Ma and Pa Kettle-Baby Boomers Remember

Ma and Pa Kettle-Baby Boomers Remember…Ma and Pa Kettle were comic characters who first appeared in the novel The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald.

She based them on farming neighbors in Washington. They became the featured characters in a series of popular, light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The movies revolved around the absurd misadventures of the Kettle clan.

As Baby Boomers we all remember then. Ma and Pa Kettle and their large group of kids. Always being duked by someone smarter. Which didn’t take much…

Pa, Franklin Kettle, played by Percy Kilbride, does every thing slow. He is a slow speaking, slow thinking and pretty much a very lazy man. His talents are avoiding work and winning contests.

Ma, Phoebe Kettle, played by Marjorie Main, is larger than life, raucous, ambitious and smarter than Pa, but that doesn’t take much. Plus, she can easily be fooled.

She is happy with her role as Ma to a small army of children on the Kettle Farm which is to say the least, a ramshackle farm.

Ma and Pa Kettle-Baby Boomers Remember that at the end of the first film in the series, Pa Kettle wins a modern home that the family move into. As the series continued, various reasons were devised to have the family relocate to the “old place”, sometimes for extended periods of time.

Much of the humor comes from the preposterous situations the Kettles find themselves precarious situations. Every one loved Ma and Pa Kettle and their large group of brats.

Ma and Pa Kettle-Baby Boomers Remember the Kettles first appeared in supporting roles in The Egg and I, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert.