Getting Away With Old Corn

There weren’t all that many radio sitcoms in the Golden Days that came out of New York City. There was only one that came out of Puerto Rico—Duffy’s Tavern.

There had actually been a Duffy’s Tavern on 44th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue in New York. It was run by Big Bill Duffy, manager of boxer Primo Carnera. The tavern had a habit of getting raided in the early ‘30s. Something about prohibition. The fake Duffy’s Tavern was on Third Avenue and opened for business on an episode of Forecast on CBS on July 29, 1940. It starred Archie the bartender, a character Ed Gardner had originated the previous year on This is New York.

Critics liked it. The network decided to turn the one-shot into a series, to be broadcast from New York. Gardner immediately hired his wife, Shirley Booth, to play Duffy’s daughter, and the show debuted March 1, 1941, with Gardner collecting $4,000 a week.

Gardner, it seems, always looked for a way to save a buck, and moved the radio show to Puerto Rico in 1949 when the territory gave him a huge tax break. The series ended on Friday, December 28, 1951 on NBC.

Television was still waiting for radio shows to make the jump onto the small screen. Gardner planned on showcasing Duffy’s Tavern on NBC’s All Star Revue on May 31, 1952. The sponsors then saw what they were getting and were shocked. They wrote NBC complaining the script was sub-par and the show never left the tavern the whole time (Variety, April 24, 1952). The show was pulled with the idea the film could be edited down to a pilot for a series. The series finally appeared in syndication in 1954. Variety proclaimed Gardner “clumsy” and “awkward” as a TV actor; series writer Larry Rhine said pretty much the same thing years later.

However, as a radio show, it could be enjoyable to listen to. Certainly discerning critic John Crosby liked it and quoted extensively from the final script in the 1945-46 season in his column of June 24 1946. Gardner cleverly found a way to get laughs out of hokey material. He put it in the mouth of hokey Archie, which worked. The episode became a parody of a worn-out stand-up act.

The ‘Closing of Duffy’s Tavern’
“Duffy’s Tavern,” where “the elite meet to eat,” shuttered its windows for the summer a week ago Friday, which means we’ll have to struggle through the hot months without the sage advice and intricate phonetics of Ed Gardner, a man who uses the English language with wild enthusiasm. Closing “Duffy’s Tavern” presented a number of rather special problems.
“We got some free lunch left,” Arch tells Duffy over the phone. “What’ll we do with it? . . . Give it away? Duffy, we been tryin’ to do that all year. . . . .Duffy, I told you the garbage man refused it three times. You have no idea how well seasoned the stuff has become.
* * *
Eddie, the bemused and cynical waiter, breaks in to call attention to another perplexity. “What’ll we do with Moriarity?” he asks.
“Is he still lyin’ over there in the corner?”
“He’s been layin’ there ever since New Year’s Eve.”
“Well, that that noise-maker out of his hand and put some summer underwear on him so his wife won’t realize he’s been away so long.”
Clifton Finnegan, the man with the impenetrable skull, wanders in carrying his suitcase and announces he’s off on his vacation.
“Where you going?” asks Archie.
“Upon on the roof. . . . You seem astonished.”
“Well, Finnegan, you got to admit it ain’t quite normal. Well, have a nice time up there, and when you get a chance let me hear from you.”
“I’ll do that, Arch. Walk by the house any time and I’ll drop you a postcard.”
“Finnegan, it’s too bad you wasn’t twins. You’d have made a lovely pair of bookends.”
Before he reaches the door, Archie warns Finnegan he doesn’t want the side window busted when he comes back in the fall.
“Just a second, Arch,” says Finnegan. “Your tone is rather accusatory. Don’t blame me for that busted window.”
“Oh, no?” says Arch. “Then what was your footprint doin’ in the alleyway?”
“How do you know it was mine?”
“Cause the footprint had six toes.”
“Left or right foot?”
“The right.”
“That clears me. On me right foot I got seven toes.” “What do you mean—seven? What about the one you lost the day the landlady caught you reachin’ for the extra butter?”
“Yeah, but, Arch, I started with eight.”
“Case dismissed.”
* * *
With Finnegan out of the way, Arch turns his mind to the problem of a place to spend his vacation. Poring over a map, he muses: “Let’s see, Bali, Java, Sumatra—hey, that guy’s even got an island named after him. Honolulu—hey, that’s the place.”
He phones United Airlines and asks for a plane reservation to Honolulu. “On one of them new four-motor jobs—the Consternation. What’s the fare? . . . Uh huh. Got any gliders goin’ out?”
Arch finally decided he can’t spend a vacation on $15 and, although “the thought abhors me,” he’ll have to work this summer. After a little subtle misrepresentation he gets a tentative opening as a master of ceremonies at a summer resort in the Catskills, providing he brings his own floor show. Finnegan is pressed into service to do bird calls, of which he knows two—Bob White and Rinso White.
* * *
But the feature of the show is Arch, “your laughing M. C.,” whose line of chatter runs like this:
“Well, sir, a funny thing happened to me on my way up here to the mountains. An elk walks up to me and says, ‘Look, dear, have you got a buck for a cup of coffee? I ain’t got no doe.’ So I says, ‘This is moose to me, but if you feel like having a little fawn, I’ll take you out to a stag.’ Yes, sir, it’s sure great to be back here in the mountains.
“Speaking of rabbits—yesterday a couple of them got in my garden, so I took these two rabbits, locked them in a closet and shook a stick at them. This morning I went back and there were more rabbits than you could shake a stick at. Mother, turn the hose on me, I’m hot tonight. All new material, you lucky people! Yes, sir—it’s sure great to be back in the mountains.”
Well, have fun in the mountains, Arch, and don’t take any wooden nickels. We’ll miss you.

Here are Crosby’s other columns for the week. To the right, you see him ridicule news commentator Gabriel Heatter, who is known for the phrase “Ahhh, there’s good news tonight!” No one seems to know when exactly Heatter started using it (it was some time during World War Two). He started out in print and then moved to radio in the early ‘30s; in fact, he was on WOR in New York before it became the main station of the Mutual Broadcasting System. He spent his career with Mutual, which may partly explain why he didn’t have a television career. Mutual had the most affiliates of any radio network in the U.S., but it seems an awful lot of them were in small towns and were stations with limited wattage or signed off at sunset. Mutual never set up a TV network. Heatter also didn’t have a warm, conversational delivery like Doug Edwards or even John Cameron Swayze, and sounded like he was reading his script from the upper register of his voice (Heatter wrote and read human interest stories on a show called A Brighter Tomorrow which Henry Morgan ripped apart on one of his variety show episodes). Heatter died in retirement in Florida in 1972. The column is from June 28th.

The June 25th column deals with some radio documentaries and a dramatic series which aired from New York, the column of the 26th talks about a new CBS news programme, as well as Meet the Press, which still airs every Sunday on NBC TV. It started on Mutual in 1945 and seems to have filled a bunch of network programming gaps. The June 27th column involves a CBS special focusing on world starvation. Click on any of the columns to see them better.