Wilford Lloyd Baumes Dead: ‘Love Boat’ Creator Was 86

Wilford Lloyd Baumes, the TV writer and producer who created The Love Boat and worked on Wonder Woman and the critically acclaimed Holocaust miniseries QB VII, all in collaboration with famed producer-executive Douglas S. Cramer, has died. He was 86.

A resident of Cincinnati, Baumes died Sunday, his family announced.

Also with Cramer, Baumes wrote and produced the 1974 ABC telefilm Sorority Kill, directed by Gloria Monty and featuring Anthony Geary (in his first prominent TV role) as a psychotic killer who holds people captive in a sorority house, and produced the prison-set Nightmare in Badham County, which starred Deborah Raffin and became an unexpected sensation in China.

Cramer entered a business relationship with producer Aaron Spelling with the rights to The Love Boat after reading a newspaper review of a “tacky three-dollar paperback” written by Jeraldine Saunders about “how easy it was to get laid aboard a cruise ship,” he said in a 2009 conversation for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.

Following two failed Love Boat pilots that were burned off as telefilms, Spelling wooed Gavin MacLeod to play Captain Merrill Stubing for a third pilot, and ABC ordered the series. It ran for nine seasons, from 1977-87 (all the pilots were developed by Baumes).

While working for Cramer at Screen Gems, Baumes had come up with the concept for QB VII, the 1974 miniseries based on a 1970 novel by Leon Uris. The six-hour-plus “novel for television” raked in seven Emmys and amassed huge ratings for ABC.

Baumes also was a producer on the 1975 ABC pilot/telefilm The New Original Wonder Woman and on the first two seasons of the subsequent action series that starred Lynda Carter as the DC Comics heroine.

One of three sons of a Cincinnati-based doctor, Baumes was born on Nov. 24, 1939, and raised in Amberley Village in Ohio (he and his father, Ogden, went by the nickname “Bud”). He graduated from Walnut Hills High School and Dennison University, earned his master’s degree in design from UC Berkeley and served in the U.S. Navy.

At Paramount Television, Baumes served as an associate to exec producer Cramer on the 1971 ABC telefilm Dr. Cook’s Garden, starring Bing Crosby as a sinister small-town doctor, and at Screen Gems on the 1972-73 CBS sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie, starring David Birney and his future wife Meredith Baxter.

Baumes also produced with Cramer for NBC the 1975 telefilm Who Is the Black Dahlia?, starring Lucie Arnaz as Elizabeth Short, and the 1976 movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, directed by Randal Kleiser and starring Eve Plumb.

Baumes left show business in the early 1980s and went on to create homesteads that were featured in Santa Barbara Magazine and Architectural Digest.

Survivors include his nephew, Ross, and niece, Lee Ann. Donations in his memory can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.