A Busy Brown

Some of the top radio actors on the West Coast found uncredited regular employment on the Jack Benny show. Two that come to mind are Herb Vigran and Elvia Allman. And a couple of the top radio actors on the East Coast did the same.

When Fred Allen went off the air for health reasons at the end of the 1942-43 season, Jack “borrowed” two actors who appeared regularly in Allen’s Alley—John Brown and Minerva Pious. It is still odd to my ears hearing the Pansy Nussbaum voice given to other characters on Benny’s show (the Grape Nuts era is not my favourite period) but Brown fits in quite well. Two roles that come to mind are an enthusiastic NBC usher who sings about Grape Nuts Flakes to the Rinso White jingle, and as a clueless Vancouverite who hasn’t heard of the city’s tourist attractions.

Brown, whose Alley character was New Yorker John Doe, returned during Allen’s last season in a promotional appearance for The Life of Riley as Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker, perhaps his best-known radio role (he used the Doe and O’Dell voices in the Tex Avery cartoon Symphony in Slang).

Here’s a profile of Brown from the New York Herald Tribune of Dec. 7, 1941. Brown talks about television, which was already filling the air with civil defence programming. That would dominate the tube in New York during shortened broadcast days while the war was on.

Protean Artist Of Radio Finds Doormen Cold
John Brown, Who Performs in 7 Shows Weekly, Still Is a Stranger at Studios
By Elizabeth S. Colelough
John Brown, one of radio’s funniest straight men, is a man of parts—and that is not intended as a joke. At present, he is playing in seven regular radio shows and has a list of successes behind him as long as the evils of mankind. His schedule taken from Sunday to Sunday runs something like this:
As Shrievy, the cab driver for Dr. Watson, he maintains the comedy interest in “The Shadow,” chiller-thriller heard on WOR at 5:30 p. m. every Sunday. In “Lorenzo Jones” he enacts the role or Jim Baker at 4:30 p. m., on WEAF from Monday to Friday.
On Tuesday he contributes his services to the “Treasury Hour” over WJZ at 8 p. m. Every Wednesday, the high point of his week, he is Mr. Average Wise Guy and other comic-relief characters in the Mighty Allen Art Players on Fred Allen’s programme. He has been with Allen’s show since it sprang, like a low—comedy Minerva, from the Allen cranium in 1934.
Figured in “Feud”
Brown unwittingly has become an innocent figure in one of the chapters of the Fred Allen-Jack Benny “feud.” Benny once presented an autographed photograph to Brown on which was inscribed “How long are you going to be with Allen?” Allen constantly accuses Benny of trying to steal Brown from him. Whenever he brings his show to New York or Brown goes to the coast Benny finds a part for him. When asked why he wouldn’t take Benny’s offer he said: “I like New York. I have a house in Croton—and, besides, I don’t want to leave Fred.” That, you feel, is the real reason.
Thursdays he plays the high school principal in the “Aldrich Family” on WEAF at 5:30 p. m.
Brown ends his week with two Saturday morning shows, “Lincoln Highway” and “Vaudeville Theater,” both on WEAF.
One of the busiest and most sought-after actors in radio, he find[s] it hard to get time off for a vacation. He had his first, two weeks, last summer, and that took plenty of finagling and adjusting. He had to be written out of eight shows. One script writer forgot and put him in. That almost ended the vacation before it began.
Brown has worked as straight man or stooge for virtually every top comic on the air. Among them are Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Jack Haley, Ed Gardner, Al Jolson, Ken Murray, Robert Benchley, Jerry Lester, Rudy Vallee, Fanny Brice and many others. On Oct. 30 he was Lord Beaverbrook’s voice on the ‘March of Time.”
Though many times a featured player, Brown has never been starred in a radio show. He is almost too versatile. He is like the department-store saleswoman who was so good in her job and brought so much money to the store that she never was promoted. However, he likes his life. In appearance he is unassuming. He says he looks less like an actor than any one he knows. Sandy-haired and quiet-mannered, he looks like hundreds of Americans you see every day in the subway and on the street. His sense of humor is keen. His blue eyes shine as he tells a joke on himself. Eddie Cantor, he said, once told him, “You look like a grocer, but you’re the best actor in radio.” Even though he has been in radio for eight years and has ridden miles in N. B. C. elevators, the page boys still ask him for tickets of admission. They won’t believe he works there.
Born In England
Brown was born in Hull, England, on April 4, 1904, began his education in London, continued it in Melbourne, Australia, and finished it in New York public schools. He now is an American citizen.
His first job was that of secretary to Frank Campbell, of the Funeral Church. He had several secretarial jobs after that, but was graduated in due course to office manager with a music-publishing firm. From there he went to real estate selling, and later became a counselor at boys’ camps. It is impossible to follow Brown’s career step by step. Before going into stock and the Broadway theater, he worked in summer resorts and various little-theater enterprises.
His personal life is happy. He is married to June White, former stage actress, and has two children—a girl, 1 1/2 years old, and a boy, 5. They live in a rambling old house overlooking the Hudson at Croton, N. Y. While he was courting the present Mrs. Brown, he sent her a telegram when she opened in the Broadway play, “Achilles Had a Heel.” It read in part, “And so has June.” She married him anyway.
Foresees Television
He feels that stage experience is valuable in radio work, but not essential. He cited the case of Ann Thomas, Goodman Ace’s pert secretary, who tried out for a part in a Broadway show lost season. She “fell into the part so easily at the first reading that the director and producer were amazed. Radio actors have to fit into parts on short notice—no six weeks’ rehearsal to smooth off the corners. He also believes they have the edge on their stage brethren because they are not typed so rigidly.
“What do you think about the average radio actor when television hits its stride?” the interviewer asked. “Any actor who doesn’t investigate or isn’t ready for it is crazy,” he said. “The change will be as revolutionary as the evolution of the silent movies into sound.
“Radio brass hats will have another problem also,” he continued. “They will have to figure out some way for the housewife to watch the shows while she cooks and cleans. The daytime show will be the biggest problem. I don’t know how they will solve it but I know television will bring an entirely new technique into the radio field.”

