How Dry He Is

Andy Panda tries catching a woodpecker by putting salt on his tail in Knock Knock (1940) but is thwarted by the crafty-but-insane bird several times until the end of the cartoon.

In this scene on the roof of family home, Andy almost has him until the woodpecker unexpectedly swirls around with a convenient, filled stein.



Evidently there are people who put salt in beer. Whether they blow the subsequently-created foam at someone, I doubt. Unless they are a woodpecker.



Cut to the next scene where Woody drinks the beer, shows some effect (they loved cross-eyed characters at Lantz back then), then tosses the empty stein away.



Woody jumps out of the scene with his usual laugh, though his mouth doesn’t open.

You likely know this was Woody’s debut and the woodpecker was played by Mel Blanc, who voiced everyone in this cartoon except Andy (who is Sara Berner).

Alex Lovy and his brother-in-law Frank Tipper are the credited “artists” with the story credit going to Bugs Hardaway and Lowell Elliot. An uncredited Edgar Kiechle is responsible for the great background paintings. Frank Marsales scored “How Dry I Am” behind the beer-drinking scene.

Today's Inside Gag

Inside gags found their way into Friz Freleng shorts from the mid-‘40s to the mid-‘50s when Paul Julian was responsible for background art. But there’s one a little before then in Freleng’s The Wacky Worm (1941).

At one point the title character, confronting a hungry crow in a junk yard, is next to an empty can for Binder Brand Peaches.



Henry Binder was the studio manager. He was born in 1906 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and worked as a publicist for Mack Sennett at one time. Leon Schlesinger hired him in 1933 when setting up a cartoon studio to replace Harman-Ising. Binder went into the navy during the war and after coming out, found Schlesinger had been bought out by Warner Bros. He soon joined Schlesinger's brother-in-law Ray Katz at Screen Gems until Columbia shut down its cartoon operations in late 1946. The 1950 census lists Binder as an “artist.” He never married and died in Los Angeles in 1975, age 68.

At this point, Len Kester was responsible for Freleng's background paintings.

Behind The Feud

“Fred Allen Forecasts 1937” reads a yellowed newspaper clipping of undermined origin. One of Fred’s prognostications simply states “Jack Benny will win the World-Telegram Radio Editors’ Poll.”

The gag here is Jack won the poll every year, so it’s not much of a prediction. (By the way, Allen guessed correctly).

Allen did not predict something else about Benny—that the two of them would begin a radio feud that pretty much lasted his entire life. The reason is simple—it had only sort of started.

The crack by Allen that set it off happened on December 30, 1936. When this column came out, Jack hadn’t responded and Allen hadn’t picked up on it.

The feud supposedly ended on March 1937, when the two made up on Benny’s show. But, as a reporter for the Boston Post editorialised, it was really too good to end permanently. To me, it got better with time. Let’s face it: does “You Wednesday night hawk” strike you as funny, let alone much of an insult? The original feud seems to have been full of weak name-calling and weird, one-shot characters that Allen invented to back up his insults. But audiences loved it.

We’ve reprinted two feature stories from the Post about the feud. The one below was the first in the series, from the March 21, 1937 edition. It comes from a picture taken of a scrapbook in the Allen archives in the Boston library. The newsprint is glue-stained, shot at an angle, with copy and photos in the page gutter (making the pictures unusuable). In fact, I am guessing at the words in one paragraph as they are out of focus and in the gutter.

Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud
Gathered, by intrepid reporter and cameraman, in the jungles of Manhattan, the Boston Sunday Post presents today the first installment of a series on the wordiest embroglio of modern days, the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen radio feud.
At jeopardy of life and limb, and irreparable damage to their laugh muscles, these Post men have bearded the dualists in their retreats among the cliffs of New York and have garnered from them the “inside” facts of the inception and progress of the mock-controversy based on Jack Benny’s ability to play “The Bee” on his violin.
Read it exclusively in the Boston Sunday Post, if you think you can stand it.

