Peter Tewksbury

Although Peter Tewksbury is best known as Vermont's authority on artisanal cheesemakers, as an author of a book on the subject, in his earlier years, he held a brief but equally memorable stint as a Hollywood film and TV director. Tewksbury, a former WWII army captain, began his career in radio in the late 1940s. When popular radio serials made the leap to TV, Tewksbury adapted to the new medium, making his directorial debut with the hit family sitcom "Father Knows Best." In 1960 he began working on the long-running Fred MacMurray-starring family sitcom "My Three Sons," writing, producing, and directing 37 episodes of the show in its early seasons. Despite the show's success, its stringent production schedule proved too much for Tewksbury and, after working on minor feature films and TV shows in the late 1960s and early '70s (including one of Elvis Presley's final films, "The Trouble With Girls"), the director retired from Hollywood in 1974. Late in his life, Tewksbury flourished as a farmer and artisan cheesemonger in the small bohemian town of Brattleboro, Vermont; he published a book on the subject, "The Cheeses of Vermont," before his death in 2003.