WHY and WHEN the DICK VAN DYKE SHOW WAS BORN

Book excerpt: In 1960, Carl Reiner shot the pilot for a comedy series titled "Head of the Family," starring Carl Reiner. The show was about a writer who lived with his family in New Rochelle, New York and commuted to his job in Manhattan, writing on a TV comedy show. "Head of the Family" aired once and the reaction was, in Carl's words, "fair to middling." So Carl had moved on, until Sheldon Leonard came along and convinced him that he could sell it to a network, and they would not fail this time because, "we'll get a better actor to play you." And thus, "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was born.Besides giving all of us out in TV land, including countless aspiring young writers, our first view of how funny stuff happens (it's created by talented writers like Rob Petrie, Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell locked in a room with a typewriter, a piano and a couch), Carl, in the year 1960, also struck a blow for feminism by making one-third of the writers' room staff female."Why and When 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' Was Born" is a recounting of behind-the-scenes stories, many of which only Carl could know, about the casting, writing and shooting of "The Dick Van Dyke Show." It includes the real life happenings in the lives of Carl and his family and friends, which inspired many of the episodes, often proving that truth is exactly as strange as fiction - like the episode where Ritchie had to wear a pith helmet to school to ward off a bullying woodpecker, a remedy suggested in real life by the Game Warden to Carl's friends, Millie and Jerry Schoenbaum, when their son Eric was under similar woodpecker attack.