By JOHN F. COGGSWELL
“Why, you bow-legged musical mistake, are you reachin’ for a violin again? Well, as I live and breathe and tear my silver locks, if you load that lethal machine with ‘The Bee’ and point it toward me, I’ll have you arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Well, you listen to me, you Wednesday night hawk! Another crack like that and Town Hall will be looking for a new janitor.”
“Why, you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon, you lay a hand on me and...”
Jack “Buck” Benny, the Waukegan wrangler, suddenly swung a hay-maker from the floor straight for the lean jaw of Fred “Boo” Allen, the Boston word-tosser.
A flash of light stabbed through the murk of the little room back stage in Studio 8-J of the National Broadcasting Company’s palatial pile of architecture, over in New York.
“Boys, that was swell! No, Jack, you......”
But feminine voices took command of the instruction giving.
“You boys sure you aren’t getting a little too realistic in this thing?” Mary Livingstone cautioned. “Besides, you used some of that stuff before, in your great reconciliation meeting Sunday night.”
“Yeah, and besides,” broke in Portland Hoffa, “if you used less time in chatter and more time in picture taking, we might get home and to bed some time tonight.”
“Well, you know, girls, we have to sort of get-in-the-spirit-of-the thing,” protested Jack.
Radio fans, don’t be looking for me for any odds that the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, that has been delighting millions ever since the latter made disparaging remarks about Jack’s violin playing, especially his musical preparation and ability to play Schubert’s “The Bee,” is all washed up, finished, forgotten and forgiven.
Just Loves Feuding

If you glued your ear to you loud speaker, last Wednesday evening, at 9 o’clock, you found of that that gun-totin’, feuding wildcat Fred Allen had no more than signed a peace treaty with Jack Benny, than he swing his artillery around in another direction and started a war with the Carvers, dwelling in their shack down the valley, just in nice gun range.
Why, that guy Allen just loves feudin’, especially when it’s all in fun. And just before he shook hands good-by and told me he was leaving for Hollywood tomorrow, Jack Benny observed...
But that comes later in the story. Did you notice, too, another little episode occurred Wednesday night? It was just after Portland had observed that it was rather stupid of Jack Benny to have sent Fred a “Happy Birthday” telegram, when it wasn’t Fred’s birthday at all. And Fred cracked:
“It isn’t the stupidity that makes me love him, it’s the sentiment.”
Now, I leave it to you, in spite of all this Jackie-Wackie, Freddie-Weddie, Palsey-Walsey stuff, that has been bedrivelling the airlanes, ever since Fred and Jack went out in the alley last Sunday night to fight it out to the death and came back scatheless, leaving out Jack’s dotted eye, and breathing undying friendship, does that wise crack sound like love?
Besides, of all the millions who laughed and shrieked and gurgled over this feud, which didn’t last quite so long as the one during which the Hatfields and the McCoys were tossing lead from West Virginia into Kentucky and vice versa, but had a lot more listener-inners, none enjoyed this mock embroglio more than Jack Benny and Fred Allen, themselves, did.
Then there’s the angle of whether or not the listening public is going to stand for such and abrupt ending to an aerial face that has given it so many genuine belly laughs as this one.
It Wrote Itself
For this was “tops” comedy at every angle. The boys and their companies had a hard time to keep from guffawing into the microphone, so high was their glee. The sponsors loved it; the whole thing cost them not a single cent for the extra talent or the like.
And the public? Why, man, the public ate it up. Last Monday a concern which specializes in that sort of thing made a country-wide survey, calling a large number of homes by telephone in every city and most of the villages in the nation. That survey showed that of all the radio fans called, of those who had their radios going from seven to seven-thirty last Sunday night, 95.5% were listening to the Jack Benny programme.
“Small credit to us,” Jack insisted to me. “The whole thing was a natural; if we couldn’t steal the air show with it, we’d better quit.”
“Yeah, but what about you and Allen taking a little credit for shaping up a natural,” I asked.
“Huh, we didn’t shape it up; the darn thing wrote itself from start to finish,” he insisted. “All we did was keep it going.”
Well, it went, all right. A couple of weeks ago the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had just finished playing a number that all but brought to its feet an audience composed of the elite of the big-river metropolis. The applause rose, flooded the huge auditorium as the gathering clapped and roared its approval.
Such an ovation demanded an encore. After repeated bows the maestro turned to the players, waved his baton. From the instruments there flowed forth a swiftly-moving drone of melody. A titter of delight ran over the listeners. Soon it swelled to a roar of laughter that shook the rafters, all but drowned the music. It was a nonplussed leader who turned his face to his convulsed audience at the end of the short number.

Huh, he had just made a mistake; that was all. He should never have played “The Bee” before an audience that knew its Jack Benny and Fred Allen just as well as it knew its Schubert. But I’m told that even that fiasco was all right with a certain musical house; they have republished “The Bee” several times since Fred Allen made his crack about Jack not being able to play the piece on his fiddle.
A pair of “swell guys”—I use the term advisedly; ask any hold-over from the vaudeville days, such as these two old friends are, about anybody and if he assets that fellow is a swell guy, that’s praise—this Jack Benny and Fred Allen.
There they were, the two of them, at 1 a. m. last Thursday, in the little room backstage of Studio 8-H, where this installment of The Famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud began.
Jack was in pretty good physical shape. Aside from the fact that he had been continuously busy for over 14 hours, working with his script writers, interviewing insistent talent, and attending to a thousand and one little things that he must accomplish before trekking back to Hollywood. If you think putting on a radio show is a soft way of earning a living just follow a couple of putters-onners for a few days as Frank Jason and I have been doing; honestly, we were run ragged.
Yet Jack was fairly bright and chipper, that early morning. But Fred Allen was dying on his feet. His hands were shaking; lines of fatigue were etched into his rugged, good-natured pan.
He had been up early Wednesday morning, laboring long putting finishing touches to the script—you know, he writes all his stuff, himself—timing the show, cutting, revising. At a few minutes before 2, he came hightailing it into the studio for rehearsal, his iron hat on the back of his head.
During three hours of rehearsal, that hat never left his head. Oh, it changed position; it did, you know. He’s one of those fellows who wears a hat all over his head; on the back of it, on either side, tilted over his eyes. “Does anything ever knock that derby off your head,” I asked him during a lull in the rehearsal, when he came down to sit with us a few minutes.
Right there, I got an illustration of the difference between these two head-liners of radio comedy. Benny would have laughed that one off, gone right on with serious stuff.
Jack Really Plays
But not Fred Allen. Always ready to “ad-lib” a wise crack when on the air, he’s just as ready to display his wit in conversation. The hat slid to the back of his head, his voice assumed the nasal twang so familiar.
“Man, I wouldn’t take that hat off to take up a collection to get Jack Benny not to play the ‘Bee,’” he cracked.
Well, anyway, he rehearsed three hours, rushed out and put in more time than that revising and cutting, came back and put on his regular full hour’s performance at 10, then showed up for another hour at midnight for the repeat programme that goes to the Pacific coast.
By 1 o’clock, he had been working continuously at hard, concentrated labor for nearly 20 hours. Yet he was willing to spend another hour in that stuffy little room, the sweat streaming down his forehead, and down Jack Benny’s, too, going through all sorts of stunts for a couple of newspapermen from the Boston Post.
We did everything but ask these two radio top-notchers to stand on their heads and you’d have thought we were movie directors or something, the way they caught the ideas and proceeded to give us something a little more than we asked for.
Swell guys! You bet! And Jack Benny played the fiddle for us. What do you think of that? I’m not going to try to name the piece; it wasn’t “The Bee” and it wasn’t “Love in Bloom,” which piece really started the feudin’, but, anyway, noises did come out of the instrument and they sounded like music to me, but my music teacher always thought that I must have been dropped on my head as a child.
The way it came about that we got this sample of Jack’s fiddling was that we’d asked one of the orchestra players to stick around for a while so that we could take a picture of his violin being played by the comedian. Of course, Jack Benny can’t carry a fiddle around with him all the time, not even in these parlous times when he’s called upon constantly to defend his prowess.
Jack picked up the loaned instrument, while its owner watched it with jealous eye, to see that nothing untoward happened to it. I gathered the impression that he, the professional violinist, didn’t believe that Benny should be trusted too far with any fiddle. Anyway, Jack tucked the proper end of the instrument under his chin and drew the bow across the strings making the aforesaid sounds.
“I’ll bet even money you never had as good a fiddle as that one to commit musical assault with,” drawled Fred Allen. “And I’ll give odds that fiddle was never handled by a lousier fiddler.”
“Oh, yeah!” roared Jack. “I’ll have you understand I’ve got a mighty good violin.”
Which struck me as good comedy missed during the feud. Anyway, no foolin’, I’ll lay a bet myself that if Jack Benny were given the choice of being, say, the 10th or 20th best violinist in the country, which he isn’t or of being radio’s top-notch, A-1, champ comedian, which he is, if national polls and awards count for anything, he’d choose the fiddling career.
If you get to talking confidentially which him on violining, he may pull a wallet from his back pocket and extract from it a yellowing newspaper clipping. It is comment upon a vaudeville act put on by Jack Benny, some 16 years ago, written by a critic in a small Mid-West city.
“What we would like from Benny,” the clipping reads, “is more violin and less chatter.”
“Why didn’t you hit Fred Allen between the eyes when that feud was on?” I asked Jack.
“Well, he answered, “if you get to thinking it over carefully, you’d get the idea that he didn’t exactly say that my playing was good, but he leaves no doubt of his opinion about my chatter.”
But his chatter is good enough now, eh? Anyway, we’d better start getting this feud to broiling, if we’re to get any real balling into this installment.
Really, it was “Love in Bloom” and not “The Bee” that set the air lanes for the great Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, though the latter did start the bullets to singing through the atmosphere.
Those who were there, that afternoon at a rehearsal in an NBC studio, will never forget that milestone in radio comedy. When I asked Don Wilson, the big, good-natured announcer who carols “Strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon and lime” so melodiously every Sunday night, about that, his whole frame shook, his triple chin jogged up and down violently for minutes before he could reply.
He’s a Riot
Here’s the picture. The first part of the rehearsal is over. At front stage stands Jack Benny, his treasured violin tucked under his chin, the bow just about to sweep over the strings. The champ comedian is to show the world that he can be as artistic as he is funny. Mary Livingstone tips a wink to Don Wilson.
The orchestra strikes up the first few chords of “Love in Bloom,” and fades out. The waiting bow sweeps. A wail of music sweeps over the studio. The first few bars and the other members of the company are tittering, a few more mouths are wide open with guffaws. Jack hits a sour note and quite, to find his small audience doubled up in mirth.
“It’s terrific, Jack!” shouts a control man, bursting out of the control room.
“It’ll lay them in the aisles,” roars the production man as he slaps Jack on the back.
“We’ll put it in the show permanently,” decrees the sponsor’s representative, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“You’re breaking my heart,” Benny mourns. “Here I thought I was to blossom out as a virtuosos and what am I? Just another musical joke.”
“Joke, thunder,” yells Don Wilson with just as much enthusiasm as he puts into a Jello plug. “Man, you and that fiddle ain’t no joke; you’re a riot.”
And blest if the bit wasn’t a riot when it went out over the air. Jack Benny’s attempt to play “Love in Bloom” made radio, comedy history. All America listened and laughed.

There’s the background. Now, let’s allow the villain of the piece to come buzzing into the plot, all set to sting a feud into action, to fill the air with verbal bullets, to lay a man-sized portion of the populace in the aisles. Enter “The Bee,” herded by a 10-year-old kid, Stuart Kanin, of Edgemere, Long Island.
Stuart brought the insect in, concealed in a violin case, on the evening of Dec. 20, 1936 [sic], when Fred Allen had called a number of juvenile performers into his Town Hall show. A new year about to dawn; youth, emblematic of the drawing year. See?
Stuart Kanin was there to show what a 10-year-old could do with a fiddle. He played Schubert’s “The Bee” and played it darn well, got a lot of applause.
They Just Ad-Libbed
What followed the dying down of the applause isn’t to be found in the script of the show that night. It wasn’t written in; Fred Allen ad libbed it on the spur of the moment; sent it wafting out over the air waves, just as old Devil Anse Hatfield sent the first bullet whining across the clearing after the McCoys had shot down one of his hogs in cold blood. And with just as immediate results.
“That was fine, Stuart,” twanged Fred Allen. “Jack Benny and his ‘Love in Bloom.’ Phooey! He ought to be ashamed of himself after hearing you play ‘The Bee’.”
Those may not be Fred’s exact words—he can’t say for sure, himself—but they convey the intended sentiment.
Listening in on Jack Benny, the following Sunday night you’d never have known, until the programme was over, that he had heard Fred Allen’s ad libbed wise crack. The orchestra had played its last number, “Buck” Benny had finished the evening’s gallop and in the “closing tag” wished his guest and radio audience a Happy New Year. For the act that set a feud to broiling let’s follow the words of the original script, which is before me as I write:
Jack—Oh, Mary!
Mary—Yes.
Jack—Take a wire to Fred Allen.
Mary—Okay.
Jack—Dear Fred: I am not ashamed of myself. When I was 10 years old I could play “Flight of the Bumble Bee on my violin too. Aegh! signed Jack Benny.
Mary—This mystery will also be continued next week.
Mary spoke prophecy that night all right. And many weeks! There was the beginning of the feud—a wise crack and a casual comeback. But the rest of it, with the radio audience, the stuff that has set all the nation shaking with laughter, was built up word for word, phrase by phrase by these two old time, warm friends, with much wringing of eyebrows and rearranging of scripts.
Maybe the reader thinks that a radio script is something that just happens. I kind of thought so, too, but changed my mind after a short period spent in the room in which Jack Benny, his secretary and three writers were getting together tonight’s programme. Imagine! They spent a whole half hour playing with one small bit.
It may or may not be on the air tonight, depending upon whether they were able to work the idea into anything. One of them had, figuratively speaking, seized upon that baker’s confection known as an “upside down cake.” Maybe they could work something out of that. Listen to Jack Benny toying with a slash of genius.
“Say, listen. How would this be? I’ll say to Mary. ‘What did you eat for supper?’ and she’ll say, ‘Upside down cake. Why?’ and I’ll say, ‘I wondered what had stood you on your head.’ U-m-m. Nawh. That isn’t so hot, it it? Well, no, maybe ...”
I’ll be interested in learning what they do with that. Also whether Jack gets the Mayor of Waukegan to New York for tonight’s show as he was trying to do by long distance as I was leaving. The feud’s over, eh? Well, if it is, why does Benny need the Mayor of Waukegan to back him up?

Next week! Oh, thunder, let’s allow Fred Allen to make the announcement, he’s a Boston guy and would just as soon do it. “Don’t fail to read in on the next installment of the hair-raising tale of the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, next Sunday at this same hour in the Boston Sunday Post. There’ll be fun, Hah, hah, ha!—Tragedy, Unhand me, villain—Pathos, Ah, woe is me, Drama—And what, oh...”

Practical Pig Warns Against Nazi Wolf

Daily Variety told readers on January 16, 1942 about a cartoon. “Fred Avery will supervise production of ‘Blitz Wolf,’ cartoon subject at Metro.”

Avery had arrived at MGM the previous September and busied himself with The Early Bird Dood It. This was the first cartoon Avery and his unit—Irv Spence, Ray Abrams, Preston Blair and Ed Love, likely assisted by effects animator Al Grandmain—worked on, with The Blitz Wolf following. It seems odd that Avery would be employed on only one short for the first four months he was at Metro, but that’s what the trades at the time indicate.

Even odder is a blurb in Daily Variety of June 17, 1942 saying Rich Hogan has bought himself out of his contract with Leon Schlesinger and “his first assignment being ‘Blitz Wolf.’” Why would he be writing a cartoon that had been started six months earlier? Especially one the Hollywood Reporter said on June 2nd was “in last stages of work.”? And when the MGM newsletter of January-February 1942 revealed he was already at the studio.

(Hogan was loyal to Avery. He returned to Avery’s unit after WW2 military service and quit animation when Avery took time off to get his life together).

Avery and Hogan brought with them from Warner Bros. sign gags, fairy tale send-ups, characters talking to the audience, radio show references and Sara Berner’s voice talent. With ex-Disney animators under him, he could try for animation that was a little more elaborate at times than what he put on the screen when working for Leon Schlesinger. There are a couple of scenes of perfect perspective animation with something large in the foreground flying into the background.

Oh, there were unmatched shots, too. Here are two consecutive frames. Sergeant Pork, the Practical Pig, drums his fingers and begins to point. But his finger doesn’t get there.



The GI-garbed pig urges the other two to buy bonds and be prepared for the Big Bad Wolf. Here are some poses. The pig’s gestures are not way-over-the-top like in a Clampett cartoon. They seem perfectly natural. This is the work of the great Preston Blair. Sgt. Pork’s voice is courtesy of Pinto Colvig. He had finished his work in Florida on Gulliver’s Travels and was back in Hollywood freelancing.



You can find more frames from the cartoon by searching here. There’s a profile of Mr. Hogan as well.

The Hollywood Reporter quoted Fred Quimby as stating on August 18th the cartoon was “winding up production.” If so, it wound up very fast. The press got a sneak preview the next night at the Filmarte Theatre by the Motion Picture Academy. It was the last short to be screened, and the programme included Superman’s Terror of the Midway, the very good Norm McCabe war short The Duck-Tators, Goofy in The Olympic Champ and the Fox and Crow in Woodman, Spare That Tree. About all Daily Variety said about it was “solid laughs.” The Reporter pronounced it “an especially ingenious release.”

The 887-foot film hit theatres on August 22nd, a week before Early Bird. In Weekly Variety’s edition of September 2nd, it concluded “With such a childish topic, Director Tex Avery and his crew have concocted a refreshing, laugh cartoon. Strong on any program.” (It also praised Avery in its review of Early Bird in the same issue).

Boxoffice, on September 5th, was more lavish in its praise: “They don’t come any better...Audiences, recovering from their laughter, will stand up and cheer this one. Tex Avery, who directed, is a man to watch.” (It, too, thought Early Bird was a “Top notcher...Tie the roof down when this one hits the projection machine”). From Motion Picture Daily of September 2nd: “Top honors for ingenuity, comedy and brilliant satirical handling go to M-G-M for this color short...Directed by Tex Avery, this short is an added attraction on any bill” (It also mentioned Tex in its review of Early Bird: “clever and amusing, and not above poking fun at the company that made it”).

Motion Picture Herald, misguided about who was responsible, wrote on August 29th: “is Fred Quimby, executive producer, at his best in the field of cartoon, and a subject which had the audience screaming.” And Showman’s Trade Review included frames in its little story on the cartoon in the September 5th edition, calling it in a critique “novel, amusing and entertaining...Entire subject is excellently animated and contains much to humorously impress the need of precaution and preparedness.” It also notes that Hitler is blown to a Hell where he is greeted by Jews.



The Filmarte again screened the cartoon on February 3, 1943 as the Academy narrowed down its list of nominees for animated cartoon. Also on the list: All Out For V (Terrytoons), Juke Box Jamboree (Walter Lantz), Tulips Will Grow (George Pal), Pigs in a Polka (Schlesinger/Warner Bros.), Der Fuehrer’s Face (Walt Disney). Alas, it lost to Disney with his elaborate dream sequence. However, in May, it did top a Motion Picture Herald poll of exhibitors as the best industry-produced war cartoons (and was second on the list of shorts).

And Canada loved the cartoon, too. The Hollywood Reporter revealed on April 1, 1943 “For its Fourth Victory Loan Drive, starting April 15, the Canadian government will distribute MGM’s cartoon, ‘The Blitz Wolf,’ which was also used as a war bond sales stimulant in this country. W.H. Burnside, director of production for the National Film Board of Canada, is here [in Los Angeles] making arrangements for 195 (16mm.) and 65 (35mm.) prints. The negative was furnished gratis by MGM.” This didn’t mean theatres. The cartoon was shown with other NFB propaganda films on a screen at Eaton’s in downtown Toronto every hour, seven times a day, in April 1944. In Vancouver and Victoria, “bond” shells were set up downtown where the cartoon played for anyone passing by.

Then The Blitz Wolf disappeared, to return some time later with the bombing of Tokyo excised and a now-unflattering reference to the Japanese rubbed out. Hitler, of course, was still hated so he remained a rightful target of satire on both the big and little screen.

As for the story of how producer Quimby told Tex to take it easy on Adolf Wolf, I call B.S. I don’t know where the tale started but as the U.S. was fully involved in the war at the time the cartoon was made, the whole thing sounds like it was cooked up by someone who didn’t like Quimby or thought it was a funny story. Add in the fact Quimby was supervising the studio’s training films for the Army Air Corps. Oh, and at the time, Quimby had his son in a military academy.

As hard as it is to believe, Avery got even more attention for the next cartoon he put into production—another fairy tale parody. It was Red Hot Riding Hood.

Barbara Walters

It seemed like she was on the fast track in the early 1950s.

She left the Rand ad agency in 1952 to be a PR assistant at NBC’s local radio/TV opearations in New York. The next year she moved to producing WNBT’s “Ask the Camera.” A year later, she was producing “The Eloise McElhone Show” on WPIX. Within weeks, she was put on camera when McElhone took a vacation.

So it was that on Monday, April 12, 1954, at 2:30 p.m., TV viewers first greeted Barbara Walters.

Her rise in the industry is legendary, mainly because of her aggressiveness and having to deal with old-school newsmen who felt a woman’s place was not anchoring or interviewing on a network, except maybe for fluff pieces on cooking or fashion. Her million-dollar deal putting her next to the suddenly unhappy Harry Reasoner at ABC-TV in 1976 was historic. Her interview specials made news.

How have things changed? Her later programme, The View, was somewhat reminiscent of a panel tabloid show, including McElhone, called Leave It To The Girls that started on radio in the 1940s. McElhone, called “a man hater” by critics at the time,” is long forgotten and a show with “girls” in the title would likely bring howls of outrage and cries of sexism.

I’ve looked around to find any early interviews about Walters’ career, and spotted one in the October 7, 1956 edition of the New York Herald Tribune. There is no byline. Almost every reference to her I’ve spotted in the first half of the ‘50s refers to her father.

IN ANOTHER WORLD. . .

BARBARA WALTERS was brought up in an atmosphere of show business. She couldn’t much help it—her father Lou Walters, is the popular proprietor of one of New York’s famous night spots, the Latin Quarter. The shapely, green-eyed beauty could make a successful career in the bright lights if she so wanted, yet Broadway’s glitter and glamour can’t attract Barbara, and it “probably never will.”
The closest Lou Walters’ daughter has gotten to the world of entertainment is with her present job, that of a feature-producer and writer on CBS TV’s “Good Morning!” show starring Will Rogers, Jr. She helps create and stage the fashion vignettes that decorate the show, in addition to contacting guest celebrities and feature acts.
“It’s funny,” she said with a pert smile, “but I vowed some time ago that my father’s unorthodox hours weren’t for me. That’s one of the reasons I don’t particularly care for showbusiness. Anyway, he goes to work when other people come home, and he gets in after three a.m. I never used to see him more than a few minutes each day, if at all. So what happens! My life is just as ridiculous as his now! I have to get up for work at 4:30 a.m. He comes home, and I leave!”
In spite of the ironic twist of things, Barbara is quite happy with her lot and just now is content to exercise her creative talents behind the cameras.
In her early twenties, and married to businessman Bob Katz (who is far and away from showbusiness) Barbara admires Will Rogers, Jr., because of his success in carving out a career for himself entirely on his own merits.
As for future plans, Barbara would like to stay with TV, but her upper-most dream is to “work at a newspaper, perhaps write a TV column. “Then,” says determined Barbara, “I wouldn’t care about the hours!”

