Standard Avery Gag No. 153

“Interesting to behold is the evolution of the tropical butterfly,” narrator Robert C. Bruce tells us in Aviation Vacation (1941). “Let’s watch this curious transformation, as from this lowly, insignificant little cocoon emerges a full-grown butterfly, vividly marked with all the gorgeous colours of the rainbow.”

Well, there would be gorgeous colours if this cartoon had been restored. Instead, we get lots of green and faded hues. Regardless, that doesn’t affect the gag, which is one of Tex Avery’s standards.

First butterfly.



Second butterfly.



Third butterfly. Well, sort of.





Cut to a close shot of the shaking, bloodshot-eyed insect. “Say! What in the world happened to you?” asks the narrator. Avery fans can shout the answer at the screen: “Well, I’ve been sick.”

This cartoon leaves you with the feeling that Avery had some gags left over from some of his other travelogue parodies and shoved them in here. There isn’t a lot to do with aviation in this one.

Dave Monahan got credit for the gags, Sid Sutherland for animation (Virgil Ross and Bob McKimson are here, too) and Johnny Johnsen supplied the greenery.

Hey, Harry, Give Me Your Job

Being able to read off a piece of paper doesn’t mean you can be a voice actor or announcer.

It’s true today and was true in 1946 when the subject came up in Radio Life magazine. The November 24th edition profiled three of the best-known announcers on West Coast comedy shows of the day—Don Wilson from the Jack Benny show; Harry Von Zell, who had his own 15-minute show in 1946 and appeared in two-reelers; and Ken Carpenter, who hung out at the Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby. All three had puttered around radio for a bit before winning auditions for big-name comedy/variety shows that shot them to fame. They all stayed on top for many, many years because they were very good. They also proved to be more than just an announcer; they interacted with the star and became a part of the cast, especially Wilson.

There were many others in that glorious era of network radio who found themselves doing more than announcing—Kenny Delmar (who was primarily an actor) is one—but these three come to mind as being at the top of their profession. And, as the story indicates, it wasn’t always easy street for them.



“Aw, ANYBODY Can Be An Announcer”
Everybody Wants to Get Into Their Act, So Let's Take Some Time to Re-examine The Careers of These Veteran Mike-men
By Betsy J. Hammer
ONE of the phenomena of this post-war world seems to be the desire of about one out of every ten of our male population to become a radio announcer. Somehow, sometime in the last five years it has occurred to an awful lot of people that the announcer's life is the life for them—glamorous, well-paid, easy . . . Urn-huh!
We came up against these hard facts when we called on Thomas Woods of AFRA, the radio actors' guild. According to Mr. Woods there are about 125 staff announcing jobs in this area and about 450 names of professional announcers on file in the AFRA office. This isn't even counting the great number of people who are studying or hoping to become announcers and who are not registered with the guild.
Is there no ray of hope in all this? Well, yes—Mr. Woods further informed us that many times an unknown out-of-towner will audition and win a staff job on the local stations where many experienced local people have failed to connect. “And a staff announcing job is not to be sneezed at,” says Woods. “It's still the best opportunity to get somewhere in radio.”
We've gotten many letters from frustrated people who have made tentative efforts to break into the announcing field. Here we print a hypothetical letter which includes most of the statements and queries that are usually contained, together with answers gleaned from the careers of three of our most successful mike-men, Ken Carpenter, Harry von Zell and Don Wilson.
“Sirs: I think it's time some of the big -name announcers moved over and gave someone else a break. While I was in the service (or working in a war plant, etc.) they got into radio and got all the soft jobs. You have to have friends and a pull to get anywhere. Why don't they give someone else a chance for the fame and easy money—they've had theirs.
I have a good voice and anybody could read from a script the way they do . . . etc. . . . etc. . . .”
Veterans All
Well, let's see now—“while I was in the service, etc. . . .” Harry von Zell went into radio twenty years ago, Don Wilson's voice was first heard on the air from KOA, Denver, about twenty-two years ago, and Ken Carpenter, the baby of the bunch, started his mike career locally over sixteen years ago. Hardly what you'd call getting into radio while anyone was in the service!
“You have to have friends and a pull to get anywhere . . .”
Yes, Ken Carpenter had a friend who got him his initial audition. The only thing wrong with this argument is that Ken didn't get the job. During a lean period, Don Wilson applied to a guy named Harry von Zell for a job at KMTR. Don was turned down cold. Many years later he asked friend von Zell why he hadn't gotten the job. "Your job ?" Harry exclaimed. "I was scared to death of my own job!"
“Fame and easy money, etc. . . .”
Harry von Zell handled announcing chores on twenty-one New York shows a week at one time—for less than $100 each week. He didn't become the full-fledged emcee comedian he's famous for being now until the summer of 1945 on the Eddie Cantor show, though he did perform similar duties for Fred Allen. That's only nineteen years after his initial start in radio! Ken Carpenter sat in the lobby of KFI for over two weeks until chief announcer Don Wilson hired him. This same Wilson got a job as staff singer locally in 1928 and became a member of an early bird program. He worked early and late at the station and then got fired because he bought a different make car than that which the owner of the station carried in his agency.
“Anybody could read from a script. . .”
When Don Wilson became a staff member of NBC in New York he did half-hour newscasts cold. That means he had no time to check pronunciations (and you know the pronunciations that show up in the news!) or read the copy through before he went on the air. Don had been a football star at the University of Colorado and when he decided to forsake his singing career for one of announcing, he was fitted for becoming one of the best-known sports announcers on the coast. Though Harry von Zell was one of the best announcers in the business, it was Harry's own natural flair for comedy and his great sense of humor that prompted Fred Allen to start writing Harry into his comedy scripts. Ken Carpenter has been pushed through a plate glass window while covering a parade, tackled and trampled by players during a Rose Bowl game, hit in the solar plexus with a bat while describing a baseball match, kicked by the race horse, Alcazar, at Santa Anita; went alone into a lion's cage to interview Leo, the lion; slipped off the top of a mountain in Elysian Park while telling the folks at home about the famous "moving mountain." "Believe me," says Carpenter, "it wasn't in the script!"
So there you have the fame and easy life that have marked the careers of these three announcers! It adds up to perseverance, hard work and a great natural ability. And it can still be done. If anything, Harry, Don and Ken will leave their field in radio a better one than they found it. Don, through his wonderfully natural reaction to Benny's comedy and his humorous handling of the commercials; Harry with his great flair for comedy, and Ken, who made ringing the NBC chimes for "Kraft Music Hall" a national institution not so long ago, have proven that a good announcer is a very important part of the whole show. If you become an announcer, you'll find that these three have already paved the way for you to become a real radio personality in your own right!

What's the Name of That Studio?

I used to boo at the screen as a kid watching the made-for-TV Magoos. They were little more than an endless string of myopia-mistake jokes with Jim Backus rarely taking a breath for six minutes. (Once in a while, there were cartoons that looked better than the rest. I suspect they were theatrical releases).

However, here’s a neat little inside joke in Magoo’s Surprise Party. Magoo is driving his old touring car with stickers on the windshield that would obscure anyone’s view (except Magoo’s because he can’t see properly). One of the stickers is the studio’s logo, with UPA’s letters in separate coloured ovals.



UPA continued to have unique designations for its staff. Vic Haboush is the art director in this cartoon. Bob Givens gets credit for “production design” while Gloria Wood and Jack Heiter are colour stylists. Bob Singer handled layouts.

X and O = Iwerks

Ub Iwerks’ ComiColor shorts simply weren’t at par with the Walt Disney Silly Symphonies they were trying to imitate. They had Disney’s past musician (Carl Stalling) and Disney’s future animators (Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster). Of course, Ub himself was Disney’s top animator until early 1930. But something was missing, despite the colour and songs.



Take, for example, Puss in Boots (1934). It opens with the hero young man playing the bagpipes, pussywillows turning into meowing cats, and then the scene cuts to kittens playing noughts and crosses. Song time! No one will mistake the lyrics for the Tin Pan Alley stuff in Warner Bros. cartoons.



Just a little game of tic-tac-toe
Makes time fly when the clock goes slow.
Three little crosses in a row,
That’s the game of tic-tac-toe.

The brown kitten is a sore loser and attacks the winning kitty.



Iwerks’ story people (I think Otto Englander was there at the time) decided to turn the tic-tac-toe thing into a running gag. The kittens swirl around in a cage that lands on top the ogre’s head. When they escape, it’s revealed they played the game there.



Disney loved butt attack jokes. Therefore, so did Iwerks. The kittens get into the ogre’s pants. Cut to a scene of Xs and Os on the ogre’s naked obese butt. Fun for the whole family!



