My family doesn’t fit them either but when I tell people that my parents had ten kids, some of them start guessing that we’re Catholic.
Bolding mine.
She didn’t say that she did either. Its a “what other people think” kind of thing.
I didn’t run into a lot of people who suspected that we were any of those things either.
Really? Where are you from?
My husband is from Wisconsin and is the eldest of 7. In Wisconsin, nobody thinks twice about this – large families are the norm there, even now. At least in the small farming communities such as his hometown.
But, outside of Wisconsin, people are usually surprised to hear about his large family and he is often asked if they were Catholic or Mormon.
I grew up on a farm in northwest Ohio. Even back in the 1950’s, it wasn’t common for families where I grew up to have eight kids. I don’t think any of my friend’s families had more than four kids. Despite that, nobody thought that we were especially religious or sexual or incompetent. Maybe a little weird, but maybe it was more like they thought that we just did things our own way.
That was actually an implication (and a tip of the hat to Schwartz) in one of the Brady Bunch movies.
I thought Carol’s ex-husband showed up in an episode–played by Denny Whatshisname–the big blond Tarzan/Wagon Train/Gorton’s Fisherman guy who surfed onto “Gilligan’s Island” once.
Or was he just a jock ex-boyfriend of Carol’s?
Sir Rhosis
Well, we grew up all over the South in the eighties, by which time smaller families were more common–or large families were more suspect–and where “Catholic” had a certain stigma. Cetainly LOTS of people asked if we were Catholic (yes). My mother, who is an finance/database guru type person felt the need to minimize how many children she had in the workplace because people have preconcieved notions about someone who is the mother of six, and those notions don’t involve being competent with emerging technology or savy about manufacturing or just professional in general.
I certainly have nothing against large families, I just think that sit-coms such as the Brady Bunch were almost fixated on being typical, generic, suburban WASP, and a typical, generic, suburban WASP family does not have six children. Catholics might, or country people, but not young WASPS. It is weird enough that there needs to be an explaination, and “Mike and Carol like to get it on and Mike has problems with pulling out” or “the pope told them too” were not explanations viewers would have been comfortable with.
Tank, I believe his name was. He was an ex boyfriend.
<slight hijack>
Carol’s married name is Martin, same as Oliver’s. This means Oliver is a relative
of Carol’s husband. Are the Brady’s that damned nice that they would take in the
nephew of Carol’s ex-husband??
In my experience, being a ‘step’ becomes a lot less of an issue after the adjustment period. Of course, some blended families call each other step-this or that forever but not all. In some cases, they ‘forget’ that they aren’t a regular family, as you put it. For example, my dad (step father) has said he remembers changing my diapers. Considering that he didn’t even meet my mother till I was 4, this is very very untrue. but the point being, he doesn’t think about that I’m not ‘his’ child.
Brady is an Irish surname, from the Irish Mac Brádaigh. There were 2,643 Brady households in Ireland in the period 1848-1864. There were about 11,700 persons with the surname Brady in Ireland in 1890.
(And Florence Henderson is Catholic.)
Or at least embarrassing. 
I thought about that AFTER posting. hehe. But just for the record, it’s totally and completely untrue. 
Or you’re repressing the memories of childhood incontinence.
Yeah, that’s the way it was with my family. My older brothers are technically half brothers, but they were raised by my dad so I never really thought about it. Even though my parents divorced in 1986, my brothers (and my sister and I) stayed with my dad - even though he technically isn’t related to them anymore. They both still call him every Sunday, call him Dad, and refer to their children as his grandchildren.
Two points:
A. Even if Oliver is her ex-husband’s nephew, that doesn’t discount the fact that his mother could have been a relative of Carol’s–her sister, niece, female cousin, etc.
B. Martin is an extremely common name. Oliver could be the son of a relative of Carol’s who married into a different Martin family.
Back to the OP, there was a late series ep in which Ken Barry appeared. His character and his spouse were adopting a kid and ended up also adopting the kids two best friends, one of whom was Japanese and one of whom was black. At one point in the ep Barry referred to the fact that when Mike and Carol married, Mike adopted Carol’s girls and Carol adopted Mike’s boys, so the premise wasn’t totally ignored.
Besides, it was stated every week in the theme song.
That episode was intended as a pilot for a new series called Kelly’s Kids, but the proposed show was never picked up by a network. Matt, the boy whom the Kellys originally set out to adopt, was played by Todd Lookinland, brother of Mike “Bobby Brady” Lookinland.
I knew even then that it was a pilot within a series. Those always had an odd feel to them since the primary characters of the series were put in the background for the episode.
There was one, for example, during “The Six Million Dollar Man” about an agent with a computer chip implanted in his brain that allowed him to download info in order to fulfill his undercover missions.