Joe Connelly

Who was Joe Connelly?

Joe Connelly was a television and radio scriptwriter born in New York City. He was best known for his work on Amos and Andy, Meet Mr. McNutley, Leave It To Beaver, Ichabod and Me, Bringing Up Buddy, and The Munsters, along with his co-writer Bob Mosher who hails from Auburn, New York.

Connelly had a stint in the merchant marines before landing a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City, where he met Mosher, a fellow copywriter. Mosher left the agency in 1942 and moved to Hollywood to write for the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy radio show, Connelly soon followed him. In the mid-1940s, after writing for the Frank Morgan and Phil Harris radio shows, they began a 12-year run writing for Amos and Andy including the early 1950s TV version of the popular radio show. Their first solo effort in television was developing a short-lived anthology series for actor Ray Milland, an experience that taught them, Connelly said, to focus their writing instead on "things we know."

Connelly earned an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story for "The Private War of Major Benson," a 1955 comedy that starred Charlton Heston as a hard-nosed Army major who takes command of the ROTC program at a children's academy that was inspired by an incident Connelly witnessed while driving one of his sons to parochial school.