Hey, if one butt joke is funny, a second will be twice as funny! The cartoon ends with the hero being attacked by a kitten and showing the handiwork. Everyone laughs just like at the end of a ‘70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Rooby rooby roo!



Iwerks’ story people sneak in one Warner Bros.’ type gag. The little princess, turned into a bird, yells at the ogre “You naaasty man!” just like Joe Penner.

The Iwerks’ ColiColor shorts went for the charm of Disney, but never got there. Lame stories and weak direction (no real suspense builds in this cartoon) were major problems.

Some more of the song lyrics:

Oh, you saved my tots
And I thank you lots!
I’m your friend until the whole world rots.

Here’s a tip (?) to do
Something nice for you
Now we’re going to make a prince of you!
Meow, meow!

The trade papers of the day revealed this was the third ComiColor cartoon put into production. The colour must have looked pretty good when these were first released; the screen shots you see here are from a tired print transferred to one of those budget DVDs of “public domain” cartoons that came out once upon a time. It’ll be nice to eventually see these given a good, cleaned-up video release.

Has Jack Benny Gone High Hat?

Radio comedians very quickly discovered the difference between their new gigs and their old ones in vaudeville. In the 1920s, they could take their act from town to town to town, performing the same show on different stages. After all, no one had seen it before.

Radio was vastly different. Once an act went on the air, everyone heard it. The comedian had to come up with something new, week after week. In Jack Benny’s case, it was twice a week at the beginning of his radio career. And there was no summer break until later in the 1930s.

It’s no wonder comedians didn’t have as much time to hang out together like they did in vaudeville. They had to concentrate on next week’s show. Every week.

Yowza Ben Bernie griped his buddies were being “high hat” by not socialising. No-za, Ben. They were plain old too busy, especially when Hollywood came calling and started putting radio stars in the movies. Here’s an article about it from the Santa Cruz Evening News of May 16, 1936.

Ben Bernie Moans "My Old Pals Are Going High Hat!"
His Former Friends Hide Behind Bland Secretaries While They Look For Gags
By RICHARD POWELL
THEY used to call each other Sadie and Eddie and Joe and Jack, back in their vaudeville days. They used to gather around cafeteria tables and discuss their joys and troubles after their five-a-day performances were finished. But now they call each other hard names and will only talk about how much money they make. For radio came in the door and love flew out the window. Ben Bernie, the Old Maestro, sighs as he gives the lowdown on the airways. He puffs a little faster on his cigar and smooths his thinning hair.
"Radio is screwy, he grumbles. My old pals of vaudeville are wearing the high hat. The money they make, the fan letters they get, have given them the old inflation of the cerebellum — or whatever they use instead of heads. It's like that gag about Boston society, only in this case the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots only speak over the radio.
"Take one radio comedian who sells gasoline over the air. If any of his old friends want to see him, they have to consult his secretary. Maybe they're important, so the secretary makes an appointment for them to see this comedian from 5 o'clock to four minutes after 5 two weeks from Sunday. He's too busy looking up jokes in his filing cabinets to be bothered by a pal."
MOST of radio's top comedians are products of vaudeville. Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn went to the musical-comedy stage from vaudeville, and from there to radio. Others went directly from vaudeville to the air — Burns and Allen, Amos and Andy (Correll and Gosden), Phil Baker, Jack Benny and Joe Penner. Ben Bernie was in vaudeville long before he formed his band.
Back in 1920 a few people were tickling a bit of crystal with a wire and yelling with joy when they picked up the time signals from Arlington. Most of the present top-notchers in radio humor were touring the vaudeville circuits. Maybe friends wouldn't see each other for months, but when they got together they celebrated. They dreamed of the day when they might play the Palace in New York vaudeville's show shop and perhaps get a contract for $200 or $250 a week. Few earned anything like that. Between $40 and $80 a week for a single was good money. Out in Hollywood, they knew, a little fellow named Chaplin had graduated from vaudeville into the big money, thousands a week. But that was a one-in-a-million shot and they didn't spend much time dreaming about it. Their biggest worries were the immediate ones of paying their bills and getting a couple of bows at each show, so that the house manager wouldn't write the booking office that they were terrible. If these vaudeville comedians had any pet hates, they were for the acrobats who opened the shows and the trained-seal act that sometimes got too much applause.
Now when they get together they don't celebrate. They bore each other with tales of how they are wowing the radio audience.
BACK in the old days the boys used to lend each other a helping hand. They all knew what a tough job it was to make a cold audience unlimber its applause. Sometimes their jokes became stale and they couldn't invent any new ones. Often they couldn't afford to pay a professional gag man to map out a new act.
"I was in a bad spot once during the war," Bernie said. "I had just changed my act from a straight violin number to a comedy number. Then one night the tough munitions workers of Bridgeport razzed me off the stage. It cost me my contract and I had no money to pay for a new act. My friends rallied around. A bunch of them, including Frank Fay and Joe Laurie, Jr., each contributed one of their best jokes to me. With that material I built a new act and got started again. If you think radio headliners now would give up a swell joke to help a pal, you can trade In your car for a horse and buggy."
SUCH a joke as the following, which was used by several radio comedians, is an example of the type that starts broadcasting wars.

The scene is the Louis-Baer fight. Baer comes back to his corner after taking a terrific first-round mauling. Before Baer can speak his second pats him on the shoulder and whispers, "Nice work, Maxie. You're doing great. He didn't lay a glove on you." At the end of the second round Baer reels back in worse shape than before. Again the assistant tells him quickly, "Nothing to it, Maxie. He can't touch you." Following the third round Baer staggers to his corner. Before the assistant can say a word, Maxie groans. "Yeah, yeah, I know all about it. He hasn't laid a glove on me. But keep your eyes on that referee, because somebody in that ring is giving me a whale of a beating!"
Just as the boys started accusing each other of stealing that joke, it was found that it had been used quite a few years ago, about the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, about the Dempsey-Willard fight and probably for as many years as Marquis of Queensbury rules have governed the fight game.
One headliner is very funny over the microphone, but has lost whatever personal sense of humor he once had. He is air sales man for a tasty dessert.
"One night," the Old Maestro states, "Walter Winchell and I decided to drop into the studio while this fellow was giving his weekly program. Our names impressed the page boys and got us into the room. We made funny faces at this radio comedian, thinking that he would turn the joke back on us by ad-libbing something about us to his audience. Instead, he got huffy and motioned us out angrily. The next day he tried to have the page boys fired for letting us in."
The vaudeville performers who once hoped to get $200 a week now think in terms of thousands and talk in millions. As much as $5000 was paid to Ed Wynn for a half-hour program once a week. Most of radio's aces get between $2000 and $5000 weekly from their sponsors. Hollywood money has been offered and taken by almost every radio star. Personal appearances and night-club engagements increase the weekly total. Eddie Cantor often makes $15,000 a week on theatre appearances. Cantor, Burns and Allen, Benny, Bernie and Joe Penner have clicked in the movies.
And so the ex-vaudeville performers have had their ideas turned topsy-turvy. They have been knocked dizzy by the strange power of the microphone. Bernie points to one man who has been successful on the radio, stage and screen. "He's a nice guy in many ways," Bernie says, "but he's a little screwy. For years he has made little jokes about politics. Now he thinks he can turn the course of any election by his radio chatter. I guess he believes he could blast the career of any political candidate whom he didn't like."
Ben Bernie was a vaudeville fiddler, teaming with Phil Baker, who played an accordion, in a musical act. Bernie never said a word onstage. Then one night a violin string broke in the middle of the act.
Bernie drawled, without thinking: "There must be a critic in the house."
Patrons howled with glee at the unexpected joke, and Bernie decided to become a comedian. Later he formed his own orchestra for a new metropolitan hotel and went on the air with his music and dry humor. It started the comedy master-of-ceremonies rage on the air.
JACK BENNY'S experience was much like Bernie's. Jack was a violinist until the war, when he entered the army and started joking while playing to soldier assemblies.
Gracie Allen was just a schoolgirl when George Burns met her. He thought she would make a good "stooge" for his vaudeville act. Their first engagement was for $5. Naturally Burns had written the act so that he would get all the laughs. Strangely, Gracie's dumb questions brought more merriment than George's bright answers. So George decided to give her the answers.
"In the old days, radio's top-notchers had time to enjoy everything," Bernie recalled. "Now many of them sleep, eat and think radio, to the exclusion of everything else. An earthquake might bother them, but only if it sets up enough static.
Copyright, 1936.

