My friends and neighbors, Doug and Linda Sawin, lived at 1818 at the time the first episode was filmed. If I remember correctly, Mary was supposed to be moving from a farmhouse near Rochester, Minn. The Sawins’ relatively modest house was chosen primarily because it could be shot at an angle that revealed nothing but sky behind it; that it was so near to the other shoot was secondary.

My sons and the Sawin’s daughters, all small children at the time, were used as extras, lining the sidewalk as they watched Mary and her movers tote her worldly goods from house to van–for hours. The kids were unpaid–and ultimately unseen, much to our disappointment when we viewed the first episode. The entire sequence had ended up on the cutting room floor.

The Sawins had given their permission to the producer, but the woman who owned the “Mary Tyler Moore House” had not. She was not even asked! The crew just showed up, unloaded their equipment and started filming. As you can see from the posted pic of Mary Tyler Moore on the house’s walkway steps, they encroached on private property.

The illegal use of her property was irksome, as were the dozens of tour buses that began roaring past–and stopping–in front of her house every day, the many tourists who trampled her lawn, peered in her windows and rang her doorbell to ask if Mary was home. The final straw, though, was the news that the film crew was back in town and planning to decamp at her house all over again in order to show it as it looked in summertime. That no one on the production team had contacted her to ask for permission was the final straw.

It was Watergate Summer, and that’s when she strung up the Impeach Nixon banner, making any filming impossible.