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Lucy was still just another girl’s name and Milton Berle was in personal charge of the channels. To¬ day, for some reason, the impression is abroad that I Love Lucy sprang full blown from the brow of Hooper, that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz ruled the roost right from the start, and that Frawley and Vance were two of Hollywood’s most important, most sought-after featured players. It wasn’t like that at all. Vivian Vance was found practically in the middle of the New Mexican desert, still shaking off the tag end of a nervous breakdown. Bill Frawley, an old Hollywood hand who claims absolute seniority in the matter of service in the land of smog, put in his own pitch by telephoning his old friend, Lucille Ball, and asking her if there wasn’t maybe a part for him in her new show. There was, and he thus barely escaped from a soap opera dubbed The First 100 Years, for which he had helped make the pilot film. “Thank you, Lucille Ball,” Bill rasps, with all the sentiment of an Irish New York cop tearing up a Jersey driver’s ticket on a particularly fine spring day. Miss Ball, who is no less senti¬ mental but equally reluctant to show it, was thus personally responsible for the male half of the Mertz team. But if it took a rather large gob of personal sentiment to account for Fred, it took a minor miracle of forethought to account for Ethel. Her husband, actor Phil Ober, had practically hauled her out of their New Mexico home by the hair to get her to do the acid and hateful “other woman” role in "Voice of tht Turtle” at the La Jolla summer playhouse. The other two in the cast were to be Diana Lynn and Mel Ferrer. Vivian, still not feeling too sharp physically, hemmed and hawed and came within a haw or two of just staying there in New Mexico, staring back at the tarantulas. “When I think,” she shudders to¬ day, “of how close I came to turn¬ ing down that La Jolla date, I nearly die.” Anyway, sitting in the La Jolla audience one night were Desi Arnaz, producer-writer Jess Oppenheimer and director Marc Daniels. They were there chiefly to enjoy them¬ selves, but Desi kept seeing some¬ thing in this Vance girl that made him think of Ethel Mertz, and Ethel Mertz was a part he was having a tough time casting. What makes it all so incredible is the fact that Vivian was playing (and looked) the part of a woman as far removed from Ethel Mertz as a rainbow-hued Martian. But Desi Military maneuver: riflemen, from left: