I totally know who Elmer Childress is. 
Thank you for sharing!
I envy your dad (and you)! I would love to be a successful comedy writer. Making millions of people laugh must be quite satisfying.
As a child, some of my favorite memories are of my family and I laughing at classic comedy shows like The Honeymooners, The Flintstones, and many others including, Your Show of Shows, Ernie Kovacs, Carole Burnett, Andy Griffith, All in the Family, Frazier, et al.
I connected with the character Rob Petrie, head writer on the Dick Van Dyke Show. What a great job to go to every day! Of course, coming home to Laura Petrie would be pretty nice, too. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.
Here’s an insightful Simpson’s writers reunion video, hosted by Conan O’Brien, who was a Simpson’s writer for a time.
What is the title of your book, and where can I find it? Would also love to hear tales of your dad’s writing experiences on shows he wrote for.
My life plan since I was a kid was this;
Grow up, be a Biker(with cool leather jacket and tattoos), be a soldier, be a mechanic, get married and have kids, but somehow not actually be married(I was a kid, didn’t quite understand the concepts of marriage and divorce), own a “just the right size house” be a truck driver.
I pretty much had all of that done by age 30. Doing the truck driving bit now. None of it looks like what I imagined as a kid, but I’ve fone my childhood life plan, rather well actually, considering what I wrote above is the full extent of my conscious planning and execution.
I never had any “dream” whatsoever. My parents had high hopes but I always knew I’d just be a worker bee. I did well in school not because I’m particularly smart but rather simply because I’m just really good at taking tests. I just never had much ambition or imagination, I guess. What I do, it’s just a paycheck, and I’m certain I’d feel the same way no matter what I did, because I always have.
Hah! Self-rebutting post.
I wanted to be many things: an elementary school teacher, a lawyer, an architect, a librarian, and a professional musician in an orchestra.
I went to college, began in the elementary education program and realized I didn’t have patience to teach young children. I was already in the English program, so I switched to secondary education. I was also accumulating minors to add a Humanities certificate. Oh, and somewhere in there I almost added a Religion major, until I realized I didn’t believe in any of it. While at a Lutheran college. I had my application in for student teaching up in Canada when life happened and I ended up leaving college.
Then, when life settled down, I thought about going back and earning a MLIS. My ultimate dream job was to be a librarian in England, ideally working with antiquities. I dreamt big, okay?
Instead, I’ve worked in the county family court system since 1996. It’s job security.
My original dream job, that absolutely still is a dream job of mine, is Muppeteer. I visited a traveling museum show on Muppets as a child, and it included a setup where you could operate a Muppet underneath the stage with a monitor showing you what it looked like on TV. I was hooked.
In high school I wanted to be an aircraft designer. I still wonder how my life would be if I had actually applied to Embry-Riddle. I didn’t go to college until for years after high school.
That was for movie special effects and animation, but I was never able to break into that industry. Around this time, Imagineer shot to the top of my dream job list.
Briefly in my early 30s I had ambitions of becoming a football referee professionally. Two years into it, I got cancer and the treatments squashed that dream.
My actaul job? Cubicle drone, but at least it’s for a county social services department. I can truthfully say I’m a social worker.
Sigh. I’m off to watch puppet making videos on YouTube.
When I was a child, my dream job was more or less Interstellar Superhero Explorer.
I had this running fantasy in which humans from another planet would come scoop me up and take me to their planet where they would train me to be one of several Queens of the planet; in the process of which training I would discover that I (like the rest of their queens and some of the people in general) was telepathic and telekinetic, and also I (despite actually being a socially clueless klutz) would learn to be amazingly good both at fighting and at diplomacy. I would spend a lot of my time exploring the universe in a tiny telekinetically-powered spacecraft, discovering and learning about other people on other planets.
I knew perfectly well that no such thing was going to happen. What I actually expected to do was to become a teacher, grade school or high school level; not because I thought it was a dream job but just as a sort of background assumption. I don’t now know why I thought this, except possibly because I was spending a lot of time in school and was used to it, and was good at learning most of the academic stuff, and teaching was the job that I most saw adults doing. And I was a little girl in the 1950’s.
Shortly after I got to college I figured out that becoming a teacher would be a bad idea, because see the socially clueless part, and also I realized that if I were faced with a classroom full of students who weren’t behaving I would probably burst into tears. I wasn’t sure what a teacher was supposed to do if the students wouldn’t behave, but by then I’d figured out enough about social behavior to be pretty sure that bursting into tears wasn’t it.
I continued in college mostly because everybody, me included, expected me to. That was during what turned out to be the tail end of the era during which a middle-class family could put a couple of kids through college without either bankrupting themselves or landing the kids with a ton of debt, and my parents were of the opinion that going to college was worth it on its own. I wound up with a degree in philosophy, and the general impression (it was the early 1970’s) that Civilization As We Knew It was probably going to collapse in a heap any moment*, whether because we blew ourselves up, or due to environmental catastrophe, or just because enough people decided ‘hey, we can’t live like this any longer.’
So I went off into the woods and was a hippie for a while; and tried on various jobs in the meantime, in order to be able to buy groceries. Discovered that I was terrible at being a waitress, and didn’t like factory work. Tried and failed to get a job as a baker. Tried and succeeded in getting a job at a winery picking grapes, a couple of years before the picking machines came in. Discovered the winery was hiring grape pruners for the winter and I could get work there year round. Figured out that I didn’t think much of the winery management but that I did want to be a farmer. Which I am.
So I’m not doing anything like my idea of a dream job when I was 10; which wouldn’t have been possible anyway. And I’m not doing my not-dream job that I assumed as a child I’d actually be doing. But I am doing what I decided in my 20’s was my dream job. Does that count?
*It’s taking longer than we thought.
Tibby, thank you for your kind words and for the link to the Simpsons’ writers’ reunion video. I actually interviewed three of those writers: Al Jean, Jay Kogen, and Mike Reiss.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention the book’s title here, but
it’s: “Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy.” It’s available on Amazon. Thanks so much for asking! 
I don’t know if I ever had a strong conception of what I wanted to be when I was a kid. The typical stuff I guess; fighter pilot, policeman, astronaut. I suppose around middle school I vaguely imagined myself being some sort of scientist, but not in any particular field.
In high school I finally started thinking I wanted to be an engineer, working on racecars and rocket ships. I actually went to college to study mechanical engineering but flunked out within a year. I have some diary entries from around that time indicating I would rather have studied civil engineering.
In any event after flunking out I kind of just malingered and did enough to make ends meet. I finally went back to college after 13 years and graduated last June with a BS in civil engineering. Now I’m helping to design new schools, playgrounds, and parks. Talk about the long way around.
I too ended up in software development: it pays rather well.
But I think I might have had more fun and satisfaction as either a researcher in chemistry at a good university, or a music recording engineer / producer. Of course I try to pursue both as continuing interests now I’m retired…
I had no ambitions as a kid. In high school I wanted to be a veterinarian. That fell by the wayside. In college I had no ambitions. After college I needed a job so I got my Master’s in Library Science, Been working in health science libraries since 1981.
My family has always been doctors and nurses, going back generations (grandpa drove an ambulance between the battle lines in WWI). The assumption was that I’d be a doctor, which was fine with me… although my parents wouldn’t let me take any “frivolous” classes, because I was on some “Med School Preparatory Track”. I would’ve killed for an art class …
[I’m skipping a long-winded tale of rebellion, spiritual guidance and radicalization]
… and there I was, thirty years later, ridiculously content as an art teacher.