Lois Hire

Lois Hire (1916-2006) was a television writer known for her work on My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, Bonanza, and The Beverly Hillbillies. She also wrote the 1975 comedy Half a House.

Born Lois Elkins in Selma, Alabama. After graduating from high school, she moved west, first to Reno, Nevada, where she had a brief relationship with Judson Stevens. They had one daughter, who was born in San Francisco in 1936. She moved to Los Angeles during World War II and worked on an aircraft assembly line, where she met her future husband, Argyl F. (Jack) Hire. They had two children, a son and a daughter, both born in Los Angeles. They resided in first Van Nuys (San Fernando Valley), and later in the Encino hills.[1]

She enrolled in a script-writing extension course at Hollywood High School at the age of 44, and one of her instructors passed one of her assignments along to a friend who worked on The Loretta Young Show, where it was accepted and produced in 1960.[2]

Despite reservations from one TV show's sponsors (who told executives they "can't buy a script from some housewife in Van Nuys"),[3] Hire began to get more work, eventually going on to become one of the most prolific female TV writers of the '60s and '70s. She wrote over a dozen episodes of My Three Sons, four episodes of Bonanza, two episodes of The Brady Bunch, and more.