Tex is Finally Coming

To the right you see a frame from Daredevil Droopy (1951). Kind of murky. Oh, it’s also a frame you don’t see in some versions of the cartoon because it’s been censored.

Well, finally, it appears this and the remaining works of director Tex Avery during his days at MGM will get a better showing on home video. Daredevil Droopy is one of 19 Avery cartoons that will be released on Blu-Ray in the first volume of a Tex Avery set by the Warner Archive.

They will be made from 4K scans (reduced to 1080p). I can only presume, since I haven’t actually seen what the cartoons will look like, that they’ll be sharp and pristine.

As someone who really likes almost all of Avery’s cartoons, I’m quite happy just to have them restored and available. I am not obsessed with chronological order. I’ve been watching cartoons on TV for more than a half century and they don’t follow some linear time frame. (If it weren’t for animation historians, people wouldn’t know what the chronological order would be anyway). I am not obsessed with bonuses; they’re a nice extra, but I just want to watch the cartoons.

I can only presume again they won’t be full of DVNR. See the frame below from Car of Tomorrow for an example (this will not be on the first volume).



It’s hard to pick a most favourite out of the cartoons on the first set. Red Hot Riding Hood may have been the most publicised Avery cartoon of its day. There are four of the five Screwy Squirrel cartoons. I’ve always liked the early detective spoof Who Killed Who? And I think many fans would rank Bad Luck Blackie among Avery’s best.

There’s still lots of great Avery to come in future volumes. Example?



Oh, right, you can read more about the set on Jerry Beck’s site.

The Bone Ranger

Anyone reasonably familiar with Terrytoons could tell some changes had been made if they watched The Bone Ranger, a 1957 release. Backgrounds were now sketches with variations on one colour. Instead of constant saxophones, a steel guitar and even a viola made appearances to augment the action. Characters had a thick ink line.

Gene Deitch had arrived to shake up the studio and make the cartoons look more modern, despite the same animators, background artists and storymen (augmented with a few hires from UPA). How much of an influence he had on this cartoon, though, is unclear.

The Bone Ranger has an ending which doesn’t remind you of anything in an old Heckle and Jeckle cartoon. A junkyard dog named Sniffer spends the entire cartoon chasing after a bone for his daily meal. He finally achieves his goal. As he’s about to chomp down on it, there’s a sound. There’s a slight eye movement.



Cut to an emaciated whimpering Chihuahua.



The annoyed mongrel tries to shoo him away, but the forlorn Chihuahua licks his leg in friendship.



Sniffer gives in and gives the little dog his bone, sighing in resignation and using his tail as a belt to indicate his stomach is empty.



The hungry dog toddles off. He turns to head into the distance and the background changes colour from brown to blue as Phil Scheib’s orchestra plays a simple and suitable string arrangement.



Scheib does a fine job scoring and arranging this short, which was originally released in Cinemascope. Connie Rasinski directed.

Injun Joe's Secret

Injun Joe is ticklish, reveals the goony western character who “won’t tell” all throughout the cartoon. Then he tickles Injun Joe, who twists and flops into all kind of positions, including inside a stump.



The iris begins to close, but no! The cartoon isn’t over. “Do-um some more,” the coy, giggling Indian (Billy Bletcher) asks the bearded westerner, who indulges. A few more similar tickle drawings and the cartoon ends for sure.



This is Injun Trouble, a 1938 cartoon from Bob Clampett which features two types of animation. One is the stretchy, floppy kind, and the other is fairly realistic when a horse gallops in a cycle.

Chuck Jones and Izzy Ellis get animation screen credits but I imagine Bobe Cannon, John Carey and Norm McCabe worked on it as well.

Carl Stalling fills the soundtrack with his western/rural favourites, including “Jubilo,” “Sun Dance” and, for the prospector/scout/whatever he is, “The Old Apple Tree” on a sweet potato.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Emergency Numbers

Log Driver’s Waltz may be one of the most popular cartoons to come out of Canada, but that’s not what this post is about.

That cartoon was the creation of John Felix Weldon, a mathematics grad from McGill University in Montreal who won an Oscar in 1979 for the short Special Delivery. But that’s not what this post is about, either.

Weldon spent 33 years at the National Film Board, worked on more than 50 films and animated more than 20. One of them is was Emergency Numbers, made in 1984.

We hope you enjoy it. The very short cartoon is today’s entry in Tralfaz Sunday Theatre.

Double Benny

Celebrities aren’t always the way they’re portrayed in movies, on TV and in the papers. We’ll skip giving you some examples, other than one.

Jack Benny played Jack Benny on the radio. But he didn’t really play Jack Benny. He played a fictionalised person named Jack Benny who shared a few things with the real Jack Benny. Is it a wonder some people really thought Rochester worked for him?

Columnist Jack O’Brian of the Hearst syndicate kind of touched on the idea of two Bennys in his weekend feature story of May 18, 1952. It was accompanied by the Sam Berman drawing of Benny; a little amusing as it was done as publicity art for NBC in 1947, but Benny was working on CBS in 1952. I wish I had a better copy of it. Not all of the funny lines are by O’Brian. The one about “an older sister named Florence” came from at least two Benny radio shows, one guest starring Al Jolson. And, no, the Orpheum circuit didn’t go as far north as Nome.

Scrooge—With String Attached
BY JACK O'BRIAN
ARE there two Jack Bennys?
If there are, Jack prefers that we only know one of them wan enough to recognize publicly.
One of than was born in the little Illinois metropolis of Waukegan. The one we don't know was patted on the bottom and squealed, “Hello, folks,” in the year 1894. The other flunked his arithmetic daily by asserting that now makes him 10 years of age.
The one we know best may not be exactly cheap, but, as his friend George Burns says, Jack has it figured out this way: “If you can't take it with you, why get in the habit of carrying it around?”
Jack wasn't actually an only child. He had a younger sister named Florence. Today, he has an older sister named Florence.

As a young Waukegan blade, Jack wasn’t always destined for the footlights. He once had visions of becoming a banker. His doctor told him to quit when he still was last a teller. Seems Jack got ulcers counting other people’s money.
The snooty small town life was fractured for Jack by World War I. He felt he was really too young to go into service in 1917 but his father didn't. His father also was head of Jack's draft board.
During Jack's first months in the Navy he was given no opportunity to practice or perform on his beloved fiddle. But he did gain experience at a specialized craft that has proved financially handy to him ever since: He was made a laundryman, third class.
He was given instructions how to perform under fire, which later came in handy at the Academy Theatre on 14th St., credited with having the toughest audience of any vaudeville house in the world in those days, including the Orpheum in Nome.
Striding with outward confidence to the center of the stage of this temple of mayhem, Jack uttered his classic ad lib, “Hello, folks,” and promptly was struck with a barrage of catcalls and boos and a small bonanza in perishable vegetables.
The crescendo rose to deafening proportions whereupon Jack took the first of his long pauses that now are part of his trademark. As the boos and rubble began to subside, Jack looked at his watch, saw his scheduled time had elapsed and in flight delivered the second and last ad lib of his life. “Goodbye, folks,” he said.
In 1926 romance struck Jack in the expected Benny fashion. A pretty salesgirl at the silk stocking counter in the May Co. department store waited on him and let drop the bulletin that employes and their relatives received 20 percent off on anything in the store. Jack immediately proposed marriage.
