Old Glory

Leon Schlesinger heeded the call of his country and of the Warner brothers, who decided in 1939 that patriotic films were needed, by rushing the Merrie Melodies short Old Glory through production.

Schlesinger told the United Press the idea for the cartoon was his and it came to him in March. The Hollywood Reporter revealed on June 3rd the film had been shipped to New York.

Boxoffice magazine’s reviewer wasn’t impressed, opining in its edition of June 17, 1939 “Probably the first animated capsule of Americanism handled in a manner which will make exhibitors wonder why they have to pay for it. It’s strictly flag waving and has only bits of fine cartoon work to recommend it.” But in the same issue, Ivan Spear called it “a noteworthy and highly commendable contribution to Hollywood’s still unofficial Americanization campaign,” adding it was “light, but topnotch, entertainment.”

Trade papers at the time stated the release date was going to be July 4th. But you can see an ad to the right for a theatre in Pittsburgh which showed the cartoon starting Friday, June 30th. (At two theatres in Chicago, it opened on July 5th with Eddie Robinson’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy).

Some of the rotoscoping in the cartoon is distracting because the animation could be more fluid, and I’ve always been creeped out by Patrick Henry’s teeth after he pulls out a sword (why is he carrying a sword?) and stares at the camera like he’s half insane.

Chuck Jones directed the cartoon and mimicked shots in live action films where the camera looks down or looks up at the action. (I do not know who the layout artist was).

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Jones made sure he had shadows on clothes and faces in all kinds of scenes.

Jack Warner wrote about his studio’s patriotic two-reelers in a United Press story at the time the cartoon was released. He didn’t mention Old Glory, possibly because it was only released by Warners, not made by the studio. But he said “I feel it is high time that the people in the United States of America think in terms of fostering peace between each other in our own land. We should also aid in the abolishment of all the mercenary and selfish preachings of hate among our citizens.”

You can read Schlesinger's comments about the cartoon in this post.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Fred and the Chevy Spies

Bill Frawley was immortalised as Fred Mertz, thanks to “I Love Lucy” which, I imagine, has never been off television since 1951.

Frawley doesn’t seem to have been able to escape the name “Fred” until he was cast in “My Three Sons” in 1960. In our last Tralfaz Sunday Theatre post, we spotlighted a 1959 industrial film where he and Vivian Vance played Fred and Ethel, though the short was careful not to give them a last name.

The late Daws Butler’s friend Joe Bev has discovered yet another industrial film where Frawley again plays a guy named Fred with no last name. It’s called “What About the ’61 Chevy’s?” and was produced by Jam Handy, a company out of Detroit that had made commercial films for Chevrolet going back into the 1930s.

It’s a lightweight comedy, the kind that seemed very popular in that era. Fred hires an all-female detective agency to spy on Chevrolet and get the lowdown for him on the soon-to-be-available 1961 Chevys. Unfortunately, Vance doesn’t make a cameo appearance (probably to the relief of Frawley) and none of the characters is named Ethel. But there is a “Lucy” connection. The film was directed by Jim Kern, who not only helmed a pile of “Lucy” episodes, but was behind the camera for “My Three Sons” in the mid-‘60s.

The main female detective is played by singer/dancer Barbara Perry, who married animator Art Babbitt. She appeared as Morey Amsterdam’s wife on a couple of episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Dancer Arlene Avril, stage actress Maryanne Cohan, cover girl Toni Hesse and Hartford Agency model Dorothy Dollivar get screen credits as well. The story may be a little odd in places, and the parts demonstrating the cars a little dull, but the score is enjoyable, thanks the work of veteran Jam Handy composer Sam Benavie.

Carmichael

Maybe the oddest character to populate the Jack Benny radio world was one that wasn’t human.

For a while, Jack had a pet polar bear named Carmichael.

The bear showed up on the February 12, 1939 episode. The plot was that someone sent him to Jack as a birthday present. It was never determined who. Not that it really mattered. Carmichael didn’t actually appear on the show all that often and was pretty much gone by 1942. He was basically a vehicle for the writers to give Rochester something to say in his weekly phone calls on the show. When the writers ran out of Carmichael gags, they simply stopped using him.

Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow must have had a thing for animals. They stuck Jack with an ostrich, a camel and a horse. None of them were funny and none lasted long; the camel appeared in one episode (actor Stan Freberg annoyed Jack in rehearsal and was never hired again).

For a time, the radio audience liked the incongruousness of Jack owning a polar bear, so Morrow and Beloin capitalised on it by sticking Carmichael into the plot of the feature film Buck Benny Rides Again. This became fodder for the media, with newspaper reports of brown bears being dyed white, and people actually mailing bears to Jack (evidently some were live). One report said Carmichael was going to be cast in the Benny-Allen picture Love Thy Neighbor (instead of a bear, they got a turkey).

There were other problems, as the weekend newspaper supplement Screen and Radio Weekly revealed in its edition of January 14, 1940.

JACK BENNY: Villain
Of the Bear that Was Not There
By Jon Stokes
MENTION Jack Benny's name on the Paramount lot if you want to see a lot of people scowl. Sure, Jack's a comedian and is supposed to make people laugh. But he doesn't at Paramount. Not when there's even a single talent scout around. To them, the name of Jack Benny spells the name of a well-known headache tablet. The most recent reason is Carmichael.
Carmichael is more than the bear that won such a following on Jack's NBC broadcasts that Paramount decided to put him in a picture, "Buck Benny Rides Again." Carmichael personifies a Benny penchant as pleasant to the talent scout as a rasping file is to the teeth. It's a penchant for making stars out of personalities that just don't happen to exist.
Now, just when or where Mrs. Benny's boy Jack picked up his yen for invisible talent along the highway of life is as much of a mystery as why the bee didn't sting him the first time he picked up a fiddle to try to imitate it. We won't go into Benny's merits as a violinist here. Fred Allen is better qualified to tend to chilling any of Mr. Benny's hot fiddle airs. When it comes to taking the musical sting out of Mr. Benny's bee, Mr. A. is better than a surgeon's lancet. We will, however, go into the case of the invisible Benny door knock.
Anybody, even Rudy Vallee, can make a tree like Charley McCarthy pay dividends, to say nothing of making stars out of flesh-and-blood people. But even Walt Disney can't make millions of people hold their breath waiting to hear a knock on the door. And that's exactly what Mr. Benny did the first time you heard the familiar rap and heard Benny say "Come in." And then the phrase that came to be a veritable household word, "Mr. Benny, I wish to take this opportunity . . ." WELL, that's how Mr. Benny started making stars out of ghosts, and even the late spook expert, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, could never get as many people to give a rap for a rap.
Flushed with his early success, Mr. Benny went on to a 1921 Maxwell. He made it sound so real even the cynical Mr. Allen almost fell for the junk heap and bought it sight unseen. Mr. Benny didn't lose a cent on that Maxwell. Neither did Allen, thanks to providence. But Benny's sponsor did.
Mr. Benny's listeners wanted to see the Maxwell, and said so by the thousands. The sponsor wanted to keep selling them his products, so he had to invest in a 1921 Maxwell, which cost more than you think because 1921 Maxwells are almost as rare as Finns in Moscow.
Which brings us pretty close to the problem that confronted Paramount with Carmichael. We'll get to it as soon as we explain the enigma that is Mr. Benny. We won't say it under oath, because it might be just another Fred Allen canard.
The story is, however, that Jack likes invisible stars because he doesn't have to pay them any money to go on the air. If he doesn't have to pay them, he doesn't have to open his purse. And if he doesn't have to open his purse, there's no chance of his ever losing that moth. It's the granddaddy of all moths, they say. Jack's had it in the purse ever since he caught it in Waukegan at the turn of the century, a very rare specimen. All of which, to Paramount spelled "c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e."
For many weeks before he went to work on "Buck Benny," Mark Sandrich had been listening to the Benny broadcast and soaking in Benny personality and Benny gags. As prominent on the program as Rochester, and provoking almost as many laughs, was a polar bear. Its name was Carmichael. We've got to get that bear in the picture, mused Mr. Sandrich. Next day there was an executive memo on the desk of the top talent scout. "Sign Carmichael for 'Buck Benny Rides Again'." And then the fun started in earnest, with an exchange of memos that must have run something like this:
From talent scout to Mr. Sandrich: "Investigated Carmichael and found he's a bear."
From Sandrich to talent scout: "I know he's a bear. I said sign him."
From talent scout to Mr. Sandrich: "Impossible to sign Carmichael. He doesn't exist."
From Sandrich to talent scout: "Frank Capra found Shangri-La. You find me a Carmichael."
MR. SANDRICH didn't say “or else . . .” But the same day telegraph wires and long-distance phones began getting hot Stanley getting his orders to find Livingstone in darkest Africa showed no more zeal. Paramount was out to find a double, for Carmichael or bust. Specifications: "a 200-pound polar bear, gentle enough not to hurt Mr. Benny, smart enough to appreciate the fact that Rochester wasn't an enemy bear and eat him up.
For five months the search continued. The only reason Paramount didn't send an expedition to the North Pole is that the animal trainer advised against it. The picture would be finished before the bear could be trained. And Buck Benny alive was worth more than a polar bear that looked like Carmichael. He was worth so much, in fact, that Paramount wouldn't trust him to stay on a real horse in the Santa Claus Lane parade on Hollywood Boulevard. He was mounted on a ferocious white animal taken from the window of a wholesale saddle shop in downtown Los Angeles. Resplendent in a silver-mounted saddle and bridle, the animal nevertheless was made of the same stuff as the now famous horse of Troy.
A couple of weeks ago, an ageing and graying Mark Sandrich sat in front of his desk and sadly surveyed the marvelous scenes he could have shot with Carmichael had there been a Carmichael to shoot. He was almost ready to give up the whole business when his secretary, Trudy Wellman, rushed in with the speed of a tropical dawn. "Mr. Sandrich, they've found him," she said.
"Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was what she swears Mr. Sandrich answered.
"No, Carmichael!"
"Carmichael?"
"Yes, Carmichael."
And there, before Mr. Sandrich's unbelieving eyes, a few days later, stood 200 pounds of polar bear doing everything but winking at the script girls and asking for a love scene in a sarong with Lamour. HIS name was Mischa, but not for long in the town where the only handicap to success is a gal's real name. He came from Clinton, Conn., but, naturally, by the way of the South Pole.
The talent scout kept his job, Mr. Sandrich's hair turned back to black and Rochester began to get slightly pale. After all, working with an invisible bear on the radio and working with one you can feel, and one that can feel you, on a movie set, are two different things. So everybody but Rochester was happy at Paramount but still nobody is smiling when you mention the name of Jack Benny.
The day after Carmichael was found, there was a new character introduced by Mr. Benny on his NBC program. Jack bought it for a Thanksgiving turkey and meant to invite all his friends to dinner, until Rochester discovered the bird laid eggs as big as a football and hid its head in the sand. Fans began writing in and asking for the name of the ostrich. Jack named it Trudy, in honor of Trudy Wellman. Yesterday the talent scout received a memo from Mr. Sandrich:
"I'm giving you a head start. Sign Trudy, the ostrich, for Jack Benny's next picture. I know Trudy doesn't exist, but Frank Capra found Shangri-La, so you find Trudy."

The Littlest Giant

More, more, more! I want to see more!

John Sutherland Productions churned out some pretty attractive and imaginative animation/partially-animated short films for industrial customers in the late 1940s and the 1950s. They were big-wheel industrial customers with money to spend on top-quality work. Sutherland was able to wave plenty of cash at artists from MGM, Disney, Warner Bros. and even UPA to get them to make pro-corporate films.

Some have surfaced on line over the years, but every time I peer through old issues of Business Screen Magazine, I realise many of the Sutherland cartoons must be hiding in film cans somewhere.

Sutherland took out full page ads to push his cartoons, usually explaining what awards they won or how widely seen they were. In the publication’s 1957 Review, some ads feature a “Film of the Month.” One that got profiled twice in ads was The Littlest Giant. You can see the design work in the frames below. Fairly average stuff for the mid-1950s. The copy below came from an edition of Business Screen published in 1957.

That it takes a special skill to present economic information in a memorable and highly entertaining manner is demonstrated in "The Littlest Giant," latest National Consumer Finance Association film produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc.

"The Littlest Giant" (13 1/2 minutes; Technicolor: animation) shows how important consumer finance is to the national well-being by pumping more than 3 billion dollars into the country's economic blood stream every year and by making it possible for the consumer to buy goods and services out of future income, thus increasing both the individual and the national standard of living — already the highest the world has ever known.

Designed for distribution to schools and colleges, this film is also scheduled for a highly successful general public audience acceptance via television and motion picture theatres. Additionally, prints will be made available all over the U.S. for community group screenings, civic and service clubs, churches and the like.

"The Littlest Giant" is an excellent example of the way in which economic information can be made concise, understandable and entertaining when experience and professional craftsmanship is applied to the problem. This motion picture, produced by the studio with the greatest number of credits for successful economic education films, is another example of the Sutherland touch.

This film won the National Consumer Finance Association "Chris" award at the Columbus Film Festival.

Business Screen also reviewed the film in its issue of December 15, 1956.

When the Average American Needs Help
A Financial Hand for Mr. Smith
A Lesson in Credit from the National Consumer Finance Assn.
Sponsor: National Consumer Finance Association.
Title: The Littlest Giant, 13½ min., color, produced by John Sutherland Productions, Inc.
This film joins two other motion pictures in the NCFA film program, Every Seventh Family and Who Gets the Credit. Like its forerunners, The Littlest Giant seeks to show the important role of the state- regulated small loan company in our economy.
Little, animated Edgar Q. Smith is shown in the title role of the average consumer, whose mass makes up the most important giant in the land. Smith, like most of us, lives on his fellow man's confidence—credit. His bills come monthly, his house is mortgaged and he buys his car on time. And when he needs cash, down he goes to one of the 9,000 small loan offices and takes out one of the ten million small loans processed every year.
Does he pay a pretty sizeable interest? You best he does. The NCFA explains this by illustrating the cost of making small "retail" loans, as against the cost of making a whop ping big "wholesale" loan to the Big Deal Corp.
And don’t forget, the film says, that if it weren’t for the friendly small loan office on the corner, the loan shark would have easy pickings.
The Littlest Giant tells a complex story, but with animation and an easy continuity it simplifies the basically complicated story of finance, rate strictures and the historical background of the consumer finance company.
Modern Talking Picture Service will distribute the film, as it does other NCFA pictures.

The February 1956 directory in Business Screen lists both George Gordon and Carl Urbano as its animation directors; both had been at MGM in the early ‘40s. The company made both animated and live action films (and some with elements of both). It lists as recent productions: Behind Your Telephone Bill (AT&T), The Dragon Slayer, Spray’s the Thing (DuPont, both animated), Meet Mrs. Swenson (GE; live action), The Conservation Story (Richfield Oil, some animation), Tops in Transmission (GM), The Rising Tide (Union Carbide), Beauty with Brains (GE), The Living Circle (United Fruit, part animation), Bananas? Si, Senor (United Fruit, animated), Working Dollars (NY Stock Exchange, animated), along with spots for Lucky Strike, Delsey Tissue, Kool-Shake, Zerone-Zerex, Ajax and Meadowgold Ice Cream.

Not mentioned in the list is one of the studio’s finest animated shorts released that year, Destination Earth, with designs by Tom Oreb, and the live action Voice Beneath the Sea and Egypt Reborn. As you can see, the studio was extremely busy with some wealthy corporate clients.

When I wrote this post about two years ago I said "Perhaps The Littlest Giant will surface yet. It was released on VHS with other Sutherland shorts." I now understand it is on a blu-ray set put out by Steve Stanchfield and his fine little company and available through Amazon. I have not seen it, but you should. Whatever you may think of the corporate propaganda contained in them, the Sutherland animated films are worth being sought out.

The Funny Phoney MP

At one time, humour on national Canadian TV boiled down to The King of Kensington and the occasional Wayne and Shuster special.

On national Canadian radio, it boiled down to one thing: The Royal Canadian Air Farce, which began on the CBC in 1973. It was such a success on radio that a TV version was put together a number of years later.

Canada is a country of regions. Toronto is not Vancouver and neither of them are Calgary or Halifax. They all have distinct cultures. About the only thing national that’s able to be satirised is either the CBC or federal politics. So the Air Farce had people impersonating various prime ministers and other political figures in Ottawa.

One member of the troupe invented his own.

Dave Broadfoot was, unlike the rest of the Air Farce troupe, from the West Coast, born in North Vancouver. Being Canadian, he did parodied some national stereotypes—a hockey player, a Mountie and a federal politician. And like Vancouver stage actors Fletcher Markle, Paul Kligman and Peg Dixon, and radio fixture Alan Young, Broadfoot decided to further his career by moving to Toronto. By December 1952, he was doing what amounted to a stand-up routine on CBLT’s Big Revue (the Globe and Mail’s Alex Barris compared him to Will Shriner). His career was slightly interrupted when he went overseas to entertain troops during the Korean War.

Let’s fast-forward to 1977. This feature story appeared July 6th in the Ottawa Journal and gives you a bit of an idea of Broadfoot’s head space.

MP for Kicking Horse Pass an idealist
By Peter Robb
Special to the Journal
Would you believe comedian Dave Broadfoot has three sisters who are missionaries? Or that he has worked in the St. Vincent de Paul prison north of Montreal doing volunteer work for the inmates?
To most of us Broadfoot is the creator of the characters Corporal Renfrew of the Mounties and the member of parliament for the riding of Kicking Horse Pass. However, there is another side to the man—one that is intensely idealistic.
In an interview this week after his Camp Fortune performance, Broadfoot discussed his career, his thoughts on the business he is in and the country he lives in. His career has spanned 25 years of hard work, almost all of it in Canada.
Broadfoot started his career in Vancouver in the late 1940s.

"I started working amateur theatre in North Vancouver and I worked three groups simultaneously. Having just come out of the merchant marine I felt I had to make up for lost time."
But straight drama frustrated him. Broadfoot wanted to do comedy and he began to develop an act.
“In those days everybody had an act. It was the only way to do comedy. Nowadays no one does things that way, they talk about their wives or their old neighbourhood, but no one has an act worked out. Not many modern comedians can come out and relate directly to an audience, it is just not the way things are done.”
Strongly influenced by the last gasps of vaudeville, Broadfoot developed a stand-up comedy routine based on the characters he saw around him. He did office parties and banquets for a couple of years to polish his act and then he made the big move to Toronto. He began his television and radio career in 1952. Out of his first appearance on television came his most famous character, MP for Kicking Horse Pass.
"I had been watching the Republican convention of 1952 and I was amazed by the rhetoric of the whole event. Out of that came a prototype of the member for Kicking Horse Pass. But it needed a Canadian flavor, so I patterned him after E.C. Manning, who was then the premier for Alberta. He had that evangelical style of speaking that made him easy to caricature. All I had to do then was give the character a riding. Mavor Moore suggested the Kicking Horse Pass and that stuck."
Broadfoot's many years in the business has given him strong views on his fellow performers.
"There are many performers that just sit back and collect their money. I do not believe in that, for example I still do benefit shows while many performers do not.
"For a performer to be successful he has to possess intellectual curiosity. So many performers, even the biggest, lack that. There is just nothing to them.
"That is why I enjoy working with Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson and the rest of the Air Farce cast. There we are all writers as well as comedians and it is so stimulating to work with creative people like these."
Broadfoot is also moved by injustices that he sees around him. His latest act contains references to Anita Bryant and her crusade against homosexuals. He sees this as hypocritical.
"The self-righteousness that these people come on with is, well, let's just say that I think it is vengeful for the wrong reasons.
"I worked at the St. Vincent de Paul prison near Montreal when I was working a lot in Montreal, doing comedy workshops and the like for the prisoners, and how anyone could wish that anyone, including homosexuals, could be locked up in any prison is horrendous."
Finally he commented on Canada and why he has never left.
"I am intense about Canada. I am a nationalist one that firmly believes that you have to look after your home before you can help the rest of the world. "I have worked in the U.S. and in Great Britain and I have never really felt comfortable. The homesickness that I feel for Canada is absolutely extraordinary.
"That is not to say that I am pleased with the Canadian situation, especially in English Canada. English Canadians watch American television, listen to American music and retire to Florida to escape Quebec and they wonder why our country is in sad shape. I think that it is sad."

Broadfoot was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1983. He was 90 when he died on November 1, 2016. Location unknown. Somewhere in Canada would be the only appropriate spot.

Con-Skunk or Not

Doctor Primrose Skunk enters the Hugh Harman cartoon The Little Mole (1941) with a little introductory song, which seems based on “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:

I’m Doctor Primrose Skunk
With a line of junk
At a trade, you’ll always find me.

His suitcase pops open to create a carnival-like prize-wheel contraption. The wheel lands on a pair of glasses he gives to the title character, surreptitiously extricating a coin, and wanders away behind an overlay of flowers singing:

I get my pay
And I’m on my way
And a sucker is left behind me.

The glasses allow the little mole to actually see things clearly. So how is it “junk”? And how is the mole a “sucker”? Maybe it’s because, at the end, he can no longer see things properly and he’s happy in his self-created world caused by poor vision. Or maybe it’s because Dr. Skunk is wearing a long coat and a top hat, and carries a cane, and that’s how cartoon con-men are dressed.

Harman and his Disneyphile artists fill the screen with little animals and insects, and fairybook flowers and toadstools. Only Harman is credited.

Dr. Skunk is played by Mel Blanc. The other voice actors are anyone’s guess.

Butt, Here Comes Popeye

Popeye’s known for using his fists a lot after chowing down on spinach, but in You Got To Be a Football Hero (1935), he uses his butt to help score the winning touchdown.

Here’s a butt swish with action lines.



Wham!



A good view of it.



Wham again!



The best gag in the cartoon is cheerleader Olive Oyl spelling out Bluto’s name with her body.

Willard Bowsky and George Germanetti get the animation credits.

The Rooster, I SAY, the Rooster is Crowin'

The ink and paint department at the Warner Bros. studio gets plenty of work to do in this scene in The Foghorn Leghorn (1948).

Foggy pretends the sun has risen in an attempt to fool Henery Hawk. Look at the dry brush and multiples (the drawings are animated on twos).



Manny Gould does some good work in this short, including this scene. John Carey, Phil De Lara, Chuck McKimson and Pete Burness also animated this cartoon for director Bob McKimson.

We Interrupt This Blacksmith

The Village Smithy must have been a real unexpected treat for cartoon-lovers of 1936. Instead of the cartoon tootling along on its own, an off-screen narrator interferes with, and reacts to, what’s happening on the screen. It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, hadn’t been done before.

The narrator recites the familiar Wordsworth poem (with a few of his own touches) focusing on the blacksmith at work. But then he completely changes direction. “Now,” he says, “our hero, Porky Pig.” The camera pans to the left, where we find Porky, shaking his hands as if he was a newly-victorious champ.



The narrator carries on with a non-poetic explanation. “Let’s see. We have the blacksmith.” The camera pans back to the smithy, who gives his opinion of the situation to the audience.



“Now, boys,” he says the two-some on screen, “we need a horse.” They lamely search for one in the scene.



Carl Stalling plays von Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture. “Listen boys! Here comes one, now!” says the narrator. A camel wanders into view. The narrator apologises for the wrong animal and an off-screen hook yanks him out of the cartoon.



This sort of humour is light-years away from any Buddy or Beans cartoon, let alone the cutesy-ootsy world of Disney and Harman-Ising. Only Tex Avery would try to make something like this.

If I recall, story units hadn’t been set up so the whole story department—Bugs Hardaway, Cal Howard, Tedd Pierce (who plays the blacksmith) and whoever else was around then—pitched in with ideas, though this has Avery written all over it. Cecil Surry and Sid Sutherland receive the animation credits, though it’s fairly certain Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Virgil Ross animated on it as well.

Among the approriate tunes Stalling employs are “Horsey Keep Your Tail Up” (Bert Kaplan and Walter Hirsch) and “My Pony Boy” (Bobby Heath and Charley O’Donnell).

Jack Benny Goes to a 7-11

What was it like hanging around Jack Benny?

Let’s find out in this column from the Orlando Sentinel of February 4, 1966. Jack was in town for another one of his concert stops. I wonder if Jack went inside the grocery store or stayed in the car.

