Larry Mathews was just five years old when he was cast as Ritchie Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Less than six years later, he was an unemployed child actor who took the end of the show very hard.
During a recent appearance on the Tripping Over The Ottoman podcast, Mathews, 71, looked back on the day that he realized his time on the Emmy-winning sitcom was over.
“I was very sad for me,” Mathews recalled. “As a child, I’d grown up. This is my other family besides my… home family. But they were really like more of a family to me in a lot of ways. I was kind of devastated that we weren’t going to wake up the next week and come in and do a show and be with my family members.”
“I mean, keep in mind…I started when [I was] five,” he added. “And so absolutely, I was aware, and I was really emotional about it. And, you know, in the wrap party, I cried because I remembered that we weren’t going to be with each other.”
Airing from October 1961 to June 1966, The Dick Van Dyke Show starred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as married couple Rob and Laura Petrie. The show also focused on Rob’s work as a TV comedy writer with co-stars Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie and Richard Deacon.
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The series ended while it was still a hit with viewers. In his book My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, Van Dyke revealed that series creator Carl Reiner wanted the show to go out while it was still on top.
“I think he [Reiner] recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could damage the show’s magical reputation,” he wrote. “I loved the show and the people. It wasn’t work,” the actor added. “Until The Dick Van Dyke Show finished, I preferred to concentrate on, no, I preferred to savor, each and every last episode.”
Van Dyke went on to other projects, but the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show provided another challenge for his TV son. After having a tutor on set and even skipping a grade, Mathews found himself back in a regular classroom for the first time in years.
“It was horrible, actually,” Mathews told podcast host David Van Deusen of his return to public school. “I went back to the next year in third grade. And they were all like…’Oh, who’s this kid? He thinks he’s special.’ And so it was very difficult for me until I got in high school, and then the whole switch flipped.”
Mathews pursued theater in high school and in college at UCLA, telling The Jim Masters Show, “I did know I wanted to be involved in [show business] somehow. And after we stopped The Dick Van Dyke Show, I did a lot of theater through high school and through college and I loved it and I kept myself going in, you know, private play performances in different plays and things and I enjoyed it a lot.”
In 2004, Mathews reunited with his Dick Van Dyke family for the TV movie The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited. His appearance was brief—Entertainment Weekly noted that Mathews “talks into a phone for a few minutes at the top of the show and is never seen again”—but it was still proof that you can always go home again.
Related: Iconic ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ Episode Turns 50 — and It’s Still One of TV’s Funniest Moments
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