The wedding took place in 1927. Jack presented a strange picture of extreme ecstasy, walking down the aisle with fiddle under chin playing the Wedding March.
In his broadening career as a vaudeville and musical comedy star, Jack naturally became a topic of Broadway chatter. Fred Allen got to know him well and decided Jack was misunderstood.
“Jack isn’t cheap,” Fred said. “He just has short arms and carried his money low in his pockets.”
The Allen-Benny friendship soured into a mutually profitable feud.
When talk came to movies, Jack chattered off to Hollywood, where he discovered ultimately that to win an Oscar for acting you must appear in very serious pictures. Thereupon he appeared in “The Horn Blows at Midnight.” It was made as a comedy but on completion wag a very serious picture indeed.
To this day Jack can’t figure out why he didn't win an Oscar, for no grimmer film ever befell a performer.
When Jack invaded the Columbia Broadcasting System with the biggest financial coup in radio, a multimillion dollar capital gains deal, reporters naturally demanded comment, “Do they really have free parking at CBS?” was all he said.
Now up to his gagwriters’ ulcers in TV. Jack can't wait for color. It will, he said, at last give the public a first gander at his baby blue eyes. They once were described as being “bluer than the thumb of an Eskimo hitch hiker.”
Now about this problem of age—Jack’s own stubborn age of 39:
The records of the Barrison Theatre in Waukegan list a violinist in the pit orchestra with the same name on its 1909 payroll. This would mean that Jack scraped along in, the house band four full years before he was born. Jack thinks this is evidence that he always was ahead of kids his age in Waukegan.
“Salisbury & Benny” was the first public billing of a vaudeville team containing the person of our man. This was in 1911, or, according to Jack's claims based on that 39-year-old birthday this past Feb. 14, one year BEFORE birth.
“Big, apparently for his age—Five-feet-ten—Jack appeared at the Palace Theatre on Broadway in 1914—at the age of four! HIS reckoning.
Still using Jack’s timetable: He was catapulted from his mother’s arms into the U.S. Navy at the age of five, appeared at the Palace for the first time “in one,” meaning a solo comedy spot, at the age of ten, and was married at 14, and went to Hollywood when he was 16. This was in 1929, though Jack disclaims any connection between his arrival in Beverly Hills and the 1929 depression.
That's the Jack Benny we know from stage, radio, TV and films.
The other Jack Benny is another gent entirely, of course, a fellow of 58 who is proud of his years and the fun and satisfaction of entertaining so long and so well.
When he speaks of Rochester at Christmas and flips: “I don't know what to get him. He has nothing,” he is the other cheerful phony Jack Benny. Actually, Rochester has just about everything—a beautiful home, race horses, a $10,000 racing car.
The attractive qualities of Jack Benny were appreciated by the soldiers in World War II and the Korean fracas. He has kept on the move for and with them all over the U. S. and Canada, Africa, Italy, the Middle East, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and the South Pacific.
Last Summer, he turned down $250,000 worth of bookings, including one at his beloved Palace, to entertain our troops in Korea.
Modest as he is, he probably will blush and disclaim these last few paragraphs. That’s one time when Jack really is tight as heck—when we try to pry from him anecdotes about his nicer, careful hidden side.
But we know you, Jack Benny. Take off the Scrooge’s mask. You may be funnier that way, but you're nicer this way—the real way.

