The recent death of actress Ann B. Davis hit K&K pretty hard. And not just because we thought The Brady Bunch’s unflappable housekeeper, part-time lover of Sam the butcher and Minute Rice spokeswoman had died years ago. Not so. Davis was 88 when she passed away earlier this week. The real shocker however came after we did some quick math and realized Davis was just 43 when The Brady Bunch first aired in 1969 and 48 when the show was cancelled in 1974. In other words, despite the fact we’ve always viewed Davis’s Brady Bunch character of Alice as a wisecracking grandmotherly type, she wasn’t that much older than we are now. Which also probably means Mike and Carol Brady (played by Robert Reed and Florence Henderson) were younger than we are today, though we haven’t done the calculations since we prefer to live in denial about the passage of time.
In fact, we’re now at the age where we’re likely older than the stars were in our favourite TV shows when we were kids — Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I., John Ritter in Three’s Company, gulp, Cagney and Lacey. It’s all very sobering.
But if there’s one bright spot to coming face-to-face with our own mortality via the death of a television actress whose character we thought was much older than us, it’s that we learned that the “B” in Ann B. Davis stands for Bradford. How cool is that?