My Weekend With Jack Benny
By HOCKER DOENGES
Why do I think Jack Benny is a good guy?
I guess because he's one of us—he's a gentleman and a scholar and a story teller.
He arrived on Sunday at 10 p.m. Beth and George Johnson and Ann and Bob Crane and Bob Doenges and I met him—also more important, Mayor Robert Carr and Helen Ryan.
We took him to the Cherry Plaza, and all of a sudden Jack Benny said, "I need something to eat before I go to bed." He had flown from Los Angeles and we never thought of food. Have you ever tried to find food at 10:30 on a Sunday night? For a celebrity? No food.
We found a 7-11 open and bought a baloney Poor Boy and a regular quart of milk. We went to the Johnsons, doctored up the Poor Boy with cheese and toasted it. He loved it. The milk was wrong—he only drinks skim milk.
FINALLY WE got through all of this and Jack put up his feet and said, "I would like to have a cigar and I'm out of them."
No husband could produce a cigar. He couldn't have been nicer—said he'd smoked his quota on the way out so really shouldn't have one. Who else would have acted like this to save our feelings?
HE MUST use a pen a day, he never turns any one down. After the concert he signed at least 250 autographs. I thought we would never get him to the party.
He called his Mary every day in Palm Springs, where she was with friends playing golf and gin rummy. He doesn't own a Maxwell and never has. He doesn't have a Rochester, but he has Irving.
IRVING IS his manager and although he scared me at first he does a terrific job and I miss him, too. Jack looks much younger than 39 and asks no quarter from any one. He calls his wife every day and finds out her golf score or whether she has won or lost at gin rummy. He even sang "Happy Birthday" to a 20th birthday gal at the Skyline when they brought in her birthday cake. She almost fainted!
HIS STORIES and conversation are terrific. He was in Berlin four days after the armistice of World War II. He was doing a show over there and after the armistice he couldn't find any of our boys to play for, so he followed them into Berlin.
He has an orange grove and a ranch in California. We gave him some lousy weather, but he didn't complain, didn't even make a snide remark about the weather here or California. I would have.
HELEN RYAN started working to get Jack Benny here 21 years ago, and finally we had him and he LIKES us. His audience at the benefit he liked—he liked the party afterwards—it was not the cost plush party, but it didn't cost $5,000 or $10,000—every penny HE made for us went directly to the Symphony deficit and Jack Benny likes that. He doesn't want to donate his time and have a lot spent on the party afterwards.
Jack remarked several times that our conductor, Henry Mazer, was one of the easiest to work with. He liked us and we loved him.
I still think Jack Benny is a great guy!
Signed His Den Mother for Three Days, Harriet (Hocker) Doenges

The paper ran a full page about Jack after his death in 1974. There were a number of wire service stories, one dealing with pancreatic cancer, another with reaction from Jack's many celebrity friends, including future president Ronald Reagan. The Sentinel reporter who covered the concert looked back.

Jack's Quips Remembered By Reporter
By SUMNER RAND
Sentinel Star Staff
When Jack Benny visited Orlando just under nine years ago to take part in a benefit concert for the Florida Symphony Orchestra (FSO), he hit some of the coldest weather that winter.
"I just came from six nights in Canada," he joked. "It was almost as cold as Miami."
THE COMEDIAN, who over the years raised more than $5 million for symphony orchestras throughout the country, impressed the Orlandoans he met, including this reporter who met him briefly at a press conference, with his informality, lack of pretense and free and easy manner.
He appeared at a press conference held in what was then called the Cherry Plaza Hotel in a dark gray sports jacket, flannel slacks, black loafers, blue ascot and scarlet handkerchief with a huge cigar.
Asked if the cold weather might affect his violin playing, he joked, "I play exactly the same whether it's hot or cold. In fact, that's how I play, hot and cold."
He said the idea of coming to Orlando to help the Florida symphony reduce its deficit came from conductor Alfred Wallenstein who had been a guest conductor of the local symphony a couple of seasons before Benny's appearance.
"He conducted my first four concerts. The other conductors weren't afraid to have me after that," Benny quipped.
He described the act he put on for orchestra benefits as follows: "I play the world's greatest violinist. Actually, I have no business to be within eight blocks of a concert hall."
His playing and his quips before a capacity audience in Orlando Municipal Auditorium that night Jan. 27, 1966, though, helped raise $23,200 net profit for the Florida Symphony.

Hocker Doenges was right. Jack Benny was a great guy.