Babo and a Flashlight Battery

The Fleischer brothers began making sound Screen Songs in 1929, so it’s perhaps no surprise the first cartoon voice actors of note in New York City were singers. But you’ll never see the names “Billy Murray” or “Margie Hines” on a title card on any Fleischer cartoons. People who provided voices simply didn’t get their names on the screen in the 1930s and, for years, Mel Blanc on the West Coast was generally the only person who got credit until the ‘50s rolled around. Even then, the successors to the Fleischer studios only rarely (and likely contractually) gave voice credits; Frank Gallop’s name in There’s Good Boos To-Night (1948) is one.

Fans of cartoons actors are left baffled by the identity of many of the people who stepped up to the mike at animation studios on the East Coast. Several actors, however, did get a little bit of newspaper press and a few lived long enough to be interviewed by animation historians.

Here are a couple of newspaper pieces about three actors. I haven’t a clue whether Toby Deane worked in theatrical cartoons, but we know that Lionel Wilson worked at Terrytoons under Gene Deitch and provided all the voices for the imaginative Tom Terrific TV cartoons. This first story is from the Radio and TV column of the Syracuse Post-Standard of August 14, 1956. It reminds us a very flourishing commercial animation business was in New York. You can read more about Wilson in this post.

Cartoon Voices Have Interesting Persons Attached
By PEG SIMPSON
A tiny, hidden corner of the TV world is occupied by a group of actors who busy themselves out of nobodies. These thespians are the ones who give life to the pencil sketches which charm viewers of video’s animated cartoon commercials.
Two members of the cartoon-voice fraternity were seen last week in featured roles in the Lyric Circus production of “Girl Crazy.” Petite blond Toby Deans has the distinction of owning the voice of Dottie Doeskin, the M&M peanut, Mr. Kruger of beer fame, and the glow worm (or bubble boy) on the Babo can, among others.
Lionel Wilson, who played Toby's husband in the presentation, has done many Ivory Flakes characters along with Crisco, Viceroy cigarette, and other commercials.
Both Toby and Lionel pursue regular, successful careers in showbusiness in addition to having built up quite substantial careers in this end of the recording business. Each can handle the voices of either sex and any age.
“That's the strange part of this business,” Wilson laughed. “A mature woman may come up with the perfect little boy voice while a man oftimes handles a little girl voice better. In fact a girl frequently does an old man’s voice better than a male actor can. I've done them all and so has Toby.”
While the pair appear to get a big kick out of being the anonymous voices behind a cartoon, each has his own philosophy about, having a job which leaves him nameless.
Lionel likes the anonymity. He has two separate, distinct careers. On one hand, he records voices. On the other, he's an actor in TV, radio and stage. He keeps the careers apart deliberately that one job doesn't reflect upon the other.
Toby, however, has welded her jobs. Primarily a club singer, she uses her many voices and stories about them in her act. She feels the identification helps her establish contact with her audience—most of whom watch TV commercials at one time or another. She's had as much success with this idea as Lionel has had his philosophy.
Just keep an ear cocked during the next cartoon commercial you see--the voice you hear belong to a couple of former Lyric Circus stars.

Another one of Deitch’s favourites was Allen Swift. He was incredibly busy with commercial work but Deitch brought him in to provide voices at Terrytoons and then later on the Tom and Jerry cartoons he made for MGM. Since someone will mention it if I don’t, Swift was also one of the Total TeleVision stock company. We’ve written about Swift’s career in this post and again in this post. Here’s yet another newspaper article from one of the syndication services, dated April 6, 1959.

Man of Many Voices Finds TV Profitable
NEW YORK (WNS)—Allen Swift is the most listened-to man in television: you may not see him, but not an hour goes by in the whole broadcasting day that you don't hear his voice.
Swift, you see, is the man who does all those odd voices for the commercials. He may be a cigarette, a pencil, a duck, an electric shaver, a bottle cap or a ballplayer ... and each time one of his voices comes at you in a commercial, Swift can say with satisfaction:
“Well, I just made myself another $35.
CONSIDERING he has 400 commercials being used on radio and TV right now, this 35-year-old New Yorker has good cause for satisfaction.
Even though his face never appears on the screen, he ranks as one of TV’s highest paid performers. Which is nice going for a fellow who started his TV career as the voice of “Howdy Doody.”
“Actually I started at the age of 8,” Swift explained in his own natural baritone voice. “I went to the movies and saw Maurice Chevalier and Zasu Pitts in a triple feature or something, and when I came out I discovered I could do the Chevalier and Zasu voices.
“DID THEM well enough so that I got a lot of attention from the family—and I liked it. So I was a mimic from that time on.”
Swift, who's a happy-faced, blue-eyed fellow with thinning brown hair, is really more actor than mimic. He doesn't just imitate voices; he makes them up. “Say an advertising agency calls me in and says they want to do a talking pencil, I try to figure out how a pencil would sound if it could talk.
“And of course I try to make the voice entertaining.”
BECAUSE SWIFT is blessed with an extraordinary range— he can go from base to falsetto in two syllables—he's never had any of his voices identified as belonging to the same man.
“I really don’t think I’ve ever repeated a voice,” he says. “Because you never get the same character speaking.”
That means Swift is the owner of some thousand different voices. He’s done 2,000 commercials, the voices for “Terrytoon” cartoons, and five years of radio soap opera.
Sometimes Swift’s voice can be heard offering competing products. For instance, he’s been eight different brands of cigarettes and two different kinds of electric razor.
SWIFT HAS little trouble with such items. But sometimes the non-existent characters he has to speak for stump him.
“Have you ever tried being a flashlight battery that sees the light?” he asked. “The biggest problem is trying to be serious about the voice. There’s something very funny, even though it’s my living, about deciding whether a pencil with an eraser talks slower than a pencil with a metal case, But it makes all the difference to the people paying for the commercials.”

There are so many other names that lie in the weeds of obscurity. For every Jackson Beck and Mae Questel there are an Arthur Kay and Cecil Roy. And who was that raspy guy who turned up in Gene Rodemich’s Van Beuren cartoons? Maybe some day we’ll see some new research to answer the many questions about people who deserve to be better known by animation fans.

I Like Him. He's Screwy.

There’s an old saying about not counting chickens before they’re hatched. How many people actually count chickens these days, I’m not sure, but that’s beside the point.