There is another connection with Jack Benny. Brown appeared, uncredited, in Benny’s self-trashed film The Horn Blows At Midnight in 1945. The same year, he was in Allen’s It’s in the Bag. He had a connection with Jack once-removed; he had a regular role on Dennis Day’s radio show. A list of his credits would be impossible, but I’ll mention one other. He was the lazy boyfriend Al on My Friend Irma; creator Cy Howard told a fan magazine how Brown would get miffed for pulling him away from poker games with Lud Gluskin’s musicians during rehearsals (Howard semi-joked Brown likely made more money than he did).

When television “hit its stride,” Brown was there, playing Harry Morton on the Burns and Allen show in 1951. Then, he wasn’t playing Harry Morton. Brown got caught in the blacklist. He had been named in Red Channels the previous June. Historian Liz McLeod relates:

Brown's "Red Channels" dossier, found on page 30, consists of precisely two items: he participated in three events sponsored by the Progressive Citizens of America in 1947, and he signed an Amicus Curiae brief seeking a review of the convictions of two members of the Hollywood Ten.

He appeared before a House Un-American Activities Subcommittee in November 1953. He plead the Fifth Amendment. At the time, he was appearing as Thorny on the radio version of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. His union, AFTRA, caved in to the witch-hunters. The following February, despite denials he was a Communist Party member, and taking the union’s loyalty oath, he was told he would be suspended if he didn’t testify before the Committee in 90 days. His career was over.

You’d never know any of this reading his obituaries in Variety or the Associated Press or United Press, or Ozzie Nelson’s autbiography. There is no mention of it. Several obits pointed out his time on the Benny and Allen shows. He died of a heart attack in 1957 at the age of 53.

The Felix Arch

Animated cartoons are entertainment and, like any entertainment, a cartoon that appeals to one person might not appeal to another. It’s visceral. That means there may be no explanation as to why someone likes or dislikes animation on a piece of film, any more than someone can explain why they like or dislike eggplant.

Despite this, there is plenty of commentary and analysis of cartoons out there, varying in tone. One book I have seems to have been an exercise of filling it with words no one uses in any kind of conversation. Others treat the subject casually.

Here’s an early attempt to analyse cartoons. It’s in a book written by an Englishman named Huntly Carter and published in 1930 called “THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA. An Analysis and Interpretation of the Parallel Paths of the Cinema, which have led to the present Revolutionary Crisis forming a Study of the Cinema as an Instrument of Sociological Humanism.”

Fantasy, which has for so long been accepted as an expression of the whimsical state of mind, is, of course, within the legitimate sphere of the Cinema. On the screen it is seen at its gayest and best in a small line that assumes thousands of fantastic shapes that compose the Cartoon. In the Cartoon, which is one of the most popular and in some respects the best medium of cinema expression, the human atom and its belongings, undergo whimsical changes that cause a continuous stream of images to form in the mind, and that throw an abundance of rich crumbs to the imagination. But the Cartoon never departs from the actual. It consists of an elastic line in evolution. Shapes grow out of it with which we are familiar even though they are distorted and battered by a sort of recurrent earthquake.

