Combating Bigots Via Radio

Old-Time radio wasn’t merely Bing crooning, Fibber McGee opening a closet, H.V. Kaltenborn with the news, or someone on Ma Perkins getting amnesia. Issues were addressed in a number of ways, issues that still haunt us today. Some were tackled well, others perhaps not.

Herald Tribune Syndicate columnist John Crosby gives some examples in his column of August 28, 1946. And he ponders a conundrum about it as well.

Witchcraft, Past and Present
There are two kinds of bigotry—popular and unpopular—and both are wrong. Bigotry feeds on bigotry as violence feeds on violence. In recent weeks radio’s better minds have made notable efforts to combat the intolerance which alarmingly has flamed again in the South and, in some instances, against Americans of Japanese descent on the west coast. It’s generally assumed that any radio program aimed against intolerance is admirable, but I sometimes wonder.
Recently I heard three such programs, and I’d like to take them up one at a time. First, let’s consider Orson Welles. In his Sunday afternoon broadcast Mr. Welles told of a Negro veteran who was blinded by a brutal beating administered him in South Carolina. Mr. Welles’ heart was in the right place, but he put his foot in his mouth at the outset by accusing the town of Aiken, S.C., of responsibility for the crime. It later developed the beating took place in another town some miles from Aiken. Mr. Welles was forced to apologize to Aiken, thus totally obscuring the original issue. Then Aiken—and I’m taking Mr. Welles word for this—in a torrent of childish wrath, banned Mr. Welles latest picture and made a public bonfire of all the advertisements and posters about it. Welles made a fool of himself over a national network, and the town looked pretty silly, too.
That wasn’t all. In that famous voice Welles threatened to pursue to the grave the sheriff who beat the Negro. If there was a trial, he said, he would attend it. If the sheriff was sentenced, he would accompany him to prison. After he had served this hypothetical sentence, Mr. Welles would be on hand when he was released. Welles, in short, would haunt the man. The Welles curse had been laid on the sheriff. Boo.
* * *
Case No. 2 is that of “David Harding, Counterspy.” This Dick Tracy of the air waves fearlessly confronted a mob intent on burning down the home of an American war veteran of Japanese descent. With magnificent bravado, Mr. Harding collared the ringleader, after standing off the mob with a ringing speech against intolerance. It was cops and robbers with a social significance, blood and thunder with a moral. The head mobster was a villain indistinguishable from any of the bully boys in a Wild West movie.
How much good does this sort of thing achieve beyond publicizing the problem? The mob scene only arouses passions in the listener as furious, though more righteous, than those the mob is exercising. You get mad enough to lynch the ringleader, scarcely an admirable anger. You are confirmed in your righteousness, and the prejudices of the west coast hoodlums probably aren’t altered a whit.
* * *
It’s all right to inform the unbigoted of what’s going on on the west coast, but is it wise to inflame them? Righteous wrath can do more harm than unrighteous wrath and, in fact, it’s frequently hard to distinguish between the two. Rather than making the rest of us mad, why not educate the people who are committing these crimes—a much harder and sometimes seemingly hopeless task.
Let’s take up the third case, which attempted that very thing. It was a superb radio dramatization of the witch burnings in Salem, Mass., in 1692. Its name was “An Interpretation of Cotton Mather,” and it was broadcasted on the Columbia Broadcasting System’s “American Portrait Stories” Saturday, Aug. 17 (6:15 p. m.). The drama soberly presented the tale of those two demonic girls, Abigail and Elizabeth, who feigned convulsions and accused three respected Salem women of bewitching them. Salem was thrown into a ferment of religious bigotry and, before the blood lust had passed, twenty-two persons were hanged or burned for witchcraft and 150 others were awaiting trial. With penetrating insight, and possibly a little hindsight, the dramatist, Irve Tunick, demonstrated how Cotton Mather, that unparalleled religious zealot, used the witchcraft scare to strengthen his hold on the people and to stop the loose talk of religious freedom, then getting uncomfortably loud for Mather’s dictatorial nature.
But the real lesson of this study was that religious conviction, or any conviction—whether good or bad—can lead to the blackest sin when too rigidly held and too blindly followed. To understand the present, study the past. Witchcraft is ridiculous. We all agree on that now. But the passions that led to the slaughter of twenty-two innocents is as contemporary as Harry S. Truman. The juxtaposition of an archaic belief with a modern emotion threw the cool light of historical perspective on own prejudices.
* * *
The same trick was performed in a single line by Bill Mauldin in the most brilliant of his recent cartoons. The cartoon showed two Roman Senators, togas and all, in a heated argument before a colonnaded building.
“Well,” said one Roman to the other, “would you like your daughter to marry a Christian?”

The rest of the week’s columns by Crosby: Monday, Aug. 26th he talked about composer Dick Whiting (father to singers Margaret and Barbara) and American standards. Aug. 27th is about radio solving the problems of teenagers; Aug. 29th is a potpourri including a swipe at Chicago Tribune editor R.R. McCormick (the paper owned WGN), who was quite likely on the other side of the political spectrum than Crosby; Aug. 30th on a programming idea from independent and iconoclastic WNEW and breakfast two-some shows in particular. Enlarge the text with a click.

Watch For Walt

Smiling pocket watches are about to open and close in time to the music in The Clock Store. But there’s an inside joke here.



One watch cover is engraved W.E.D. and another H.G. The first would be for none other than Walter Elias Disney, and the second for Hardie Gramatky, a young background artist at the studio.



Music and dancing. Oh, and two clocks fight. Not much else in this 1931 cartoon.

Makeshift Stone Age Gun

Dinosaur Dan, the first Texas Bad Man, runs out of bullets. No matter. He uses his finger to fire at the posse chasing him.



It’s not exactly one of Tex Avery’s most stellar gags.

The First Bad Man was released by MGM in 1955, well after Tex’s unit was shut down by the studio. Walt Clinton, Ray Patterson, Mike Lah and Grant Simmons are the credited animators, while future Flintstones designer Ed Benedict came up with the model for these characters.

Good Night, Joanie

Jack Benny had a little message at the end of his broadcasts when he was out of Los Angeles in the late ‘30s-early ’40s.

“Good night, Joanie,” he would say.

It was a private recognition of his little daughter Joan, listening back home before being put to bed.

Little Joanie passed away last Thursday, a week before her 87th birthday. She and her father both succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

Joan grew up in the spotlight, with movie magazines running feature stories about the Benny family when she was a child. Her first wedding drew huge press attention, mainly because her father spent and spent and spent some more on it, in contrast to his radio character. She stood in for her mother in the end days of the radio episodes, and even appeared on the radio and TV shows. No doubt fans are rushing to video sharing sites, re-watching her and her dad on Password in the early ‘60s.

She is probably best known as what they used to call an “authoress” by taking her father’s memoires, adding her own memories, and compiling “Sunday Nights at Seven.” She remarked that she didn’t think it would be popular because she had nothing bad to say about her father. But she loved him very much, and so did fans, who snapped up copies as soon as they came out.

Jack Benny died December 26, 1974. Joan, naturally, was one from whom reporters at the time wanted to hear. She was featured in a story from the Philadelphia Inquirer of January 14, 1975 that was syndicated across the U.S.

My thanks to Bill Cairns for use of the photo of father and daughter.

