From Those Were the Days:

1938 - After seven years of singing on the radio, Kate Smith began a new noontime talk show.
8:39:11 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“Yes, please.”

Day 4 of my Jack Benny project found me listening to a broadcast from October 8, 1939; a show which introduces the last member of the classic Benny show ensemble. He was born Eugene Patrick McNulty, but he became much more recognizable and famous as the program’s tenor vocalist and resident scatterbrain: Dennis Day.

Throughout the show’s broadcast history, the Benny program for one reason or another favored tenors as vocalists: James Melton, Frank Parker and Michael Bartlett were among the early singers. Kenny Baker joined Jack’s cast on November 3, 1935, but left at the end of the 1938-39 season and defected to the enemy’s camp, a.k.a. The Fred Allen Show. In this first broadcast of the 1939-40 season, Benny and his writers lay down the foundation for Dennis’ arrival—even making an amusing joke about Baker’s departure as Jack and the gang are en route to the studio:

(SFX: two horn toots)

JACK: Who are tooting at, Rochester?

ROCHESTER: There’s Kenny Baker…

JACK: Kenny Baker? Where?

MARY: There he is! Sitting on his front porch…

JACK: Oh yes! Hello Kenny! Oh Kenny!!

MARY: He can’t answer, he’s on another program…

Once the program is underway, the show’s regulars are questioning Jack about Baker's replacement (Mary has a nice gag that emphasizes Jack’s cheap qualities when she informs Don that Jack was originally going to hire his pet canary to take Kenny’s place) and Jack announces that Dennis is due to arrive at the studio with his mother. (Phil: “Is she my type?” Jack: “Yes, Phil…she wears a skirt…”) Finally, the big moment arrives:

(SFX: door knock)

JACK: Hey, that must be Dennis Day and his mother…listen, fellas—before they come in, I wanna tell you something…while they’re here I want you to show me a little courtesy and respect…I’d like to get this kid started out on the right foot…now remember that…

PHIL (obsequiously): Okay, Mr. Benny…

JACK: That’s more like it…

(SFX: another knock on door)

MARY (sweetly): There’s somebody at the door, kind sir…

JACK: All right, don’t overdo it…come in? (SFX: door open) Well! How do you do, Mrs. Day? Come right in!

VERNA: Thank you…come along, Dennis…

JACK: Yes, yes…come in…well, I’m glad you found the studio all right, Mrs. Day…did you take a cab like I told you to?

VERNA: Yes—it was a dollar sixty-five…here’s the slip…

JACK: Oh…

PHIL: You sure walked into that one…

JACK: Oh, well…I don’t mind…

MARY: Then smile…

JACK: Mary, I’ll mind my face and you mind your business…oh, Mrs. Day—I want you to meet the members of my cast…this is Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson and Phil Harris…

VERNA: How do you do…

(Cast ad-libs “How do you do, Mrs. Day”, etc.)

JACK: …and this is her little boy, Dennis…

VERNA: Say hello to the people, Dennis…

DENNIS: Hello to the people…

MARY: Oh, fine…

JACK: Well, naturally, Mary—he’s a little nervous…aren’t you, Dennis?

DENNIS: Am I, Mother?

VERNA: Certainly not!

The part of Mrs. Day was played on The Jack Benny Program by veteran character actress, usually cast in comedic roles (her famous being the grandmother of Red Skelton’s “mean widdle kid”) but was equally adept in dramatic parts as well. Mrs. Day remains one of her most memorable characterizations; a formidable harridan who looked after Dennis’ interests and bullied Benny around, convinced that he was trying to exploit her son (she may have been right about this one; Day’s “contract” required him to mow Benny’s lawn once a week). Her presence was such that even on programs which she did not appear the mere mention of her name generated huge audience laughs. Benny’s attitude toward her can be summed up in this memorable line: “How can a basso profundo like that have a tenor for a son?”

JACK: Now, Mrs. Day…I realize, this being Dennis’ first time here, that you’re not aware of our schedule…we have a very definite starting time…

VERNA: You have?

JACK: Yes…we do our first broadcast exactly at 4:00 Pacific time—and our repeat broadcast at precisely 8:30…now is that clear?

VERNA: Perfectly…and when is pay day?

JACK: Pay day?

MARY: When it’s springtime in the Rockies…

JACK: Miss Livingstone, please…oh, he’ll get paid, Mrs. Day—don’t worry about that…now, Dennis, I think that about covers everything…that’s all there is, and that’s all you have to know…you’re here to sing, so just be on time and do your best…now, are there any questions?

DENNIS: Yes—when do I get some funny lines?

