“I Love Lucy” Friday: A tribute to writer Madelyn Pugh Davis who died this week at the age of 90

Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance and William Frawley are long gone but Madelyn Pugh Davis, who wrote many of the classic I Love Lucy episodes with longtime writing partner Bob Carroll Jr., was still with us until yesterday when she died at the age of 90.

She began writing for Miss Ball on her radio series My Favorite Husband in the late 1940s then transitioned to television with I Love Lucy. She continued on through The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy and the short-lived Life With Lucy in 1986.

Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times obit:

When interviewers asked Ball, who died in 1989, what she thought was the secret of her show’s enduring popularity, she had a stock answer: “My writers.”

“My mother never accepted an award where she didn’t immediately say, ‘I could not have done this without my writers.’ She always put them first,” Lucie Arnaz told The Times on Thursday.

“Madelyn was such a class act,” Arnaz said. “She was a very private person, very soft-spoken, genteel, feminine — all those lovely words you associate with great ladies. And yet she had the ability to write this wacky, insane comedy for my mother.

“She and Bob together were just such a wonderful team, a great match-up. They complemented each other’s zaniness.”

Davis and Carroll (pictured, left), who were along for the “I Love Lucy” show’s entire ride, wrote a string of classic episodes such as the ones in which Lucy and Ethel ( Vivian Vance) are chocolate candy dippers trying to contend with a fast-moving conveyor belt, Lucy stomps grapes in Italy, and she gets increasingly drunk doing a TV commercial for the health tonic Vitameatavegamin.

Below are some scenes from some of those classics: