He's Not Tom Ewell

“Spot the character actor” was a fun game to play when watching TV in the 1960s. There were plenty of them who worked on different shows but would be on the screen regularly.

“There’s Henry Jones!” was one exclamation from young me. I saw him in the films Support Your Local Sheriff (he appears to have filmed a string of Westerns in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s) and The Girl Can’t Help It. Where I spotted him first in the ‘60s, I really don’t remember. Offhand, I remember him on Bewitched. Oh, and Lost in Space.

Besides a pile of guest character shots, there was one series where he was actually a co-star. There was a short period of “relevant” TV dramas in the early ‘60s that tackled issues of the day. One of them was Channing. No, it was not about a “Hello, Dolly” star playing a daffy blonde. It was about issues surrounding a college.

Alan Patureau of Newsday wrote about it in the paper’s Sept. 18, 1963 issue.

Racial discrimination, exam cheating, Communist influences and all sorts of meaty subjects COULD be treated on ABC-TV’s new college campus series, “Channing” debuting tonight—and perhaps they will, says star Henry Jones, if some good scripts can be found.
“Our first purpose is to be entertaining,” Jones chuckled the other day on a trip East. “As the great George S. Kaufman said, ‘If nobody comes, who gets the message?’”
Not that “Charming” is to be a retread of the treacly old “Halls of Ivy” series, Jones said. “We’ll have no rah-rah stones, no panty raid capers; some of the scripts are real rockers.”
“Channing,” which is the name of a small, mythical Midwestern university, bows tonight at 10 PM on Channel 7, and Jones has the top role as kindly Dean Fred Baker.
“Negroes have taken two speaking parts in the series so far, and are seen in every classroom shot, so ‘Channing’ definitely intends to portray campus life—outside the South—as realistically as possible, with no more cowtowing to timid Sponsors,” Jones said.
“Channing” is rara avis in TV-land. It has been in production a full year and there are 15 one-hour episodes in the can. None of the too-common, frantic last-minute filming and script patching here. The series was spun off from Fred Astaire’s “Alcoa Premiere,” where it appeared as a one-hour drama in March, 1962, with its current stars, Jones and Jason Evers.
How was Jones lured into a TV series after 28 years on Broadway and in movies?
“Simple,” he said, peering over big bifocals. “In show business I’m known as the guy who looks like Tom Ewell. With weekly exposure in a major TV series, I hope to gain true star status—become a boxoffice draw. Ewell can be the guy who looks like Henry Jones. I’ve gone as far as I can go in the theater without a boost from another medium.”
“Channing” is being shot at Revue Studios, one of Hollywood’s busiest TV mills. In one corner is a small-scale reproduction of World War II (for the “Combat!” series) and in the other is the set for Channing U., replete with quadrangle, football stadium, the whole works.

The comparison to Ivy is a little unfair, as it was mainly a comedy show, though there was one marvelous episode on radio where it attacked racism very straight, something completely unexpected in a 1950s sitcom.

The syndicated column below published Nov. 9, 1963 delves into Jones’ career.

Channing’s Dean, Henry Jones, Has A Sense of Humor
By RUTH E. THOMPSON
It’s a tossup who has to deliver a longer list of credits to rate his job, a real university dean, or Henry Jones — actor — who’s starring as Dean Fred Baker in ABCs “Channing” (Wednesdays, 10:00 PM).
“Incidentally I certainly would not have taken the role.” Henry says cheerfully, if by any chance they’d gone in for the stereotype of a stuffy, pompous dean. As a matter of fact every one I’ve known has had a considerable sense of humor and problems.
“But I’m not really a dean, remember, I’m no authority on education. I’m art actor.” A pretty well-educated actor, however, and definitely an authority in his field (500 television shows, a dozen films, countless Broadway appearances). He’s also an authority on sense-of-humor. He started developing his own early through his some quixotic schooling.
“My mother sent me to boarding school in Canada for the seventh grade so I could learn French . . . but none was spoken there at all. She’d neglected to check. It was an English language institution.”
He thereafter also went to Georgetown Prep and to St. Joseph’s College in his home town of Philadelphia. Though he admired his surgeon-father, he had no desire to emulate him and hot-footed off instead to Jasper Deeter’s legendary Hedgerow Theatre where he swept floors, worked as a stage hand, learned the switchboard and — against his wishes — honed the sense of humor some more.
“For a while, in fact, it looked as though I was doomed to be a comedian. No matter what I did on stage, people laughed.”
His first speaking part was in the grim war epic, “Journey’s End.” “Since it was about Englishmen, I worked on an English accent then in my role as a coward I chirped out, ‘I cawn’t go on.’ The audience broke out laughing and nearly broke my heart.”
But along came another role (again a coward, the locale a submerged submarine. Came his moment, tense, dramatic. He snarled, “If you don’t let me go. I’ll kill every one of you with my hare hands.” Comments Henry further, “Only trouble was they looked like a bunch of football players. I’m five-ten. Unintentional comedy again.”
During the winter he thought maybe he’d try his hand at business and sell oil-burners door to door. The firm’s star salesman was resting. Finally he shared his wisdom. “Nobody has ever sold a heater here in this season.”
Henry was actually relieved. Business was not for him. The theatre life had its own challenges and rough spots, but this was really his dish, this he could handle and back he went to Hedgerow to learn both acting technique and show business.
This time he also house-managed. “In fact I did every job at that theatre except box office. There were about six kinds of tickets; regular, subscription, students, press. Some were subject to federal tax, some to local, some to none.” His head for business being what it was it was agreed the theatre would be money ahead if somebody else handled the arithmetic and the cash.
Then in 1938 he debuted on Broadway in a minor role in Maurice Evans’ five-hour “Hamlet.” Successive role grew bigger, then in 1942 he was drafted into the Army which promptly drafted him into its camp show (later a movie) “This Is The Army” which played bases the world over.
“Solid Gold Cadillac” with Josephine Hull was his first lasting post-war role. Then came “Bad Seed” in which he was so good as the sneaky janitor he was afraid for a while he’d be typed as a psychotic. However, that blooming new medium television saved his “sanity” as well as his reputation for flexibility.
“I played 50 different roles in one year, then I realized,” he says with a smile that lighted up his sage humor again,” that the greater the exposure, the less they were paying! So, I started appearing less often and in longer programs.”
Meanwhile, back on Broadway Henry Jones was becoming more and more a name to reckon with. He walked off with the 1958 Tony award for best supporting actor for his Louis McHenry Howe role in “Sunrise at Campobello;” and in 1960 he got star billing in the Broadway production of “Advise and Consent.”
Though he suttled [shuttled?] back and forth for a time between New York and Hollywood for movie commitments, the “Channing” schedule keeps him in Hollywood except for an occasional trip East on network business or to visit his children 17-year old David and 13-year-old David [sic, it should read Jocelyn]. Divorced now, Jones lives a bachelor life when he is in California.
“Any series is very hard work but I find ‘Channing’ satisfactory all around. And you know, I like our not limiting our stories just to the campus. By going afield in flashbacks, or by following a crisis in a person’s life and tieing in with his days at Channing University we are able to show the long range influence of education and of college memories.
“Then too we have good guest stars. It was good to work with Wendell Corey again, he was Hedgerow, too, you know. And Gene Raymond was just great.”
And where is Channing University? “In the mythical town of Channing of course.” And with an interesting guy like Henry Jones as its leading light, it’s a school and town we should keep hearing about.

ABC had a decent Wednesday night line-up that season: Ozzie and Harriet, Patty Duke, The Price is Right, Ben Casey and then Channing. But this was CBS’ year and Channing ran 26 episodes. Howard Heffernan of the North American Newspaper Alliance wrote at the time that Jones “was permitted in the earlier episodes to drift in and out,” suggesting TV producers wanted to go with the more photogenic Evers to attract an audience. But ratings fell and Jones was shoved to the forefront. It didn’t help and the show was replaced over the summer with reruns of 77 Sunset Strip (featuring the photogenic Kookie and his comb).

So it was that Channing did not give Jones “true star status.” He went back to character parts (and a regular role on the sitcom Phyllis) and acted until the early 1990s. He died May 17, 1999 at age 86.

Nutsy Blur

Confusions of a Nutsy Spy (released in December 1942) is full of angled shots and varying perspectives in a war-time tale of a really stupid Porky Pig trying to capture a bomb-carrying Nazi spy.

There’s also a pan shot reminiscent of the Fleischers in the late 1930s. To simulate speed, the pan is blurred. Not by the camera pan itself but by brush work over the background painting. I can’t snip this together to give you the full background, but here are some frames that may give you an idea.



The backgrounds are likely by Dick Thomas.

Norm McCabe directed this war short, which has some of the most tedious and obvious puns you can find in a Warners cartoon, supplied by Don Christensen.

The cartoon opens with a rather low-key violin and clarinet version of “Hey Doc!” by Edgar Sampson and Kim Gannon. You can hear a different version below.

How To Escape From the Moon

Tex Avery’s nameless black cat (Pat McGeehan using a Durante voice) has had enough of abuse on the Moon and wants to return to the abuse of Earth (specifically, the United States of America) in The Cat That Hated People.



But how to get off the Moon when your space ship that crashed into a heap of metal? It’s easy when you’re in a Tex Avery cartoon. “A body can do just about anything,” said one of his characters when Tex was still at Warners. In this case, the cat pulls down a backdrop of a golf course, sets himself on a tee, yells “Fore!” (to nobody in particular, but that is what one does at a golf course), and swats himself toward Earth.



You can check out frames from the next scenes in this post.

Heck Allen gets a story credit, with Louis Schmidt, Bill Shull, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton credited as the animators.

Blintzes and Bets

Jack Benny celebrated his birthday in Toronto in 1943, and then returned to the city seven years later in a stop on his one-night-stand tour. This time, he didn’t broadcast a live show; his radio season was already transcribed for release at a more convenient time.

The first trip was set up to sell Victory Bonds, and his some of his radio cast was with him. There was some charity work as a sidebar to the second appearance, which was a variety show and included two of the people listeners heard on the air (via Buffalo; Toronto stations and others in Canada did not run the Lucky Strike show).

Here’s a story from the Toronto Star of May 31, 1950 about an unusual news conference. Something doesn’t ring true to me, as if this was something put together by Benny’s writers. Eddie Anderson and Phil Harris seem to be in character, and Vivian Blaine’s comments sound like something she would say on a radio show.

Sold Out Everywhere Benny’s Not Hungry But Only Pretending
By A. O. TATE
Star Staff Correspondent
Buffalo, May 31—Jack Benny will be wondering today if those cheese blintzes were really as good as they were cracked up to be.
Jack was here yesterday with Rochester, Phil Harris and Vivian Blaine. The famous radio comedian was torn between sadness and gladness, and when it came time for lunch Jack said he wasn’t hungry. He just wasn’t hungry.
“I’m not hungry . . . I’m not hungry . . . I’m not hungry,” he said in three directions.
When Miss Blaine, who is a very appealing blonde movie star and radio singer, appealed to Jack to think of his stomach, Mr. Benny responded with only a sardonic smile.
“But boss . . .” Rochester began.
“ROCHESTER!” Jack yelped.
“But Jackson,” Phil Harris dared.
“PHIL,” Mr. Benny gargled, “I’M NOT HUNGRY!”
Jack Benny is on a tour of one-night stands which brings him to Toronto for a Maple Leaf Gardens show tonight. He is minus Mary Livingstone and Dennis Day, but along with Rochester, Phil Harris and Vivian Blaine are the Wiere Brothers, Harris’ orchestra and a cast of 40. At lunch time yesterday Jack was very sad about Buffalo, and exceedingly happy about Toronto.
“Six thousand . . . twenty-five thousand,” he muttered into his lap while people swirled about him in his suite’s living room. “Six thousand . . . twenty-five thousand.”
Jack Benny is doing one-night stands for the first time in his long show-business career.
“Just for Fun”
“I didn’t have to start out on this,” he said to someone who was standing nearby. “I’m just doing it for fun. And I’ve got a good show . . . a fine show . . . a terrific show. If Jack Benny, Rochester and Phil Harris can’t pack ‘em in—well, nobody can.”
Even in the old days of vaudeville, before he went into radio about 20 years ago, Jack Benny never did one-night stands. When he showed up in a theatre with his violin and his gags, he was there for a week. One night stands are rugged.
When the reporter and photographer entered the suit they saw Jack Benny in conference with three other men. The conference, over the next hour or so, clustered about one chair after another as Jack moved restlessly about.
Occasionally it would disappear briefly into one of the bedrooms. When it would re-appear, Jack might be in a figured silk dressing gown, or back in his plain tan sports jacket.
Once, when the conference was in a bedroom, a bellboy came in and put a basket of fruit on a living room table. When Jack saw it first he made a quick move in its direction—only to remember, suddenly, he wasn’t hungry.
“I’m Not Hungry”
Three Buffalo radio people came into the room with a tape recorder and yards of wire. When the conference and the radio people tangled in mid-floor a couple of times, the conference disintegrated and Jack sat down and looked at his publicity man, Irvine Fine [sic]. Irving had just come in.
“How about some lunch, Jack,” said the unsuspecting Irving.
Mr. Benny eyed Mr. Fine for a moment and then said, quietly: “No thank you, Irving. I’m not hungry.”
Then the tape recorder was ready to go. Someone went out to find Rochester. A few minutes later Vivian Blaine came in. Phil Harris had gone to a ballgame.
“Oh Jack,” Vivian breathed at Mr. Benny. “Phil and I had the most wonderful food. Really, Jack, we’ve never eaten more wonderful food. We had cheese blintzes as light and tender as . . .”
“Cheese blintzes?” Jack whispered.
“Jack, cheese blintzes like we’ve never eaten before. And Jack, what do you think? A girl came over to me in the restaurant. She said her boy friend says you are his favorite comedian. He listens to you every Sunday night. Nothing interferes with that. But she said he said he didn’t have enough money this week to take her to see your show. There are two people, Jack, two people who would give anything to see your show.”
“Could Pretend”
“You can’t go by what one or two people say, Vivian. This afternoon, the day before the show, there is a $25,000 advance sale. What have we got here on the day of the show? A $6,000 advance sale. What’s the reason? What’s the answer? The cheese blintzes were good, eh?”
“Oh, Jack, they were . . .”
“Jack’s not hungry,” Irvine Fine reminded Miss Blaine.
When Jack and Rochester and Vivian were interviewed for the tape recorder, Vivian said she had just had the most wonderful food just a short time earlier. She gave the name of the restaurant, the street and number.
“We call this show ‘Tape it or Leave it’,” said one of the radio people. “Pretty corny, don’t you think, Jack?”
“No,” Jack said, laughing heartily. “I like that. I also like Vivian’s commercials. Cheese blintzes, yet.”
After a while Jack Benny slowed down long enough to be photographed. “Why don’t youm” he asked the photographer, “take my picture with a great banana. That one right there. I could pretend to be eating it.”
Two bananas later Jack posed with a banana.
“Toronto’s a great city,” he said. “A great city. By tomorrow night the Gardens will be sold out. Buffalo and Pitsburgh. Yipe. In Wichita we sold out. In Pasadena, where they’ve seen me a million times, we sold out. We’re going to London in a month or so. The Palladium is practically sold out now.”
Outside Jack’s suite a number of ‘teen agers waited around hoping for his autograph.

How did the act go? The Star’s Jack Karr, in the June 1 edition, gave a summary. He tagged it with an example of Jack’s real-life un-stinginess, the declaration made by Canada’s best-known newsman-turned-announcer who, in a few years, would become America’s best-known Cartwright.

The Jack Benny jackpot at the Gardens last night was a happy piece of entertainment . . . even for those who don’t worship at the Sunday evening radio shrine. For this trek into the hinterlands, Jackson has surrounded himself with a program full of talent, some of which, if subjected to the applause meter, would climb quite a few decibels higher than Benny’s own rating. And that, you’ve got to admit, is a pretty brave thing for any top-ranking comic to do.
* * *
By saying that Benny doesn’t hog the show doesn’t mean, however, that anybody walks away with it from under his nose. He sees to it that his presence is liberally sprinkled throughout the evening simply by taking over the master of ceremonies job. But he has also seen to it that there isn’t a dud act on his supporting bill and that each of these various acts gets a chance to show off its stuff under the best of conditions. And that’s smart showmanship. So the net impression left is of a fine evening’s entertainment all provided through the courtesy of Mr. B. “You can’t say I don’t provide you with the best,” he reminds his audience a couple of times during the show.”
And “the best” includes his radio mates, Phil Harris and Rochester, as well as a gorgeous hunt of Hollywood womanhood named Vivian Blaine, the screwy Wiere Brothers, the juggling Peiro Brothers, and an adagio act known as the Stuart Morgan dancers. These, with Harris’ orchestra in the background, add up to a very solid vaudeville program.
* * *
While no special attempt has been made to make the Benny in-person show conform to the pattern of the Benny radio show, a great deal of the latter has very naturally crept in.
The Benny character—the one developed in nearly 20 years on the networks—is established early and is allowed to grow through the evening; the tightness, the bad violin playing, the infirmities of advancing age that are creeping up on him, his vanity and school-boyish petulance, his notion of being a lady’s man, and his hurt when the glamour dolls won’t take him seriously. He is continually heckled by Phil Harris and he, in turn, heckles Harris. “Did you see how he leads that band?” Benny asks. “Harris is the only man in the world who leads a band as though he has to go some place.”
Harris, in fact, doesn’t lead the band at all. When he is singing his standbys, “That’s What I Like About the South” or “Preacher and the Bear,” he occasionally attacks it in the manner of a cheerleader with a hot-foot, but he seldom conducts it.
* * *
For her part in the performance, the blonde, low-cut Miss Blaine sings a couple of bouncy songs and a couple of torchy ones, and then becomes stooge to Benny’s and Harris’ demonstrations in technique of love-making to much audience hilarity.
The Stuart Morgan dancers—a girl and three men—have the most violent adagio act these eyes have caught in some time. One late-coming lady member of the audience, walking past the front of the stage, almost lost her balance when she ducked at the sight of the girl in the act coming hurtling out in her direction.
The Peiro Brothers have a very fast juggling act . . . and the Weire [sic] Brothers, three clowns who occasionally use violins with their nonsense, are show-stoppers in the real sense of the word.
And then there’s Rochester—Eddie Anderson—who occupies a special spot of his own on the program and who sings in a voice like a fingernail on a blackboard with a great deal of raucous good humor. Rochester is obviously looked upon with a good deal of affection by the Benny regulars, and they eat it up when he sasses Boss Benny.
* * *
At the conclusion of last night’s performance, there was a special announcement from Lorne Green. During his Toronto stay, Jack Benny made a trip out to Variety Village, the school for crippled boys at Scarboro, operated by the Variety club of Toronto.
Jack Benny has offered to completely furnish one of the rooms in the school as a gesture of friendship for the reception he was given here.

While Jack was visiting disabled young people, Rochester and Phil Harris decided to check out the ponies. Eddie Anderson owned a stable of race horses and one famously came in last at Churchill Downs in 1943. The Star’s Sports Editor, Milt Dunnell, has the story. I do not understand why he gave Anderson an Amos ‘n’ Andy dialect. A Canadian should know better.

Rochester’s Horse Didn’t Co-operate
THERE was one new record at Woodbine yesterday that won’t appear in the books. Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, an afternoon refugee from Jack Benny, broke all existing marks for autographing programs. Tom “Long Boy” Ellison, the happy-go-lucky colored clocker, gaped in awe as Rochester “stole” his public. Long Boy had been ticking off winners and non-winners for years on the programs of these same people. They practically trampled Tom under foot in their haste to get Rochester’s signature.
Phil Harris, Benny’s bragging (on the air) band-leader, made the mistake of sitting back of Rochester and Mrs. Rochester in their box. That made Phil the pivot man in passing paper. The play was from public to Phil to Rochester; then from Rochester to Phil to public. Harris soon tired of it and got himself a front row seat breaking up the combination.
Rochester made one trip to the paddock, but was button-holed by so many fans that he was shut out when he finally went make a wager. After that, he remained in his seat and sent down bets with his chauffeur.
Rochester is a “just even” player and owner. He likes the bangtails too well to admit they cost him money. A steed named Whiffletree got him “even” in the seventh. He’s just about “even” in his operation of a modest collection of beetles. His pride and joy was Burnt Cork, which he bought at the Saratoga sales and which he ran eventually in the Kentucky Derby. At least, he entered the colt in the Kentucky Derby. Whether it ran is a matter of argument. Some students of the thoroughbred claim Burnt Cork still would be somewhere on the back stretch at Churchill Downs if he hadn’t got hungry. The Kentucky hardboots were miffed. Such a grazing gluepot, they sniffed, had no place in the Derby.
Kunnel Rochester disagrees. Burnt Cork might not have won he admits, but sure enough, he’d have been in the dough, if the race had been run according to instructions.
Did he mean the jockey disregarded instructions? No, the jockey rode to instructions, but Burnt Cork refused to co-operate. He didn’t like to come from off the pace. So after a mild canter, he spit out the bit and said “to hell with this nonsense.”
“When the race is over, he’s not as tired as ah am right now,” Rochester lamented, shifting his cigar and wagging his noggin.
Eleven days later, Burnt Cork was dead. Killed in a spill while driving down the stretch?
“Naw,” Rochester gloomed. “Died of nee-monia.”

Back to the States went Jack for a June 4th performance at Carnegie Hall for the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research (tickets were $1.80 to $6.00, tax included). Something else was added to the regular Benny show that evening—another round of the feud with Fred Allen. But that’s a story for another time.

From Horse to Hefner

Quick, the answer the question: Who played Irving, the Unemployed Horse? (No coaching from Greg Ehrbar, please).

The correct answer is Allan Melvin.

Irving wasn’t a cartoon character. He was the star of an MGM children’s record put on the market in 1947. Columnist Leonard Lyons noted in Sept. 26 that year that Melvin played 37 different roles on the record (two double-faced, 10-inch 78s). Melvin was 24 years old at the time.

Before his long TV career, in animation and live action, Melvin got his break thanks to the audience of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts on CBS radio. Like Art Carney, Melvin began his career as an impressionist, and won the amateur contest on the Oct. 15, 1946 show. He hit the cabaret scene the following year, appearing at the Café Society in Greenwich Village; Lew Sheaffer’s column in the Brooklyn Eagle of Nov. 14, 1947 mentioned he impersonated Humphrey Bogart and Frederic March.

The impressions led to a role in the stage production of Stalag 17 (Comedy in a POW camp? That can’t be possible!), which opened at the 48th Street Theatre in New York in May 1951 with Melvin’s character giving impersonations of Hollywood celebrities. A story in the San Francisco Examiner in 1952 reported Gary Cooper thanked Melvin for his version of him in the road show version in Los Angeles.

Melvin couldn’t get out uniform for a while. He jumped to TV as Sgt. Henshaw on the Phil Silvers show starting in 1955, played Rob Petrie’s army buddy in a number of episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and appeared as Staff Sgt. Hacker off-and-on on Gomer Pyle, USMC.

The military roles led to cartoons. Melvin’s first animated voice roles were in the 1963 syndicated Beetle Bailey cartoons, where he played Sgt. Snorkle and Zero opposite Howard Morris. Those animated roles led to cartoon stardom a year later in Hanna-Barbera’s Magilla Gorilla opposite Howard Morris.

