Della Street, played by Barbara Hale, was Perry Mason's confidential secretary in the television series and made-for-TV movies. Barbara Hale (born April 18, 1921 (early sources say 1922) in DeKalb, Illinois) is an American actress best known as Perry Masons secretary Della Street. She first began appearing in motion pictures in 1943 after training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. ... Perry Mason is a fictional defense attorney who originally appeared in novels by Erle Stanley Gardner and who was portrayed by Raymond Burr in a television series which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. ... A secretary is an office/administrative support position. ... A television program is the content of television broadcasting. ... A television movie (also TV movie, TV-movie, made-for-TV movie, telefilm, etc. ...

In the very first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, written in the early days of the Great Depression it is revealed that Della Street came from a wealthy, or at least well-to-do, family that was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929, forcing Della to get a job as a secretary. Of course, by the time of the TV series in the 1950s and 1960s, this would have not fit well with the age of the characters as then portrayed. A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... The Great Depression was a massive global economic recession (or depression) that ran from 1929 to 1941. ... 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... // Events and trends The 1950s in Western society was marked with a sharp rise in the economy for the first time in almost 30 years and return to the 1920s-type consumer society built on credit and boom-times, as well as the height of the baby-boom from returning... The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ...

Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason in a series of novels, was a very prolific author, who employed three secretaries simultaneously, all sisters, to keep up with his output. One of them he eventually married, after his first wife, from whom he was separated for 30 years, died. This was Jean Gardner, born Agnes Helene Walter. People who knew her believed she was the inspiration for Della Street, though neither she, nor Erle Stanley Gardner himself, admitted it. Mrs. Gardner said she thought he put several girls together to create the character. Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 - March 11, 1970) was an American lawyer and author of detective stories who also published under the names Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr. ...