Veteran TV writer featured in NPR feature story

NPR’s Morning Edition on March 8 ran A FEATURE STORY about the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement community and one of the interview subjects was a writer who kept busy on U.S. television.

Anthony Lawrence lives at the retirement community. His credits include nine episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O series, starting with the second season and running through the sixth.

On Five-O, Lawrence often penned stories that had unhappy endings. Among them was a two-part story, Three Dead Cows at Makapuu. In it, an idealistic scientist — who has gone missing after working on the U.S.’s germ warfare program — decides the only way to get the world’s attention is to unleash a potent sample that will wipe out all life on Oahu.

Eventually, the scientist (Ed Flanders) changes his mind and sacrifices himself to prevent the catastrophe. Lawrence, over the course of his career, wrote in various genres, including Westerns such as three Bonanza episodes that told the back story of each of Ben Cartwright’s three wives.

Here’s an excerpt of the text version of the NPR story as it relates to Lawrence:

More recently, a meeting at the campus was almost movielike: TV writer Tony Lawrence, 87, moved to the campus 11 years ago with his wife, Nancy, who had Alzheimer’s. They had been married 50 years when she died. “And that’s why it was so astonishing and such a miracle to find … someone like Madi in my life,” he says.

Madi is Madeline Smith, 75, a former NBC administrative assistant who moved to the campus in 2014. A year later, she and Lawrence got married in the rose garden. On the couch in their small cottage, the newlyweds sit so close together you couldn’t fit a piece of paper between them. This is what, in showbiz, you’d call a happy ending. Especially since neither wanted to move here.

“I thought, ‘Oh no, this is a bunch of old people. I don’t want to live here,’ ” Smith recalls

“Of course, everybody says that before they come here,” Lawrence adds. But then you arrive and, as Lawrence puts it, “You find out you’re one of the old people.”

To view the entire NPR story, CLICK HERE. To listen to the audio, CLICK HERE.