All this is before his better-known, non-Army TV roles—appearing periodically as Sam the butcher in The Brady Bunch and Archie’s buddy Barney Hefner in All in the Family and Archie Bunker’s Place.

Sam gets bypassed in this feature story about Melvin on the Associated Press wire, June 6, 1981.

Allan Melvin: From Al the Plumber to Barney Hefner
By JERRY BUCK
AP Television Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP)— Allan Melvin has played Archie Bunker’s best friend since 1972, but it didn’t start off as a chummy relationship.
The very first time Melvin appeared on “All in the Family,” it was not as Barney Hefner, best friend, but as Sgt Pete Pulaski of New York City’s finest.
“The fun of that episode was that Archie came down to the police station and was making remarks about the Polish,” he recalled. “Somebody says, ‘Oh, yeah, tell that to Sgt. Pulaski’ — and I throw Archie into the can.”
It was a few months after that that Melvin was reincarnated as Barney Hefner. He remained with the CBS show when it was changed to “Archie Bunker’s Place,” and only Carroll O’Connor, has been with the series longer.
Melvin, who got his start as a stand-up comic and mimic and then played on Broadway in “Stalag 17,” has had a long and profitable career in television as the foil to the leading man.
A lot of that time was spent in uniform. On “The Phil Silvers Show” he was Cpl. Henshaw, who was Sgt. Bilko’s partner in his attempts to bilk the other soldiers. He was Dick Van Dyke’s old Army buddy on his show and Sgt. Hacker on “Gomer Pyle.” He also had recurring roles on “The Joey Bishop Show” and on “The Andy Griffith Show.”
“I went in the same season from Pulaski to Barney Hefner,” he said “I think thy make allowances for the fact that the audience will accept certain changes I guess they figure since it was a one-shot I wasn’t that established I’ve been Barney ever since.”
Melvin recalled that during the making of “The Phil Silvers Show” in New York, the technical adviser assigned to the show was a captain named George Kennedy.
“He would beseech Nat Hiken for a role,” he said. “Finally Nat made him an MP and let him stand by the door and wear a helmet. He was thrilled. Did I ever think he’d become an actor? No way.” Kennedy, of course, not only became an actor, but went on to win the Academy Award as best supporting actor.
Melvin is also well known as Al the Plumber, a character he has played for 14 years on the Liquid Plumber commercials. Less well known is the fact that he does many cartoon voices. He has been the voice of Bluto on the “Popeye” cartoon for the past four years. He’s also done the voice on “Magilla Gorilla” and has done many impressions for “The Flintstones.”
In fact, the day after the interview he was due to spend the day at Hanna-Barbera studios, recording voices.
Few characters on television ever seem to have jobs, but Barney Hefner is a bridge inspector. Not that he ever works at it. “He never really inspects any bridges,” said Melvin. “He just says they’re all unsafe. That’s how he can spend so much time at Archie’s Place.”
As Archie’s oldest friend they are very similar. “He’s very much like Archie in his thinking and his values. But not to the extreme that Archie goes. He’s more temperate.”
Melvin was born in Kansas City, but was raised in New York and New Jersey. He and his wife now divide their time between their home in Brentwood and one on Monarch Bay in Laguna. He also spends much of his spare time on the golf course.
His own oldest and closest friend is author Richard Condon, who wrote “The Manchurian Candidate.” Condon wrote an early children’s record that Melvin recorded and wrote a night club act for him. It was that night club act that caused the producers of “Stalag 17” to alter the role of Reed to fit Melvin’s background and his act.

27 years later, the same wire service led off his obituary with his time consorting Alice the maid where “his place in pop culture will be fixed.” Brady Bunch fans had now grown up to pen newspaper obits. Irving the Unemployed Horse was forgotten.

We haven't forgotten. If you are interested in hearing Melvin narrating the story of Irving, someone had digitised it. Listen below.

What? How? Why?

While being chased across the U.S. by Yosemite Sam, Bugs Bunny skids to a stop and gets “that funny feeling” that gold is nearby (in reused animation). Sam can’t any chances in case he’s not being tricked again, so he starts a-diggin’.



But it is no trick. Sam discovers Bugs’ feeling was right.



The camera pulls back.



Wait a minute! That “Fort Knox” sign wasn’t in the shot before this. Where did it come from?

Well, the answer’s simple. If writer Warren Foster had it planted at the outset, it would have ruined the reveal gag. So he and background man Irv Wyner left it out. This bothered me as a kid. A sign can’t show up on a lawn out of nowhere.

The ending bothered me, too. “And what are YOU doing here?” an MP asks Bugs.



“Oh, me?” nervously answers the rabbit. “Well, I, uh, I’m waitin’ for a streetcar.”



We hear the sound of a ship. Cut to an ocean liner pulling up on the lawn of Fort Knox.



“But, in a spot like this, a boat will do,” Bugs says happily.



The cartoon ends with the boat ploughing across the lawn into the distance, as Carl Stalling plays the Warner-owned “The Song of the Marines” by Warren and Dubin (from the Warners feature The Singing Marine).



Me-as-kid didn’t like Deus Ex Machina stuff like this. “I could have thought of that,” likely said I. Foster was just trying to be off-kilter, but the ending seems more convenient than surreal.

Virgil Ross, Art Davis, Manny Perez and Ken Champin get the animation credits in 14 Carrot Rabbit, released in February 1952.

Rock and the Villain

One of Tex Avery’s gags in Homesteader Droopy (released 1954) reminds me of something from a Roadrunner/Coyote cartoon, but Avery handles it much differently than Chuck Jones would have.

In one scene, the evil Dishonest Dan (yet another incarnation of an Avery wolf) tries to destroy the homesteaders’ house with a huge boulder on a cliff.



Cut to a longer shot. The boulder won't fall no matter what Dan does.



Finally, he comes up with the solution—just push away the cliff and the boulder will fall.



If this was a Jones cartoon, he would focus on various facial expressions (a la Wile E. Coyote). Avery doesn't bother with poses. He simply goes for the quick gag.

You’ll notice how the house moved from under the boulder to make the gag work. I doubt any theatre audience noticed as Avery’s cartoons boot along from one gag to the next.

Bob Bentley, Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the credited animators. Backgrounds by Johnny Johnsen.

More Than Hazel

At first, it would seem ridiculous that a woman who won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Tony for a heavily dramatic role in Come Back, Little Sheba would be cast in a light-weight domestic sitcom on TV. But Hazel was far from Shirley Booth’s first stab at comedy. For that, you have to go back to radio and “Where the Elite Meet to Eat.”

Here’s a feature column from the Associated Press, Sept. 17, 1961.

Shirley Booth Late to TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
HOLLYWOOD — The last time Shirley Booth had a continuing role in broadcasting was 20 years ago when she played Miss Duffy, the waitress, in radio’s great and well-remembered Duffy’s Tavern.
On September 28, Miss Booth comes to television as the star of NBC’s Hazel, a situation comedy revolving about the maid who runs the Baxter family with an iron glove on a velvet hand.
Between Miss Duffy and Hazel, she has become one of the great stars of the American stage and screen, winner of a bucketful of acting awards, including an Oscar and the official title of “world’s best actress,” for her performance in “Come Back, Little Sheba.”
Booth fans may legitimately be a little nervous about the vehicle which will bring this versatile performer into their living rooms each week. Hazel was born as a cartoon character in a weekly magazine in 1942 and has been appearing regularly ever since. It is hard enough to give life to a cartoon character. It is even harder when the background is upper-middle-class family life, so thoroughly explored in TV comedy it has become a cliche.
Miss Booth, however, feels confident and calm.
“I guess I’m a little late getting into weekly television,” she said, almost apologetically. “But then I always get in at the tail-end of everything. But as long as I’m occupied and busy with plays, I’m perfectly content.”
She has had Hazel on her mind for several years, however, Ted Key, the cartoonist who created the character, wrote a play about his brainchild several years ago and presented it to Miss Booth.
“I didn’t feel that it was right—I thought even then that one play was not as good for Hazel as an episodic medium.
“But once we were under way, the thing I had to do was get some depth, a different dimension to her character. The comedy will take care of itself, but the problem was to give her warmth. The only really important job of the actress is to get the audience interested in and caring about the character.”
‘Create a Character...’
Key’s job as a magazine cartoon-1st is to produce one laughter-evoking picture a week. Miss Booth’s job in creating a flesh-and-blood Hazel was “to create a character, not a caricature.”
“So the audience won’t always laugh,” she continued seriously. “That would ruin everything. To build up comedy, you must build up some protection around the funny lines. You must have arid spaces—a desert—before you can have an oasis. So you must have contrast to humor to make it effective.”
Now in her early 50s, Shirley Booth has been an actress since she was 12 and joined a Hartford, Conn., stock company.
In 1925 she was the ingenue (with Humphrey Bogart, another youngster) in the Broadway production of “Hell’s Bells.” In 1939 she won critical notices that topped those of Katharine Hepburn for her acting in “The Philadelphia Story.” But although the rave notices—for serious parts and for comedy—rolled in over the years, stardom came with “Come Back, Little Sheba” in 1950, when she played the poignant, lost Lola Delaney in the Broadway play.
Has Two Poodles
A small, round-faced woman with a quiet wit and easy smile, Miss Booth has hedged her Hollywood bets. She continues to maintain her New York City apartment, is having an addition built on her Cape Cod home—and is sharing her apartment-hotel quarters with her two poodles, “Prego” and “Grazia.”
Her marriage to comedian Ed Gardner ended in divorce in 1942—and it also ended the best years of his Duffy’s Tavern because she left the cast. She subsequently married investment broker W. H. Baker Jr. who died 10 years ago. “I keep very busy,” she confided. “My emotional life now? You can see the answer to that easily: I own two poodles.”

