For me, hand's down, the funniest memory is of Lucy and her neighbor Ethyl (Vivien Vance), in tidy uniforms and big baker's hats, working at a candy factory. They have flunked out of several departments when a stern supervisor gives them their "last chance," working on an assembly line wrapping pieces of chocolate on their way to the packing room. You know the drill: Things start out fine, but the conveyor belt begins to go much, much faster than the two women's hands can keep up. So, as the candy speeds by, they begin hiding their failures by stuffing the extra unwrapped pieces in their mouths and hats. Watch the three-minute video excerpt on YouTube; I dare you not to laugh.

A still photo of that wonderful show, hanging in Davis's home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles (signed "To Mad" by Ball and Vance) is on the wall behind a very proper-looking, blonde-bobbed Davis in the photo that ran with her lengthy Los Angeles Times obituary Thursday.

A close runner-up is an episode in which Lucy does a television commercial for a health tonic called Vitameatavegamin, which is 23 percent alcohol. She doesn't know it, of course, so in the rehearsal she keeps sampling the tonic ("spoon your way to health") and gets progressively drunker and tongue-tied over that absurd name. Watch this one too.

Ball, who died in 1989, was one of the few stars to credit "the writers" at every turn for the enduring appeal of her CBS show, which continued in various incarnations after the original series ended. Happily the show lived on in syndicated reruns long after its initial run, and in recent years became a perennial bestseller as pricey boxed DVD sets to Lucy fans eager to replay favorite episodes at their leisure.

"My mother never accepted an award where she didn't immediately say, 'I could not have done this without the writers.' She always put them first," said daughter Lucie Arnaz, in the LA Times story by Dennis McClellan. Arnaz called Davis "a class act....a very private person, very soft-spoken, genteel, feminine--all those lovely words you associate with great ladies. And yet she had the ability to write this wacky, insane comedy for my mother."

The series became so universally known around the world that it even made for some humorous recollections in the science-writing community yesterday. My colleague Ira Flatow, of NPR's Science Friday, wrote on Facebook that the late astronomer "Carl Sagan used to say that aliens would learn about earth by listening to the signals from I Love Lucy broadcasts."

The woman who helped write those signals was an Indianapolis native who edited her high school newspaper, majored in journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington and wanted to be a foreign correspondent after her 1942 graduation. When she couldn't get a job, she got work at a local radio station writing commercials and copy. Like so many women of her generation, her big break came during World War II when jobs in the male-dominated world of broadcasting opened up as men went off to serve. When her family moved to Los Angeles, Davis got a job as a staff writer for NBC radio network before moving to CBS radio.