To the right, you see a chicken. One chicken. We can count it because it’s hatched.

To the left, you see a washed out frame from the cartoon Uncle Tom’s Cabaña (1947). It’s not any cartoon. It’s a cartoon that carries some racial baggage, but that’s also beside the point.

It’s not just any cartoon. It’s a Tex Avery cartoon. Fans of his work at MGM have been hoping—I don’t know for how long—for some kind of release of all his Metro cartoons by the current rights holders, Warner Bros. I’m among them. I love an awful lot of Tex’s cartoons. I even like Screwy Squirrel, though Tex insisted he did not. You may have noticed I post frames from a Tex Avery cartoon once a week here.

Well, it appears something is happening, judging by this purposely-vague video.

pic.twitter.com/APnr1oa06B— Warner Archive (@WarnerArchive) January 17, 2020

So is this a full Avery set? (It looks like only one disc). Is it just the old Droopy set un-DNVR’d for Blu-Ray, or will we get great shorts like Bad Luck Blackie and Magical Maestro? Will scenes be cut (or, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabaña or Half-Pint Pygmy, whole cartoons omitted)? I’d rather not speculate.

We will get the answers next Tuesday. I’ve waited all this time. I can wait some more. At this point, Jerry Beck has confirmed the disc you see in the video is a first volume. I can do no better than to suggest you keep an eye on his Animation Scoop site for accurate and timely information. For now, we’ll avoid chicken-counting.

Acorn In Disguise

Poor squirrel. He can’t shake an acorn from a branch. Oh, wait. It falls on him.



Cut to the next scene. The acorn sprouts legs and dances; after all, this is a musical cartoon. The squirrel smashes the acorn only to find a caterpillar in it. The annoyed insect smacks the squirrel in the snoot with part of its body, which bounces back into place, and the caterpillar dances off scene.



This is from a typical 1930 Silly Symphony, Autumn, which has animals gathering food for storage to Carl Stalling’s classical beat. Ub Iwerks gets the only animation credit. This is a seasonal followup to Springtime (1929) and Summer (1930); Winter was released the following October.

The Hunt For the Elusive Quarter

Great poses highlight Walter Lantz’s last cartoon for United Artists, Drooler's Delight. By the time this cartoon was released in 1949, Lantz had his studio on a hiatus and did some world touring. Profits from overseas theatres were still tied up in post-war money restrictions and Lantz discovered his U-A release contract wasn’t as financially beneficial to him as when he was working with Universal-International.

It would appear Ed Love was the last animator kept on staff. Several more cartoons were in the pipeline and had been written by Heck Allen and timed by Dick Lundy but sat unmade until the studio reopened over a year later. Love was the sole animator of this cartoon, though I imagine he must have had an assistant. Woody is extremely well animated, with little dances and lots of subtle changes in expression. Most of the frames below are extremes as Woody searches for 25 cents to buy a drooler’s delight like the one he heard advertised on the radio.



Love was never rehired when the studio reopened. He freelanced in commercials and then landed regular work at Hanna-Barbera when it was putting Quick Draw McGraw on the air in 1959.

The cartoon benefits from Lionel Stander, whose wonderful growly, gangster-type voice suits Buzz Buzzard perfectly. Bugs Hardaway is Woody; Dal McKennon might play the radio announcer.

She and the Chimps

Quick—name Peggy Cass’ TV series! No, I don’t mean To Tell the Truth.

There may be some old sitcom die-hard fans who can name the show. It never (to the best of my knowledge) appeared in reruns because it only lasted one season. On paper it must have looked like a winner.

The monkeyshines of J. Fred Muggs turned into moneyshines for NBC’s Today, as some credit the chimp with boosting the show’s ratings. Then the Marquis Chimps scored hits whenever they appeared on TV, including a memorable appearance with Jack Benny. Someone watching at Screen Gems must have thought, “Hey, let’s give these monkeys their own show.”

They did. ABC picked it up. And they put it down again after 26 episodes.

Cass and Jack Weston were signed to co-star. But despite the work of some top former radio comedy writers, assisted by a ubiquitous laugh track, there was really only one joke—chimps were treated like human kids. Cass, who proved in the movie Auntie Mame that she really was funny, soldiered through as best she could.

Here’s a piece from King Features’ TV Keynotes column dated September 23, 1961.