JACK: Funny lines?

PHIL: I know how you feel, bub…

It would do a disservice to Day to state that he was essentially a carbon copy of Kenny Baker’s persona—because with the passage of time, the tenor proved he had a lot more on his plate than just a great voice. He proved to be an excellent mimic, doing hilarious impressions of personalities like Ronald Colman and Jerry Colonna (his Colonna was so dead-on that on one Benny broadcast—in which the cast did a take-off on Bob Hope’s program—some of Colonna’s friends called his wife and asked how the mustachioed comedian could be on the Benny program at the same he was touring overseas with Hope). Day also possessed a gift of impeccable timing, at times rivaling that of Phil Harris and even Benny himself. His character gradually became a male Gracie Allen, using—as John Dunning notes—“logical irrelevancies in a way that drove Benny crazy.”

Day was later rewarded with a spin-off series, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, which began on NBC October 3, 1946. While it didn’t quite have the same comic punch as, say, Phil Harris’ great sitcom (with wife Alice Faye), it remained consistently entertaining and amusing, ending its five-year run in 1951. (Actually, the funniest thing about Day’s program wasn’t the show itself, but the fact that Dennis would lord over Benny the fact that he had two shows to Jack’s one. As Harris commented on one broadcast after a typically inane observation by Day: “Me having two shows I can understand—but this kid is a mystery.”)

After this broadcast, I listened to a show from October 18, 1942—a remote originating from Arizona’s Williams Field in front of an audience of G.I.’s. This one was a bit of a letdown; it has a funny premise featuring Jack donating his beloved Maxwell to the scrap drive to assist the war effort, but its execution falls sort of flat. (The second half of the show features a dream sequence in which Jack finds himself bombardier aboard the Maxwell, which has been transformed into a plane.) As a rule, my favorite Benny shows are the post-1943 efforts, when Jack had his classic writing quartet—George Balzer, Milt Josefsberg, John Tackaberry and Sam Perrin—in place; the pre-1943 shows, written by Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin have a tendency to be a little too zany for my tastes. Still, even a lesser Benny is better than most anything else, and it’s a good representative of the remote broadcasts Jack often did in Bob Hope-like fashion, beginning in May of 1941.
8:37:53 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“Ah-ah-ah-ah! Don’t touch that dial!”

It’s a comic strip that has endured in America’s “funny papers” for nearly seventy-five years now; the domestic saga of Everyman Dagwood Bumstead and his ever-patient wife, Blondie. Created by Murat Bernard “Chic” Young on September 8, 1930, its popularity is such that it appears daily in an estimated 2,000 newspapers worldwide.

In the strip’s early days, it concentrated on the exploits of a dizzy “flapper” named Blondie Boopadoop and her boyfriends—one of which was wealthy playboy Dagwood Bumstead. The comic strip was pretty much floundering until Young decided to have the two fall in love. Dagwood was determined to marry Blondie, despite the protests from his father, railroad magnate J. Bolling Bumstead—so Dag went on a hunger strike (that might explain his fondness for the “Dagwood sandwiches” all these years) until his father relented. But the millionaire Bumstead cut off his son without a penny, and on February 17, 1933, the two newlyweds faced an uncertain future, particularly at the height of the Great Depression.

Marrying Dagwood and Blondie was the best thing that ever happened to creator Young—his comic strip increased in popularity to the point where it became one of the public’s favorites. The strip took on a domestic focus, with Blondie settling into the role of responsible wife—and mother, with the birth of their son Alexander (April 15, 1934) and daughter Cookie (April 11, 1941). The children matured pretty much in the same way as the people in the Gasoline Alley comic strip; that is until Young decided in the 1960s that if the kids got any older, the flavor of the family strip would be lost.

The comic strip made its debut on the silver screen with Blondie in 1938, and the picture was such a smash that a total of 28 B-pictures were churned out by Columbia Studios between 1938-50. Starring in the roles of Blondie and Dagwood were Penny Singleton—a redhead who soon became a bleached blonde—and Arthur Lake, a vaudevillian of whom practically everyone has said was born to be Dagwood. Shortly after the first film’s release, Lake and Singleton made their radio debut, guest starring on The Bob Hope Show broadcast of December 20, 1938, which in turn, led to a Blondie series less than a year later over CBS beginning July 3, 1939 as a summer replacement for Eddie Cantor. (When Cantor failed to return in the fall, Blondie became a full-time series, broadcast over CBS, Blue, NBC and ABC until July 6, 1950.)

