Harry Ackerman

Harry Stephen Ackerman (November 17, 1912 – February 3, 1991) was an American television producer, credited with creating or co-creating twenty-one series, seven of which were at one time being broadcast simultaneously. Some of the sitcoms in which he was involved in production during the 1950s and 1960s are also among the most popular American shows in the early history of television, such as Father Knows Best, Dennis the Menace, Leave It to Beaver, The Farmer's Daughter, Hazel, Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and Gidget.

Ackerman was known in the entertainment industry as the “dean of television comedy”, although he was also instrumental in developing many dramatic classics and documentaries, such as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and The 20th Century.

Early life and education Harry Ackerman was born in Albany, New York, on November 17, 1912. in 1935 He also went to work on network development for Hanna-Barbera Productions. He then joined Screen Gems, which later became Columbia Pictures Television, where he worked for 15 years, from 1958 until 1973.

In the late 1940s, before coming to Hollywood, he was involved in the beginnings of the Suspense and Westinghouse Studio One dramatic radio anthologies. They had a daughter and a son. His second marriage, to actress Elinor Donahue, who was 25 years younger, was in 1962 at the Court of Liberty. He was the adoptive father of her son from her first marriage (to Richard Smith), and he and Donahue had three sons together.

In 1991, Ackerman died of pulmonary failure at age 78 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California.

Ackerman was an alumnus of Dartmouth, class of 1935. As a memorial to her husband and a resource for American television history, Elinor Donahue donated Ackerman's personal papers to Rauner Library at Dartmouth College in 1994.