two widowed parents on a naval base. The attraction is there alright, but the deal killer seems to be her eight children stacked up against his ten offspring. In the end their out-sized families are hilariously blended and they finally bond when #19 “Ours” arrives to flesh out the perfect family.

Paradoxically, MGM Studios released a movie extolling the joy, beauty, and happy chaos of large families at exactly that moment that the ‘second wave’ sexual revolution was just hitting full stride in America. Continue reading →