Walters spent 1958 to 1961 working for Tex McCrary’s public relations outfit, then moved to Rowland Co. It would seem to have been a comedown when she ended up at the Today show before the year was out; she went from running a radio and TV division of a PR firm to a writer. But Walters was canny. When Jackie Kennedy announced a tour of India and Pakistan for March 1962, Walters was in the media entourage, the only American woman who was part of it, reporting live via short wave (for the record, Lisa Howard anchored five-minute daily reports on the trip from ABC-TV in New York. The Herald Tribune pointed out they were geared to housewives).

Slowly but surely, she continued to be handed reporting assignments on the show—some hard news, some not—and when Today was revamped with Hugh Downs hosting, Walters, who “came in by the back door” in her own words, continued to increase her stock with viewers and the press, which flooded newspapers and magazines and stories with her, starting in 1965. It was noted by one columnist she and Downs were chatting on camera more often and she was handling more commercials. When Today co-host Jack Lescoulie was fired the following year, Walters was there and ready (and respected by producer Al Morgan, unlike Lescoulie).

There were other women regularly on the networks at the time—Marlene Sanders (began TV anchoring at ABC in 1964), Nancy Dickerson (CBS’ first female reporter in 1960) and the veteran Pauline Frederick (reporting on ABC starting in 1947, TV in 1948), not to mention part-time interviewer Arlene Francis—but Walters, through sheer force of personality, is the one who is getting credit in stories about her death for opening doors and breaking glass ceilings for women in the media.

How To Uncrush a Dog

A dog gets crushed by a barrel of...Roman Punch? Well, that’s the name of this 1930 cartoon from Terrytoons.



The mashed dog is turned into hot dogs, which get up, move toward the background and re-form as the dog—minus his tail.



The capper to the gag is the most fun. The last hot dog flat on the ground develops crutches, hobbles over to the dog and jumps on him to create a tail.



The earliest Terrytoons were named for foodstuffs. This was the fifth cartoon Paul Terry and Frank Moser made under the auspices of Audio-Cinema. Phil Scheib is the musical director.

It's Not Doing the Backstroke

How far back does the “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” joke go?

There’s a version in the Flip the Frog cartoon The Soup Song (1930).



The fly shakes itself dry, congratulates itself, and flies out of the cartoon.



The “sound” in this sound cartoon are music and effects. No dialogue. Ub’s still in the cartoon-star-makes-music-using-things-around-him stage.

As for the joke, the earliest I’ve found in print is from a newspaper of August 4, 1870. The same joke appeared for the next number of years in various American publications.

Guest: “How comes this dead fly in my soup?”
Waiter: “In fact, sir, I have no positive idea how the poor thing came to his death. Perhaps it had not taken any food for a long time, dashed upon the soup, at too much for it, contracted an inflammation of the stomach, which brought on death. The fly must have had a very weak constitution, for when I served the soup it was dancing merrily upon the surface. Perhaps, and the idea presents itself only for this moment, it endeavored to swallow too large a piece of vegetable, this remaining fast in the throat, caused a choking in the windpipe. This is the only reason I could give of the death of that insect.”

Yeah, there’s nothing like stiffly-worded sarcasm. Iwerks cartoons were not exactly known for wit and rollicking humour, but I’ll take Flip’s joke over the overblown facetiousness of the newspaper.