Assembly Line Art in New Rochelle

1955 was a pretty good year for Paul Terry. He was still tied in with 20th Century Fox to put new cartoons in theatres. He was putting his old ones on television thanks to a network deal. And at the end of the year, he decided to take the money and run by working out the sale of his studio to CBS for $5,000,000.

The year was Terry’s 40th anniversary in animation and that made him good copy for national newspaper writers. After all, he pre-dated that Walt guy everyone was so giddy about. Here are two of the stories. The first one appeared in papers around January 18th and the second around March 7th.

The Marquee
By Dick Kleiner
Sure, a little bit of Hollywood fell from out the sky one day, and nestled in New Rochelle right next to the railroad tracks. It's quite surprising, but it's been in that suburban Westchester town for years.
Paul Terry makes his fabulous movie shorts, Terrytoons ("Mighty Mouse," "Tom and Jerry," "Heckle and Jeckle," and so forth), in a pleasant New York suburb. Few people, outside the movie business, know about it, because Terry isn't the type to go around beating drums.
He's an elderly, hearty, philosophical man, primarily an artist, who was one of the first to go into animated cartoons. In those trail-blazing days, all movies were made in the New York area. The live stuff moved to California for weather purposes, and many cartoon studios followed. But Terry stayed where he was and he's still there.

He likes to recall how the chain of events that led him to his present spot started with the San Francisco quake. He was a newspaper artist there at the time, then left and went to Montana for a few years. From there he joined the general eastward movement of artistic young men, and landed in New York.
"My early years seemed sort of aimless," he says. "I drew for newspapers, learned something of photography, developed an interest in the theatre. And then, in '13, I saw the first animated cartoons. I knew then that my aimless wanderings had all been with some point--and this was it. In animated cartoons, I could fuse my interests in art, photography and the theatre into one project. So I began to make cartoons immediately."
His first, "Little Herman," came out in 1915. And he's been making them steadily ever since. Since the name Terrytoons was coined, there have been more than 650 of the six-minute shorts.
The Terry factory—for that's what it is, assembly-line art—works steadily. There are always several shorts in the works—one being written, one being animated, one being filmed, one being colored. Usually more than one in each stage. The place is always humming: it's animated itself.

Animated Cartoon Pioneer Going Strong on TV Show
By WAYNE OLIVER
NEW YORK, March 7 (AP)—A pioneer of animated cartoons who predates Walt Disney is going strong on daytime television.
He's Paul Terry who began with newspaper comic strips 50 years ago and since 1915 has been doing animated cartoons for the movies, for the past year and a half he has been showing his Terrytoons on CBS' Barker Bill five afternoons a week.
"We've got the top rated daytime show on television," beams the 68-year-old cartoon tycoon who, like Disney, makes his big money from the movies but couldn't resist the lure of TV.
"It's due to the power of the cartoon," he declares. "I think the cartoon is one of the best mediums of information and education. It can put over ideas without personalities it doesn't hurt anybody."
"The cartoon is truly an American art," he continues. "It embodies all the arts.
"You have the composer who puts everything he has into the music for the cartoon, the painter who concentrates on providing the most artistic background he can, and the animator responsible for the acting.
"Because they're all shoved at you at the same time, you really enjoy a cartoon more the second time than the first."

Terry was born in California and began his career there, but reversing Horace Greeley's famous admonition, came East and remained.
"In those days the whole motion picture industry was here," he explains. "Then they started moving to Hollywood because of the light. Movies were mostly made out of doors then and the prime reason they moved to California was because of the light.
"Now, with modern lighting a large part of their production is indoors. The movie industry could just as easily have been here if modern lighting had been available then.
"There never was a reason for our end of it to move. There was always indoor lighting."
Terry's studios are in suburban New Rochelle where he still turns out about 26 movies cartoons a year for 20th Century-Fox.
"And they're all switched to Cinemascope now," he adds.

Smart Willoughby

“George” the fox tricks Willoughby the dopey dog to jump off a cliff twice, then after rescuing him from a vicious bear, tricks him a third time. Director Tex Avery uses the same running animation and camera pan down the cliff to set us up for the switch.



This time, the camera quickly pans down the same mountain with broken tree limbs. Except Willoughby doesn’t crash-land.



“Ya know,” he tells us with a large, floppy tongue, “I ain’t so dumb,” then rests up as the iris closes.