Arthur Lake would continue as Dagwood through the entire run of the radio series (he even starred in a television version in 1957 with Pamela Britton as Blondie), but Penny Singleton left the show in 1949, and was replaced by several different actresses: Florence Lake (Arthur’s sister), Ann Rutherford, Alice White and Patricia Van Cleve (Mrs. Arthur Lake in real life). Among those who appeared as Alexander were Tommy Cook, Larry Simms (who played the part in the Blondie films), Bobby Ellis and Jeffrey Silver. “Baby” specialist Leone Ledoux (who also played baby brother Robespierre on The Baby Snooks Show) portrayed Alexander in his infant stage, and did the same for sister Cookie as well. When Cookie got older, Marlene Aames, Joan Rae and Norma Jean Nilsson all got a crack at the role.

A hardy cast of radio veterans ably supported Lake and Singleton, most notably Hanley Stafford, who played J.C. Dithers, Dagwood’s tyrannical boss (“Bumstead! I’ll run your little finger through the pencil sharpener!”), and Elvia Allman, who was Mrs. (Cora) Dithers. Frank Nelson essayed the role of next-door neighbor Herb Woodley (also played briefly by Hal Peary), and Arthur Q. Bryan and Harry Lang played yet another neighbor, Mr. Fuddle. Others in the cast included Dix Davis (as Alvin Fuddle), Mary Jane Croft, Veola Vonn, Lurene Tuttle and Hans Conried.

If you’re familiar with any of the Blondie feature films; then the radio series won’t bring anything new to the table; the program captures the flavor of the movies extremely well, though it tends to be a little more on the manic side. I listened to two broadcasts last night, beginning with an AFRS show dated June 18, 1944, “Dagwood’s Icy Challenge,” in which Dagwood does a little creative tall-tale embroidery:

DAGWOOD: Well, every spring I was always the first fellow to go swimming in the river…

BLONDIE: Dagwood…

DAGWOOD: Hah?

BLONDIE: Is that the truth?

DAGWOOD: Oh, it’s…er…eh…um…well, not every year…

BLONDIE: I thought so…

ALEXANDER: So you weren’t the first guy every year, huh, Pop?

DAGWOOD: Well, no—remember, my first two years I wore a diaper…but I was the first one in swimming each year as soon as I was old enough to dress myself…

BLONDIE: How old were you? Twelve or fourteen?

DAGWOOD: Eh…aw, Blondie, take it easy on me…I was ten…every year, while it was still plenty cold, I’d ride out to the old mill on my bike and change clothes and climb up to the second story window and…then while my friends watched, I’d dive…hah! And crack, splash!—and Bumstead had done it again…

ALEXANDER: Crack splash, huh?

DAGWOOD: Yeah…

ALEXANDER: I understand the splash, but—what’s the crack?

DAGWOOD: Well, that’s just my head going through the ice…hah hah hah hah hah…

BLONDIE: Now, Dagwood—did you really go in when there was ice in the river?

DAGWOOD: Yep! Even if I had to bring my own ice…hah hah hah hah hah…

Alexander brags to a local reporter (Frank Nelson) about his father’s “feat,” who in turn writes it up as a human interest story in the paper—the crux of which has the paper challenging Dagwood to repeat it this year, which Dagwood’s boss has already accepted on his behalf. Dagwood tries to back out of it, but the story has become an event and he even allows Dithers to goad him into it. Needless to say, the episode ends in typically wacky sitcom fashion—though if that AFRS date is correct, I can’t quite fathom what river would have ice on it in June. (Perhaps their famed residence of “Shady Lane Avenue” is located somewhere around the Arctic Circle.)

In the second broadcast, originally heard over NBC February 9, 1949, Alexander finds himself on the horns of a dilemma over which one of his girlfriends deserve a Valentine’s Day card. Dagwood asks his boss for advice (I was amused when Dithers remarks that he wants to help out “the little Bumlet”), but of course, it’s Blondie to the rescue when she suggests that Alexander give every girl in his class a card. I enjoyed this one more than the first, due to its network origination—including commercials from sponsor Super Suds, with its “magic ingredient” Pyray (sic). (I’m not exactly sure what that does, but then again, I haven’t even figured out Rinso’s “Solium” yet, either.)

I have a handful of Blondie shows in my collection—mostly for the novelty value since it’s pretty much average sitcom material—and extant broadcasts of the series are scarcer than hen’s teeth, though the Library of Congress apparently has quite a few broadcasts from the 1948-49 NBC season. Still, they remain amusing time capsules of those wonderful years of the Golden Age of Radio, which has sadly passed us by.
8:37:45 PM    comment []  trackback []