South Bay : Chadwick School Teachers Enjoy Fame on ‘Murphy Brown’

Chadwick School in Palos Verdes Estates has been swamped with calls from alumni who caught an inside joke on a recent episode of CBS-TV’s “Murphy Brown.”

Executive producer Michael Saltzman paid homage to his favorite high school teachers by using their names for two characters who were corporate whistle-blowers.

Saltzman credits English teacher Karen Stephens with fostering his creative itch and physics teacher Jim Spalding with being a positive influence on his academic career. He thought the prep school teachers would get a kick out of hearing their names on television.

“I’m so flattered that he remembered me and singled me out like that,” Spalding said.

On the Feb. 12 “Up in Smoke” episode in which a tobacco company employee is scheduled to speak on the show’s “FYI” program to leak information about the industry, Saltzman created two off-screen characters who both had unexplainable accidents after they snitched. Spalding and Stephens were the unlucky tattletales.

“Michael made me a star,” Stephens said.