The titles in Of Fox and Hounds give the draft numbers of the writer and animator. It’s late 1940 and American involvement in the war is about to escalate.

55 or so years ago, this was probably the most-shown Avery cartoon on the channel I watched that incessantly aired Warners cartoons. I still like it. And I ain’t so dumb.

Ham and Peking Duck

Chinese acrobats see that Cubby Bear is looking for talent in Fresh Ham, a 1933 Van Beuren cartoon. You can see they’re speaking in what are supposed to be pictographs.



They’re actually pretty good. They play music. They tumble in the air. Cubby is impressed.



Uh, oh. Out of the swirls comes the “fresh ham” of the title; a washed-up Shakespearean duck that keeps showing up to audition.



The ducks pounce on him. Cubby has had enough. The trap door takes care of them and a twisted combination of ducks runs out of the cartoon.



Steve Muffati and Mannie Davis get the “by” credit. The guy with the raspy voice plays the ham actor.

Catching Up With Bob Hope

There was a time Bob Hope was funny. And there was a time when he wasn’t.

Hope’s rise to fame may have been as a result of the movie The Big Broadcast of 1938 (in which he sang “Thanks for the Memory” for the first time), but he became a superstar through the “Road” pictures with Bing Crosby, his endless tours of military spots during World War Two, and his radio show where he could stop things with an ad-lib that was likely funnier than anything his writers came up with.

As he moved into the 1970s, it seemed like he was going through the motions with his comedy films, and his TV specials became larded with college patriotic marching bands, cheerleaders, non-actors, sweetened audience reactions, and far-too-obvious attempts at deciphering Barney McNulty’s cue cards. Hope, perhaps unfairly, was labelled an over-the-hill war-monger, but if you watched him on TV in the later years, it was clear he was past his prime and should bow out, gracefully or otherwise.

Here’s a Hope interview from September 25, 1966. In my opinion, Hope had jumped the you-know-what by then; his TV shows from the early ‘50s could be pretty funny.

Woe to the Golf Ball! Hope's Mortal Enemy
By BOB ROSE
Special Press Writer
HOLLYWOOD—About the only thing Bob Hope is mean to, outside of Bing Crosby, is a little white sphere on a patch of green grass.
"Ah, golf. That's where I get rid of my aggressions. That ball is my enemy and I attack it. Makes my psyche better. And of course, everybody's concerned about that," he says.
We here talking about the many sides of Bob Hope—comedian, father and Public Good Guy No. 1—over lunch in his dressing room on the set of his new movie, "Eight on the Lam."
"Mama sent this over," Hope said, pointing to a roast capon, dish of fresh peas and salad. "She doesn't like me to eat that commissary food. Oh, how right she is."
After Hope awkwardly hacked away at the bird ("Hmm. I better stay away from brain surgery.") And served his publicity man (Bill Faith. That's right, Hope and Faith) and me. The conversation then turned to his comedy nemesis Bing Crosby. "A really great guy," said Hope.
HOPE HAS been doing his put-down gags about Crosby since their first radio days. The comedy ritual is 30 years old and, frankly, Hope gets a little tired of it some times.
"But people want me to throw some gags at Bing. They are disappointed when I don't."
And you wonder if he could stop if he wanted to:
"Let's see, I first met Bing back in 1932 when we appeared on the same vaudeville bill. He was known as the Cremo cigar crooner. Cremo cigars! Well, I guess he fixed them. They aren't around any more."
Some other, more shapely, figures out of Bob Hope's past will appear with him on his first of five television specials of the year on NBC on Wednesday, Sept. 28. His staff managed to round up 15 of his former leading ladies gals like Lucille Ball, Joan Fontaine, Hedy Lamarr, Signe Hasso, Joan Collins, Virginia Mayo, Vera Miles and, of course, Dorothy Lamour (11 Hope movies, including 7 "On the Road to Morocco" etc., etc.). plus his present leading ladies, Jill St. John and ("wait a minute, how did she get in here?") Phyllis Diller.
HOPE'S 51ST movie, "Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number," which co-stars Miss Diller, is doing well in its second run around the movie houses. His 52nd, "Eight on the Lam," also stars Miss Diller, Jonathan Winters and Jill St. John.
"It's nice to get a picture out now and again," Hope says. "I like to remind people that I began as a paid comedian."
Hope does so many benefits and so much USO touring, the requests he gets for even more days than there are in a year. But he has a business side too. On the phone to an agent, he said:
"Yeah, but let's see if you can't get them to come up with some more scratch. Standing ovations are fine, but you can't put them in the bank."
But just a few days ago Hope donated a $500,000 tract of land for the new Eisenhower Medical Center near Palm Springs.
HOPE, now turned 63, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his first USO show, at March Field, by doing another at the same spot. He also is planning his umpteenth Christmas show for the troops overseas ("I get more out of it than the kids. The experiences are unforgettable").
Despite his go-go life, Hope has found time to take a big part in the raising of his four kids.
"Delores is a wonderful mama."
One daughter, Linda, is in Japan finishing a documentary ("she's $20,000 over budget already; I'll be ruined"); another, Nora, works in public relations at NBC; a son, Kelly, 18, is expected to go into the service soon.
The oldest son, Tony, 25, was admitted to the bar in California a few weeks ago, and both parents were proudly on hand at the ceremonies.
"I think it's important to have an attorney in the family," Hope quipped. "You've seen my act."

