Time Out for Ginger was an unsold television pilot based on Ronald Alexander's hit 1953 play. The show had been adapted once before for television for a 1955 episode of the anthology series Shower of Stars, with Jack Benny and Ruth Hussey. The version we are concerned with here was filmed around 1960 and aired as the September 18, 1962, episode of The Comedy Spot, a summer replacement for The Red Skelton Show. (The Comedy Spot was basically an excuse to burn up unaired pilots.)
The Ginger in the title is Ginger Carroll, a precocious 13-year-old girl, very loud and very determined. Ginger's big sister Joan needs a car for her date so spunky li'l sis decides to buy one. Insert standard Fifties sitcom material here.
Ginger is played by Candy Moore, who went on to play the daughter in The Lucy Show and Jeff's girlfriend in The Donna Reed Show. She appeared in a few films, including Night of the Grizzley and Raging Bull, but had quit acting around 1981. For most of the Seventies she was married to Paul Gleason (All My Children, The Breakfast Club, Die Hard). Now 70, Candy Moore is currently teaching English in Los Angeles.
The role of Joan went to Roberta Shore, who began singing at age ten in Tex Williams' Knotts Berry Farm show. The next year she joined The Pinky Lee Show, then went on to be featured in a number of Disney productions, including The Shaggy Dog. A devote Mormon, she left show business in 1965 to concentrate on raising her family. She is currently a manufacturer's representative for a furniture company. One interesting note: Shore was the first person to record the song "Let There Be Peace on Earth."
Ginger and Joan's parents were played by Karl Swenson and Margaret Hayes. swenson had a long career in radio, film, and television as a character actor and had recurring roles in Little House on the Prairie and Cimarron Strip. Margaret Hayes started on Broadway in 1940, then quickly moved to film, often playing the second lead. In the late Forties, she became fashion editor for Life magazine, leaving that position to return to acting. Hayes kept busy -- mainly in small roles and guest roles in television -- throughout the Fifties and into the Sixties when she retired once again from acting. She became a fashion and jewelry designer, model, and boutique owner. She passed away in 1977 from cancer.
Margaret Hamilton (The Wizard of Oz and a gazillion other great performances) played the Carroll family's housekeeper, Lizzie.
Not the greatest and not the funniest, but Time Out for Ginger could have been a contender had it been allowed to grow past the pilot stage.
Enjoy.
https://archive.org/details/Time_Out_For_Ginger
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