Chimps Steal Scenes
By STEVEN H. SCHEUER
HOLLYWOOD — It's a good thing Peggy Cass has a lot of confidence in herself because she's going to need it in her new TV series, "The Hathaways," to be seen on Friday nights this fall with Jack Weston and the three Marquis chimps. The chimps, Enoch, Charlie and baby Candy get bored routine four times for jelly beans or ice and then they quit.
The other day on the Columbia stage, Weston and Cass fumbled their lines or missed cues. Peggy stumbled over her line for the fourth time and Charlie the chimp walked off the stage in disgust.
"I was so embarrassed," said Peggy.
Miss Cass can really take care with stunts. They will do the same of herself, but she isn't going to attempt to swipe scenes from the chimps.
Enoch's Scorn
"If I get a laugh on the set," said Peggy, "Enoch turns his head to a camera and he seems to say, 'Tell the big, shiny lady to shut up.' "
The chimps can't talk, but they can make sounds to fit a vocabulary of 100 words—"not all the best ones, either," says Miss Cass.
Hearing that pilots never sell, Peggy decided to take the plunge last winter for money and work with animals. The day she signed the papers she appeared on her favorite Jack Paar Show and there was a chimp.
"It was an omen," said Peggy.
Sure Laugh Getters

Chimps, sure laugh getters, are going to be in a lot of shows this season. Joey Bishop, among others, will have a monkey guest for insurance.
Learning this, Miss Cass' Irish dander rose. "Listen, there's going to be a bed check on my chimps," she said with snap. "I'll have you know, my chimps are the originals."
She thought a moment. "We have the world's best, so why worry. Let the others try and imitate Enoch, Charlie and Candy."
Miss Cass expects to be known on TV as The Monkey Lady and according to the storyline she and Jack Weston have merely adopted the three monkeys.
Train Wreck Survivors
Peggy says the producer still hasn't told her how she obtained her three "babies". "No one told me about their background so I've made it up. I say there was a train wreck outside of town and some of the cars were carrying circus animals. Jack and I go down to the accident and rescue the three chimps. Now they're our family."
As Mom, Peggy has scenes putting curlers on baby Candy's head with lines like, "Oh, I wish my hair were as thick as yours." She plays croquet with the chimps and she thinks this could be dangerous. "They're stronger than I am and they were using real mallets. One bang on the head and I'm through." A true Mamma, Peggy has fallen in love with her "children."
"The chimps pay little attention to you if you don't work with them," she says. "They're particular. You ought to see them greet their trainer Gene Detroy. They fly into his arms in the morning."
Night Club Act
Peggy would like to do a nightclub act with the chimps. "I'd crack the jokes and they'd clap," she said. "I'd call it 'Peggy's Revenge.' "
While Peggy dreams, her mother brings her back to reality. She saw her daughter's pilot and came out nodding. "Well, Peggy, the kids will love it, but don't let them photograph you from the side. You have some beak for a nose, my dear."
Peggy is watching for this and at the same time she keeps an eye on the three scene stealers.
She also hopes to cut down on the one line gags she's been receiving. "I'm not that kind," she says. "I need image humor, you know.
"I don't worry about the chimps, just me. But they are dear. And looking at 'em, you just have to believe Darwin. I see my friends and my rel—— ." She broke off. "Well, it's true!"

Since most of you reading have little interest in an obscure sitcom bomb, here’s another story about Cass from the Schenectady Gazette of August 29, 1963. There’s a reference to Pauline Frederick. My recollection is she anchored some of those minute-or-so updates on NBC during the daytime but she was also a regular reporter from the U.N. for quite a while. In those days, women had to be pretty feisty to get a piece of the on-air action in network television news. In a way, I get the impression that description could be applied to Peggy Cass. I can’t see her taking crap from anyone.