Sedaka Isn't Back; He Never Left

An 81-year-old man is trying to cheer us up as we attempt to deal, as best as we can, with a worldwide pandemic.

He’s not just any 81-year-old man. He’s Neil Sedaka.

A number of singers/musicians known better to boomers than anyone else have been showing up on social media to give us one more rendition of songs we first heard many years ago.

I was a teenage disc jockey when I played Neil Sedaka on the air. That was 45 years ago, give or take a few months. And that was during Sedaka’s second career; 15 years before that he had huge pop hits. The songs were almost like commercial jingles. Bouncy. Fairly predictable chord changes. Easy and simple lyrics. But record stores racked up huge sales with them. They were radio’s dose of fun.

Today, Sedaka has been getting hits on his hits. He’s put up little medleys on social media of songs familiar to a generation, with warm and friendly introductions.



We’ll take a little intermission and give you a chance to read a review from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of August 22, 1975. Sedaka talks about his comeback and how it happened.

Today's Music
'Sedaka's Back' on Album Tour
By GARRY BARKER
The bright silver banner suspended above the stage at Six Flags' Music Mill Theater said it all in a nutshell:
"Sedaka's Back!"
Neil Sedaka, who's had a land in writing some 75 gold records since 1959, made a spectacular recording comeback last year with "Sedaka's Back" on Elton John's Rocket Records label.
Already Sedaka has scored three hit singles off that LP with "Laughter In the Rain," "The Immigrant" and his latest, "That's When the Music Takes Me."
ARTISTS ARE MINING gold from it as well. The Captain and Tennille scored with "Love Will Keep Us Together," Andy Williams and the Carpenters took "Solitaire" and Maria Muldaur has recorded "Sad Eyes."
His two shows at Six Flags last Friday night packed the outdoor theater to overflowing and saw a horde of young people push against the stage hoping to shake his hand. Backstage, a relaxed Sedaka said the latter really amazed him.
"If my 12-year-old daughter saw that she wouldn't believe it," he said.

Sedaka lives in New York with his wife and two children and presently is on an extended tour of the United States.
An immediate eye-catcher are the two gold medallions he wears, which he said were presents from Elton John and John's management.
"It was Elton who convinced me to release my come back album in America," he said.
Sedaka and his new Rocket album is due to be released Sept. 22. It's called "The Hungry Years," after one of the songs on it.
"It's similiar to the last album," Sedaka told me. "Phil Cody and Howard Greenfield are on it and Robert Appere is the producer again."
SEDAKA RETIRED FROM performing in 1964, after a string of hit records that included "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" and "Calendar Girl," which is his favorite from the old era.
He quit because "I felt I had seen the world and I just wanted to get away from it all, relax and write."
His knack for hit songs certainly continued. He's been in on composing such standards as "Puppet Man" and "Workin' On a Groovy Thing."
When did he know it was time to get back to performing?
"When music became fun again," he said. "When artists such as James Taylor and Carole King (his old friend from high school) started showing up on the charts."
Later this year Sedaka will be appearing on the "Tony Orlando and Dawn" and "Cher" television shows.
Would he like to have a show of his own?
"Yes!" was the immediate reply.
With a warm and gracious personality and a string of hits that won't quit, Sedaka has an excellent shot at that last one.

Well, our intermission is over. Back to the performance. Bless you, Neil Sedaka.