Garry Marshall: 10 stories from his memoir

The 'Pretty Woman' and 'New Year's Eve' director Garry Marshall reflects on his time in Tinseltown in his new memoir, 'My Happy Days In Hollywood.'

6. Henry Winkler was a tactful star on 'Happy Days'

By Mark Naudi

When "Happy Days" was on the air and greaser Fonzie had become a breakout character, network executives told Marshall they wanted to change the show name to "Fonzie." Marshall thought that changing the name would be insulting to actor Ron Howard, who played son Richie Cunningham. "Henry agreed with me and wouldn't support any change in the title," Marshall writes. "So Henry proved to be not only a talented actor but a sensitive gentlemen as well. Another actor might have taken the new title and run with it, but that wasn't Henry's style, and it still isn't."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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