Jack Benny Fans Unite

The internet has improved things so much for people who like to share common interests. Just log on and read or chat. En masse.

Kids today don’t know what it was like before everyone had access to the world in the palm of a hand (Old man shakes fist). You maybe got a newsletter or magazine in your mailbox (the kind where you pull out something that has a postage stamp on it). Maybe someone organised an annual convention if the group was interested enough.

An example is the International Jack Benny Fan Club. It still issues an old-fashioned newsletter. It has a web site where members and others can access a forum and leave posts. The forum is still there, but everyone seems to prefer communicating on Facebook, posting pictures, links to videos, asking questions and even hooking up with those connected to the show (Eddie Anderson’s daughter drops by. So does Sammy the Drummer’s daughter).

The Benny Club Facebook group has 5,500 plus members. Compare that to the story below. Laura Lee (under a different surname) still loves Jack and still runs the club after all this time. This story is 30 years old, appearing in newspapers on December 29, 1991.

Laura Lee is 22 and crazy about Benny
By Murry Frymer
Knight-Ridder Tribune News Writer
PALO ALTO, Calif.—There is one fascinating facet of show business that, to me, has always been a curiosity. It's the fan club, the collection of fanatics who make the avid absorption of a show-biz star a major factor in their lives.
Is it a chance to shine through reflected glory? Is it an addiction?
Laura Lee was 5 years old when comedian Jack Benny died. She doesn't remember it as a cataclysmic event.
But then, just five years later, she formed the Jack Benny Fan Club, and now, at 22. Laura Lee heads an organization that spans nine countries, from Egypt to Scotland, from Israel to Germany.
There are 300 card-carrying members, the youngest age 2 and the oldest 95. (The 2-year-old was coerced into joining by her parents, both members.) The oldest is George Burns, one of the first members, who joined because Jack Benny was his best friend.
What is more difficult to ascertain is why Laura Lee formed the Jack Benny Fan Club in the first place and why she devotes so much time to informing herself about the comedian.
Her answers to the question seem rather cryptic to anyone not so possessed.
"WELL, I just enjoyed his style of humor. I didn't like slapstick comics, because I was always afraid they would hurt themselves. Jack Benny was not like that. Many of my friends liked Jack, too, and one of them encouraged me to start the club," Lee says in her office at Quintiles Pacific, a pharmaceutical company in Palo Alto, where she supervises shipping and receiving.
The friend "said it was better to light one candle than to sit around and curse the darkness."
Instead of cursing the darkness, Lee has sought out anyone and everyone connected with Benny—his one-time writers, co-stars, adopted daughter, friends. She knows enough about the man to fill a book. And she has done just that, a compilation on Benny's career that is now in the library at the Smithsonian Institution. It's called "39 Forever" and sells for a thrifty $15.
New information about the comedian shows up in the bimonthly Jack Benny Times, a Xeroxed newsletter Lee writes and produces herself. Members reveal bits of trivia and ask for background.
The newsletter's Jack Benny Classified includes such items as: "Paul Pinch has Xeroxes of London Palladium programmes from three of Jack's appearances, which are available for trade." The address is in London.
PETER TATCHELL, meanwhile, is trying to get dates of three ancient Benny TV shows, which he describes in detail.
And Phil Evans wants to know the name of the theater where Jack Benny performed on Oct. 15 and 27, 1927. Evans already knows that the Frankie Trumbauer band was in the pit. Apparently, a new comic routine involving the band originated that night, and Evans, in his painstaking research, has found that it was repeated on the Lawrence Welk TV show of Oct. 23, 1962.
On such minutiae do fan clubs thrive.
Lee ran her club from her home in Ft. Wayne, Ind.. until moving to Castro Valley, Calif., this year. Much of her Benny memorabilia is still back home in Indiana.
But the knowledge Lee carries around in her head is amazing. In fact, an actor named Eddie Carroll, who is planning a one-man stage show on Benny, recently met with Lee to learn more about the comic.
Lee knows innumerable facts and dates. For example, Benny's home address in Beverly Hills was 10231 Charing Cross, but the house was torn down by a buyer who built what Lee calls a mausoleum.
Lee claims to know intimate details but says, "In most cases I was sworn to secrecy. His friends made me promise never to tell, but still they wanted me to know."
How did the long-running age-39 joke begin? "On one show," Lee says, "Jack said he was 37, and when he had his next birthday on the show he said he was 38. The following year he turned 39. "They were going to have a big blowout the next year when he was going to turn 40, but Jack said no 39 was a funny number, and 40 wasn't. And anyway, it was funny to stay 39, because people made a big deal out of turning 40."
"Benny claimed Waukegan as his home town on the show, and he did grow up there," Lee says. "But Benny was actually born in Chicago.
"Actually" is a word you hear a lot when talking to Lee. She seems to actually know everything about Benny.
As, I suppose, do all the members. If you hurry, you can be a member before the annual memorial of Benny's death. Jack Benny died Dec. 26. 1974. He was born Feb. 14, 1894.
At his death, he was 39.
The bimonthly Jack Benny Times is available for a penurious $6.39 a year from the Jack Benny Fan Club, 3561 Somerset Ave., Castro Valley, Calif. 94546.

I imagine the address is outdated. You can read the club on-line at this address or check out the Facebook group. There are nice people there. I’ll bet you all know of them know who Dreer Pooson is.