The Waukegan Whiz of Television

You never know when a newspaper is going to need to fill its space with a story about a celebrity, so film studios and TV network publicity departments came up with specific and generic stories with stock photos about their stars.

I suspect what you’re about to read came from the CBS publicity department. It appeared in various lengths in newspapers from the start of 1953 to the second half of 1954. This is the longest version I can find.

It’s a profile of Jack Benny, talking about his career and his family, not promoting anything in general. You Benny fans will have seen these details before but will be happy to read them again.

Television Viewers Find Jack Benny Fits Frustrated Character He Created On Radio
Jack Benny, who for 18 years on radio has created solely through his voice one of the greatest of comedy characters, entered America's living rooms “in the flesh” when he made his debut on television October 28, 1950.
And the millions of delighted fans who saw him on television for the first time found he fitted exactly the money pinching frustrated lovable laughmaker they so vividly imagined him to be.
Jack Benny made four broadcasts from New York during the 1950-51 season. He launched his second season, November 4, 1951, in a transcontinental broadcast originating from the CBS-TV outlet, KNXT, in Hollywood.
Benny in 1932 was one of the first of the major comedians to make the changeover from vaudeville to radio. Vaudeville was going out and big time radio was coming in.
Benny bumped into columnist Ed Sullivan one night in a Broadway restaurant. Sullivan (now host of CBS-TV's "Toast of the Town") asked him to appear on his radio program the following evening.
"But I don't know anything about radio," Jack protested. "Nobody does," Sullivan replied.
Immortal Line
Benny offered to give it a whirl gratis and on this first broadcast of his life introduced himself with an immortal line: "This is Jack Benny talking. Now there will be a brief pause for everyone to say 'Who cares?'"
Millions did care as Benny soon found out. The same year, 1932, he had a sponsor and a network program. He was a sensation from the start.
On television as on radio, Benny is the central figure in what historians of comedy call the classic insult method. It goes back to Aristophanes.
His knack of building unknown personalities into stars in their own right is well known. Dennis Day, Eddie Anderson, who plays Rochester, and Phil Harris are notable examples. And his sense of timing has been underscored by critics—a quality which contrasts strangely with the dither he works himself into in preparing his scripts. He sweats out the lines which appear to flow effortlessly and merrily over the air.
Although a battery of top gagsters whip together the raw material, Benny does the final editing, unifying and polishing. To keep the lines fresh, he cuts rehearsals to the minimum. And during the broadcast he rarely ad libs, but stops the show and howls with unrestrained laughter when others put over an unscheduled nifty.
Child Prodigy
Waukegan, Benny's home town, is a suburb of Chicago. His father, a haberdasher, insisted on violin lessons at an early age and Jack was a child prodigy in Waukegan.

One of Jack's early triumphs was playing "The Bee," a short violin piece that has been the butt of Benny jokes on the air for a decade. "The Bee sparked his famous radio feud with Fred Allen. A moppet in an Allen skit which was a take-off on amateur programs played the song and Fred commented afterward that it was Benny's old vaudeville specialty. "Only eight and you already can play 'The Bee'," Allen joked. "Why Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."
The next week Benny, on his own show, indignantly declared he could produce four persons who would attest that he had played "The Bee" at the age of six. And the feud was on.
"The Bee," by the way is not "Flight of the Bumble Bee," but a piece composed by Franz Schubert but not the Franz Schubert. Seems confusion is the word for Benny.
At 13 he was a fiddler in Waukegan's leading dance orchestra and a regular on the Barrison Theater orchestra, a lone knicker-bockered figure surrounded by grown-ups. Since his teachers recall him more vividly for his wisecracks, it wasn't surprising that Jack quit school before he was 17 to team up with a vaudeville pianist named Cora Salisbury.
Jack billed himself as Benny K. Benny and at $15 a week toured Midwest theaters with his partner. He didn't tell jokes, but he drew laughs by sawing away at his violin with the little finger of the bow hand extended affectedly while his eyes followed in mock curiosity.
Jack joined another pianist named Lyman Woods and their tours took them, at the outbreak of World War I, to London's famous Palladium. They broke up and Jack joined the navy.
In a navy revue, Jack played the fiddle without much success until one night when he paused to make a few wise cracks. The crowd roared and Benny the comic was born. Thereafter, Jack was penciled into the show as Issy There, the Admiral's Disorderly.
After his discharge, Benny returned to vaudeville and to avoid confusion with another fiddling comic, Ben Bernie, he adopted the Jack Benny tag.
He worked with the greats in the vaudeville heyday and went on to the Earl Carroll and Shubert shows on Broadway.
His movie debut was as auspicious as his radio bow. A talent scout spotted him in a Los Angeles theatre in 1929. Benny got the lead in "The Hollywood Review," clicked big, and has been starred in a number of pictures since, including "Charley's Aunt," "The Horn Blows at Midnight" and "George Washington Slept Here."
Benny and his wife, Mary Livingstone, have been stage and broad casting partners for 20 years. She was Sadye Marks, a salesgirl in a Los Angeles department store when they were married in 1927. She recalls that he practically had to drag her onstage to make an actress out of her. But it was not long before she became an invaluable ingredient in the Benny fun formula.
The Bennys have a beautiful home in Beverly Hills and their home life has been a happy one. Their daughter, Joan Naomi, adopted at the age of four months and now married, is the joy of their lives.
As practically every Benny fan knows, Jack is the exact opposite in private life to the penurious, protesting character he plays on the air. He is notorious for his over-tipping. His genial manner and friendliness have made him one of the most popular figures in Hollywood.
Benny gets little time off to play, what with television schedule, weekly radio show and business interests, but when he has an hour or so to loaf he's usually out on the golf links.