In other words, the Cartoon of the Mickey Mouse, the Krazy Kat, the Felix the Cat, the Inkwell, the Adventures of Sammy and Sausage, or the Oswald Sound Cartoon kind, is simply the caricaturist playing with a line that has the elasticity of gas. It shrinks and expands, collapses and recovers, behaves like a spring winding and unwinding, and at the same time assumes the shapes and characteristics of human beings, animals, insects, of animate things, and inanimate ones made animate. These extraordinary puppets of all sorts, that fall to pieces in heaps and reunite, and outdo even an india-rubber ball in diversity of shapes, that speed through space with a velocity that has no parallel outside the Cinema, have a distinct sociological value. They exhibit man in society caught in a network of events undergoing or trying to escape the consequences. They are in fact a comment, a very witty instructive and biting comment on the absurdities of Man and other living things seen in the light of materialism. At the same time they are human, tragic and comic.

According to Mr. W. O. Brigstocke, of the Education Department of the Liverpool University, the Cartoon has a valuable educational side owing to its elasticity. He has suggested that the moving line of a Felix Cartoon can serve to teach architecture. " Felix could illustrate in a film such difficult conceptions as that of thrust in architecture. Suppose the teacher turned two other Felixes into pillars at his side and then constructed a Felix arch. It would be easy and amusing for him to show stresses and how they could be met. You would see the arch sagging at the knees or wherever it would sag. Gothic cathedrals which demonstrated in the sight of all men where they were weak and where they were strong, by bending, writhing, and even falling down promise infinite amusement. In the same way what could not be done with maps? Let Felix be taken up to a great height and let him behold all the kingdoms of the world with their pomps and vanities not to speak of their trade and transport; then drop him a given number of feet, or let him use up one of his nine lives and drop him all the way; in this manner it would be easy literally to see what scale means, both in space and times values. When one thinks of Felix and mathematics — cones sliced in lovely sections, curves developing in a panopoly of perpendiculars, and tangents to illustrate the secrets of growth and motion and form — why, on these lines we could have all the joys of Felix, Professor Einstein and the Zoo simultaneously."[Footnote]1 Einstein in the Zoo? Some persons would say by all means.
1 The Observer, May 8, 1927

Some of you may find this kind of analysis intellectually stimulating. Others may find it a bore. It’s all subjective, the same as the way you feel about cartoons themselves.

The (Bat) Swingin' Cuckoo

A cat driven insane by a cuckoo clock (from the cartoon of the same name) “knew it meant murder.” Unfortunately, Tex Avery’s generic cat fails in every attempt to silence the cuckoo inside the clock.

First, he tries a baseball bat.



The cuckoo listens as the cat crashes to the floor.



The bird does a little two-step as it is transported back to its home in the clock. Avery did the same thing to the same drum beat with a dog in another cartoon. Does anyone remember which one?



The story in The Cuckoo Clock (1950) is by Rich Hogan, with animation by Grant Simmons (I think he did the bat scene), Walt Clinton and Mike Lah.

The Worm Family

Mickey Mouse led a band. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit led a band. But the oddest of the other 1930s “band” cartoons may be The Bandmaster starring Krazy Kat, a 1930 offering from the Ben Harrison-Manny Gould unit of the Winkler (Charles Mintz) studio.

There’s a great gag about a prisoner escaping from INSIDE an elephant cop. And I like this Fleischer-type bit. Squirrels are trying to crack an acorn to the beat of Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. We’ll let the gag tell itself.



There’s lots of early ‘30s imagination going on in this quirky short, with the story attributed to Ben Harrison and the animation to Manny Gould. Musical director Joe De Nat gets away from Sousa and into some jazz for the last 40% of the cartoon. Mickey Mouse got the highest profile (and space) in trade ads for Columbia cartoon releases of 1930, but I’ll take this one over Disney.

Wacky Bwush

An unsung hero (or heroine) in Bob Clampett’s The Wacky Wabbit (1942) is responsible for the dry brush work during the cartoon.

Here are some frames from the climax when Elmer Fudd is wrestling Bugs Bunny for his gold tooth.

I don’t know how this works but I presume an animator indicated some movement and someone in the ink and paint department supplied the finished product.

Sid Sutherland is the credited animator, with Warren Foster getting the story credit.