Jack Benny's Daughter, Joan, Recalls Life With Dad
By ELAINE TAIT
Knight Newspapers Writer
PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—"Daddy had the greatest enthusiasm about everything. We used to laugh at him. He would say something like 'this is the greatest glass of water I have ever had in my life' and mean it."
Joan Benny Blumofe smiles a lot when she talks about her father, the late Jack Benny. But there are times when tears well up suddenly in those lovely, expressive eyes.
Joan was in town this past week to tape a Benny tribute for a Jan. 24 Mike Douglas show. She was adopted by Benny and his wife when the comedian was 40 and she was an infant. Despite the age difference, she and her father were very close, she says.
Both were baseball fans and they haunted the stadium where the Hollywood Stars played. They shared an enthusiasm for classical music, something that in the last 20 years of Benny's life, became more important than his comedy work according to Joan.
Despite his reputation as a comedian, Benny wasn't a funny father, Joan says. "He would tell us jokes he had heard at the club then explain why a certain story was funny even though you already knew why."
As an example of this "unfunny" characteristic Joan recounted the time she told her father a story she thought was funny. She got to the punch line and drew a blank look from Benny. "I said 'that's the story Daddy,' and he said 'oh'," Joan recalls.
"So I said, 'let me try again.' Again, nothing. Two hours later we were talking about something else, he said 'That was a great story.' And he then explained to me why it was funny.
"I wish I could be more like him," Joan says. "He had no guile. No ulterior motives. Mother was the stronger person. She would tell him to look out for someone she suspected was trying to use him and Daddy would listen. But he was never convinced.
"Daddy couldn't care less about clothing. Mother saw to it he was dressed properly. He might wear purple socks if Mother didn't supervise. He didn't understand status dressing like Gucci shoes."
Like father like daughter.

Joan, who is 40 but looks younger, says she dresses in jeans and wears virtually no makeup. For the Douglas show, she wore a denim pantsuit that de-emphasized her petite, feminine prettiness.
Joan, who was slightly nervous about doing the Douglas show, (she left show business to raise a family of four), says her father was always nervous.
"Really talented people always are," she says. "He worried about everything as far as his profession was concerned but I thought he hid it well."
Benny doted on his first grandson, Michael, Joan's son. He took the boy everywhere, to Expo in Montreal and to one of the early space launchings.
"He was always recognized. I think he was unhappy if he wasn't. He and Bob Hope once compared vacations which each other had taken to get away for some peace and quiet. When he wasn't recognized in two days he came home," Joan says. "He hated it. Bob said he had the same experience.
“He was a great visitor, popping in on friends. He loved to walk. That's not unusual anywhere but in Hollywood. I drive to the corner to mail a letter.
"He was a pushover as a father," Joan says, and her eyes begin to mist. Records show she isn't exaggerating. When she was married at 21, the man whose comedy reputation had been based on being a skinflint, gave her a wedding that was estimated to cost from $25,000 to 150,000.
Asked to share special memories, she remembers how every week when she was three or four. Benny would take her for an excursion through the Calif. countryside. "He'd always say that the car wouldn't start until I gave him a kiss." There's a pause and a visible effort to regain composure.
"I don't know yet what I can talk about without crying," she apologizes as she rushes off to the Douglas taping.
The explanation is unnecessary. A whole country will know how she feels.

Another Background Gag Mystery

Painting sets for cockroaches probably isn’t very satisfying. Especially if you don’t have the full spectrum of Technicolors because Walt Disney has them exclusively.

That’s the situation that was faced by whoever did the backgrounds for The Lady in Red, a 1935 Friz Freleng cartoon.

There’s a nicely-drawn establishing shot to open the short, and we get a lunch counter to set the mood. The other shots below are pretty lacklustre.



Ah, but we have hidden gags by the guy who loved sticking references to Tubby Millar and his hometown in background objects. They are littered in a bunch of Merrie Melodies and all have the same style of lettering. It was either Griff Jay or Elmer Plummer. My wild guess is Plummer.

First, cereal made in Portis (and packed by Tubby Millar). Note it’s patented in 1934.



Next, Tedd Pierce’s black olives. Perhaps he used them in his martinis.



Not just cereal! Tubby has laying hens, too. In a throwaway gag, a cross-eyed roach keeps looking the wrong way.



Here are two similar backgrounds but different. One has the cake cups manufactured by “The Millar Co.” The other has them by “The Coleman Co.”



Another Coleman reference.



We’ve talked about Coleman before. Don Coleman’s name and address were in a phoney phone book in Buddy the Detective (1934). At the time, we mentioned the Los Angeles City Directory for 1935 listed his occupation as “cartoonist.” It’s the same in 1936 and 1938. In 1933, it says “artist” and he is living at home with his parents.

A detective is what’s needed to solve the mystery of who Coleman was. He can be found in the 1930 City directory, which reveals he was born in Montana and was 19 years old. His name pops up in the “Junior Times” section of the Los Angeles Times of June 12, 1927 where young people sent in cartoons and other art. Besides Coleman, future animators mentioned in the column were Hardie Gramatky (Disney), Manuel Moreno (Lantz), Leo Salkin (Mintz, UPA), Phil De Lara (Warners) and Bob Stokes (Harman-Ising) with a drawing by Cal Howard (various studios).

His picture is in the Loyola High School annual of 1928-29. The Los Angeles Evening Express of February 1, 1930 mentions he is at Los Angeles Junior College as assistant art editor and a later edition reveals he was taking commercial art, designed the college seal and was illustrating a book called “Rum-Tum-Tummy.” A drawing of his of Loyola’s coach appeared in the October 3, 1930 Los Angeles Evening Post-Record.

I have no evidence his cartoonist job was at the Leon Schlesinger studio, but it would seem most probable.

What happened to him? Other than some Times stories involving events at Catholic schools, his name is in the 1940 Census—living in a jail. Why? I haven’t been able to find out, but it’s him without a doubt. He appears twice in the 1920 Census as well, in Lewiston City, Montana, and San Diego, but his first name is given as “Dominick” (side note: Don Pardo’s first name was actually “Dominick”). With that information handy, we find a WW2 Draft Card for Charles Dominic Coleman now residing with his mother at Tuxedo Terrace in Los Angeles, unemployed. He was born October 15, 1910 and died in San Diego on August 16, 1958, having served as a corporal in the U.S. Army during the war.

The song “The Lady in Red” is a Mort Dixon/Allie Wrubel composition that was first peformed in the 1935 feature In Caliente with Dolores Del Rio and is heard in 14 Warners cartoons, the final one being The Windblown Hare (1948). The music when the parrot is being chased is “Comedy Excitement” by J.S. Zamecnik.

Jim Tyer is Cat Happy

Was Jim Tyer on catnip when he animated Cat Happy? There’s a scene where Percy the cat is twisted into all kinds of shapes when he orders Little Roquefort to put the cheese back in the fridge.

But he goes even crazier when Percy sniffs some catnip balls. These are just some of the drawings. Only Tyer would do this.



There are others equally as bizarre but we’ll leave it at that. If you have a video file of the cartoon and you’re a Tyer fan, you must stop-motion this scene.

Fans of the Terry Splash™ will be pleased it shows up about five minutes in. And we get another one of the jerky saxophone marches by Phil Scheib.

Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet

The pairing of director Friz Freleng and writer Mike Maltese worked so many times, including the 1944 cartoon Little Red Riding Rabbit. In one scene, Bugs tricks the wolf (Billy Bletcher) into singing “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet.” The wolf really gets into it in a funny way, and Bugs adds his silent commentary.



There's another knock at the door and one of those sweat takes.



Clueless Red Riding Hood (Bea Benaderet) continues to shout the lines assigned to her from time immemorial. Except she has trouble remembering them. The wolf slams the door on her.



The wolf resumes his enthuiasic singing and bopping up and down. There’s another sweat take when he realises Bugs is gone.



Manny Perez is the credited animator, but Jack Bradbury, Dick Bickenbach and Gerry Chiniquy animated this, too, I suspect. This is a great cartoon from start to finish. The Maltese family told me the “TA HAVE!” shouted by Red during the cartoon came from Mike’s little daughter Brenda, who used to say the same thing.