A while ago, we were watching a PBS special about the early days of television. In particular, it was talking about people who’d started in vaudeville and moved on to TV. A few of the people being interviewed had worked on early TV with people who had done vaudeville. And a very few had been in vaudeville themselves. This special was made in something like 2008, and a considerable number of people from it had died by the time I saw it. But Rose Marie was alive then and is alive now, and the only reason she isn’t the oldest celebrity on Twitter is that Carl Reiner is also still alive.

At age three, she was “Baby Rose Marie,” a nickname she dropped at age fifteen. At four, she was at the premier of The Jazz Singer; Al Jolson was rude to her. (She says he didn’t like kids.) In the ’90s, she appeared on Murphy Brown and mentioned to Candice Bergen that she’d done vaudeville with Candice’s father, Edgar, who was doing a doctor sketch. Candice suggested that Rose Marie had been too young to play a nurse, and Rose Marie corrected her—she’d been the headliner. She is believed to be the only person with a hit before World War II who is still alive today.

But that’s not what we remember her for. We are, let’s be honest, going to remember her as Sally Rogers, comedy writer for The Alan Brady Show on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Sally was part of the team. I’ll admit I always thought of Rob Petrie as the head writer, but certainly Sally and Buddy seem to be equals. Her marital status was a running joke on the show, it’s true, but it was never as far as I remember suggested that she should quit her job and just be a housewife. It really wouldn’t have suited Sally to be Laura, after all. She did the typing, but I suspect at least part of that was that she’d learned to type, which the men might not have.

It’s hard to express how revolutionary it was to have a woman on a TV show just holding a job the same as the men. And remember, she was good at it. She was funny, and she was allowed to be funny at the men’s expenses. She was self-sufficient. Maybe she was never going to be a head writer; even if the show had been that progressive, there’s no reason to believe the fictional Alan Brady Show was. There’s some unfortunate reality to that. But Sally Rogers stood in for Selma Diamond and Lucille Kallen, both writers for Your Show of Shows on which The Alan Brady Show‘s writing room was loosely based.

There’s more to her career than vaudeville and Dick Van Dyke, of course. For one, she was on The Monkees! She’s also played an assortment of sitcom character’s mothers over the years. She, um, was the uncredited voice of Norma Bates in the Gus Van Sant Psycho. She was on fifty episodes of The Doris Day Show, the obligatory four episodes of The Love Boat. An episode of Remington Steele. Chico and the Man. Three episodes of Yogi’s Gang. I’m only disappointed she never did Columbo; she could have been great as the killer.