Now Sojourning in 'Sandwich Land'—Witty Peggy Cass Likes Talking
By PEG CHURCHILL
Gazette Reporter
A warm and wildly witty woman from the Land of the Bean and the Cod, comedienne Peggy Cass is sojourning in another country now . . . Sandwich Land.
* * *
"I CALL THIS 'Sandwich Land'," she explained yesterday over a corned beef-on-rye at the Thruway Motel in Albany, "because I haven't had anything to eat but sandwiches since I arrived here Tuesday."
"This may turn out to be the Kosher week of my life," she quipped, surveying her luncheon fare. "I've had more corned beef here than I ever have in New York." "You're from Schenectady. What kind of a name is that?," she asked, and quickly added, "Boy, any kid has to learn how to spell to live in that town."
Told that Schenectady is the home plant of General Electric Co., her blue eyes widened in familiar Cass-fashion as she remembered: "When I was in Syracuse I had the General Electric suite of the motel where I was staying. When I walked in five of the lamps didn't work. I thought the last man to check in must have been Mr. Westinghouse."
* * *
LUNCH WITH Peggy Cass is a zany occasion. She may not try to be funny, but it's a habit which has stayed with her since she "had them in stitches down at the Gulf gas station when I was five years old." That was in Cambridge, Mass., outside Boston.
"And, I like baked beans and cod fish, especially sprinkled with pork scraps. I just got a new New England cook book. I'm going to get busy with it in the fall and ruin a lot of Friday evenings."
"I'm a talker," admitted Peggy in what might have been the understatement of the hour-long conversation. "I just can't stop. My mother always told me to shut up 'cauz talking could get me into a lot of trouble. Boy, was she wrong."
* * *

TALKING brought Peggy Cass to the attention of millions who saw. her guest appearances on the old Jack Paar Tonight show. She became a regular guest on the late-evening television show after scoring a Broadway success as Agnes Gootch in "Auntie Mame" in 1956.
The auburn haired actress enjoyed her guest spots with Paar, but she was "terrified" by them as well. "It was like going to the block every time, you went on. You had to have all your own material. If you weren't funny, what then?"
Miss Cass shivered as she thought of the trip she made with Paar to the Berlin wall, a trip which caused considerable furor.
"I WENT ALONG as the pauper's Pauline Frederick," she remarked. "I was just plain people. When Jack told me there was going to be a senate investigation, I broke out in goosepimples. I just wanted to be the nice girl next door again, the one the women will invite over for coffee."
The wife of Carl Fisher, business manager of current Broadway hits "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and "She Loves Me," Peggy is the "girl next door" to her neighbors on Manhattan's fashionable east side.
THE FISHER family also includes Peggy's stepdaughter, a Radcliffe College student now traveling in Japan, and the comedienne's two black poodles — Schroeder (named after the character in the Peanuts comic strip) and Freddie "it's as good a name as Charlie, isn't it?").
Schroeder and Freddie, constant traveling companions, are with Miss Cass now while she appears at Colonie Summer Theater in "She Didn't Say Yes." Actress Joan Caulfield also stars in the comedy being given a pre-Broadway trial on the summer stock circuit.
THIS IS THE ninth and final week of the tour. Next week, Miss Cass will leave for Ireland where she has relatives . . . "and how." She said she's going to Europe to think about whether she will be in "She Didn't Say Yes" when (and if) it has its scheduled November opening on Broadway.
"I have my choice of this show or a serious part in another dramatic show. There wouldn't be too many laughs in the dramatic part and a lot of crying. It appeals to me: After all, I don't want to be a female Jackie Leonard."
Peggy Cass is outspoken in a fresh and funny way about everything from the lack of ice machines in a motel ("it's a disgrace") to Richard Burton ("If he gets married again, there's sure going to be a line of applicants").
* * *
SHE THINKS of her humor as "a way of looking at the world." Sometime, she notes, "I say something and people fall down laughing and I don't even think it's funny."
If she's going to be funny, Peggy likes best of all to be funny on the New York stage.
"I'm happy when I'm on stage," she confessed. "I love it." Without trying, and perhaps without even knowing it, the down-to-earth Miss Cass is "on stage" all the time.
Despite her mother's prediction, all Peggy has to do is talk.

Cass continued to do a lot of stage work and, since she was in New York, she was in the home of the Goodson-Todman game show empire. In 1960, besides appearing with some regularity on Jack Paar’s Tonight show, Cass was filling in for both Polly Bergen and Kitty Carlisle on To Tell the Truth. Bergen left for other show biz ventures and Cass eventually became a regular into the 1980s. Also appearing on the Broadway stage and on Goodson-Todman panels was Anita Gillette. She, too, detoured to California’s TV-ville to co-star on a sitcom bomb called Me and the Chimp.

We can imagine what they said if they compared notes.