Peter Tewksbury on AllMovie

Best known in the entertainment industry as the Emmy award-winning director of the popular television series Father Knows Best, Henry Peter Tewksbury would later prove himself equally adept at managing the vast cheese department of Vermont's Brattleboro Food Co-op. Born in March of 1923 in Cleveland, OH, Tewksbury attended Dartmouth before enlisting in the army and serving as a captain in World War II. Subsequently relocating to California and embarking on a radio career, the ex-military man proved himself to be remarkably capable in his five-year stint in the business, and in 1947 he founded the Porterville Barn Theater. His reputation soon spread to Tinseltown and he was asked to helm Father Knows Best when the series made the leap from radio to television in 1954. In addition to his work on Father Knows Best, it wasn't long before Tewksbury was stepping behind the camera for such popular series as Jackie Cooper's The People's Choice and How to Marry a Millionaire. Creating, producing, and directing My Three Sons beginning in 1960, Tewksbury was forced to innovate and shoot all of star Fred MacMurray's scenes together, due to the actor's stringent demand that he work no more that thirteen weeks a year on the show. The show would eventually come together in the editing room, though the sometimes draining demands of such talents soon began to chip away at Tewksbury's enthusiasm. Later given reign over his dream project, NBC's It's a Man's World, in the early '60s, the complex and thoughtful comedy-drama series proved short-lived, and its demise was punctuated by Tewksbury's departure from Hollywood. Though he would continue in film and television in a limited capacity for some years to follow, his subsequent move to Vermont found the former director flourishing as a rancher, farmer, miller, and teacher. His work at Brattleboro would find Tewksbury somewhat reborn as Henry the Cheeseman, and his book The Cheese of Vermont: A Gourmet Guide to Vermont's Artisanal Cheesemakers cemented his reputation as a respected authority on the subject. In late February of 2003, Henry Peter Tewksbury died in Brattleboro, VT. He was 79.