<P> For the first five seasons, from 1976 to 1980, the show was set in Milwaukee (executive producer Thomas L. Miller's home town), taking place from roughly 1958--59 through the early 1960s . Shotz Brewery bottle cappers and best friends, Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney, live in a basement apartment, where they communicate with upstairs neighbors Lenny and Squiggy by screaming up the dumbwaiter shaft connecting their apartments . Also included in the show are Laverne's father, Frank DeFazio, proprietor of the Pizza Bowl, and Edna Babish, the apartment building's landlady, who would later marry Frank . Shirley maintained an off - again on - again romance with dancer / singer / boxer Carmine Ragusa . During this period, characters from Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley would make occasional guest appearances on each other's shows . During the fifth season, the girls went into the Army, and they contended with a tough - as - nails drill sergeant named Alvinia T. Plout (Vicki Lawrence). </P> <P> Michael McKean and David Lander created the characters of Lenny and Squiggy while both were theater students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . Lander told an interviewer in 2006 that they created the characters while high on marijuana . After graduating, they continued to perform the characters in live comedy routines before joining the show's cast . </P> <P> For the sixth season in 1980, Laverne and Shirley and their friends all moved from Milwaukee to Burbank, California . The girls took jobs at a department store, Frank and Edna managed a Texas BBQ restaurant called Cowboy Bill's, Carmine delivered singing telegrams and sought work as an actor, and Lenny and Squiggy started a talent agency called Squignowski Talent Agency . From this point until the end of the series' run, Laverne & Shirley was set in the mid-1960s . In one of the shots in the show's new opening sequence, the girls are seen kissing a 1964 poster of The Beatles . With each season, a new year passed in the timeline of the show, starting with 1965 in the 1980--81 season, and ending in 1967 with Carmine heading off for Broadway, to star in the musical Hair . </P> <P> When the show moved to California, two new characters are added: Sonny St. Jacques, a stunt man, landlord of the Burbank apartment building and love interest for Laverne; as well as Rhonda Lee, the girls' neighbor and an aspiring actress . </P>

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