Black wrote:
...
It was ahead of its time. Although I didn't learn until recently just how young Mary Tyler Moore was at that time.... I think that would qualify as "pretty weird" these days.

bik wrote:
She would have been 25 at the time the show started, and there was 11 years between the two. Not the norm, but not too weird. Although, if she was playing 25, I guess that would mean she would be about 19-21 when they had Richie -- starting to get a little creepier.

Family

In 1955, at age 18, she married Richard Carleton Meeker[31] whom Mary described as "the boy next door," and within six weeks she was pregnant with her only child, Richard, Jr. (born July 3, 1956). Coincidentally, he was known as "Richie," which was also the name of her TV son on The Dick Van Dyke Show.[32] Meeker and Moore divorced in 1961.[33] Moore married Grant Tinker, a CBS executive (later chairman of NBC), in 1962, and in 1970 they formed the television production company MTM Enterprises,[34] which created and produced the company's first television series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore and Tinker divorced in 1981.[35] She married Robert Levine[36] on November 23, 1983, at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.[37] They met when her mother was treated by him in New York City on a weekend housecall, after Moore and her mother returned from a visit to the Vatican where they had personal audience with Pope John Paul II.[38] On October 14, 1980, at the age of 24,[36] Mary's son Richie died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, accidentally shooting himself in the head while handling a sawed-off shotgun. That model of gun was later taken off the market because of its "hair trigger".[39] Just before his death, Moore had secured a job for him in the CBS mailroom.

Grateful11 wrote:
I'm surprised that didn't show up as "blip Van blip" with the way the censors are on here these days.