Booth’s Hazel caught the eyes of viewers. Among them were Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, always looking for sources for new cartoon characters. In 1962, The Jetsons debuted. Just as they tagged The Honeymooners on The Flintstones, TV critics equated The Jetsons with Hazel, thanks to Jean Vander Pyl’s portrayal of the robot maid, Rosey, who suspiciously sounded like Booth’s Miss Duffy. Writers had her calling George Jetson “Mr. J,” just as Hazel addressed her boss as “Mr. B.”

There is only so much you can do in a domestic sitcom, and Hazel staved off disappearing from prime time in 1965 by switching networks and replacing almost all of the cast. Hazel polished the silver for one more season. Booth had been hospitalised for exhaustion and likely didn’t want to carry on with a weekly series.

Better make that “weakly” series. The new Mr. B., Ray Fulton, complained to Dick Kleiner of the Newspaper Enterprise Association that the scripts stunk; they were full of basic grammatical errors, plot flaws and repetitions, and sloppy writing. “What’s amazing,” he said, “is how Shirley Booth can make something out of nothing. It has been an education to watch her work.”

The Associated Press talked to her again after the cancellation. This is from April 16, 1966:

Shirley Booth Chooses ‘Menagerie’ Role on TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
HOLLYWOOD (AP)—A Hollywood trade paper recently carried a note that a producer of a television series was trying to get Raymond Burr, whose “Perry Mason” series recently came to an end, to play a trial lawyer in one episode. It is extremely doubtful that, no matter how attractive the series, money or role, Burr could be persuaded to take the assignment. This is typecasting, more dreaded by actors than a low Nielsen rating.
“Well,” said Shirley Booth with a smile as she concentrated on maneuvering her hardtop into a right-hand lane for a turn onto Sunset Boulevard, “nobody has offered me any parts as a domestic.”
Miss Booth, an Oscar winner—“Come Back Little Sheba”—and a three-time winner of Broadway’s “Tony,” has wound up five busy years of playing the title role in “Hazel,” a comedy that earned her an “Emmy” as well.
* * *
The first assignment she accepted was the lead in a CBS special, Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” which will be produced in London in October for broadcast early in December.
“Of course, I’ve been offered lots of guest star roles,” she continued, moving into the noon-hour stream of traffic. “And some series. I really don’t want to get into another series but I’m very reluctant to say ‘never’ about anything because something might come along and I’ll change my mind.”
When the chance to do the Williams play turned up, she said, she was even reluctant about that, at first.
“I remember Laurette Taylor in the Amanda part,” she said. “I remember that performance so vividly — she really contributed something important to theater with it. I didn’t feel as if I wanted to take on something in which I’d just be doing an imitation of somebody else.”
She drove into a driveway of a handsome little house on a hillside in a secluded section and there followed a leisurely luncheon in the patio. One eye was on the clock, however, for she was due back at the studio in midafternoon to wind up chores on a two-hour film, “Package Deal” she is making for NBC’s “World Premiere” series next season.
“I also decided to do this film, even though it broke into my Cape Cod summer,” she continued. Pleasant parts — women with humor and wholesome outlooks — are hard to find these days, and I just didn’t feel like playing a lady drunk or a woman of loose morals and those parts are all over the place now.”
* * *
Meanwhile, re-runs, of “Hazel” will be on television channels all over the lot—which provides a painless steady income for the star.
Miss Booth, still remembered fondly as “Miss Duffy” in radio’s immortal “Duffy’s Tavern” and as a musical comedy star of Broadway’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” has four homes.
Her voting residence is the hillside house in Los Angeles. For weekends and holidays in winter, there is her recently acquired desert home beyond Palm Springs. Back East she has her summer home in Chatham on the Cape, plus the co-op apartment she owns in New York.
A widow, she enjoys movie and theater going, does a little Sunday-type painting, collects antiques, and is a passionate art collector. Most of all, though, she likes acting.

There were plenty of pre-broadcast newspaper publicity interviews by Booth for The Glass Menagerie. She got an Emmy nomination for that role, too.

One more sitcom awaited Booth. She played a widow in A Touch of Grace, that ran on ABC in 1973. Why did she come back to television? She told a press junket (as reported in the Omaha World-Herald) she had read the scripts for three series and preferred Grace. “I like the regimentation of doing the show, because I like to be a certain place at a certain time. For a lonely woman, it’s nice to have a built-in family.”

The show had a very good cast—J. Pat O’Malley, Warren Berlinger and the wonderful Marian Mercer—but eked out only 13 episodes. The finale featured a monologue by Grace to a table that represented her late husband’s gravestone. O’Malley and producers Saul Turteltaub and Bernie Orenstein cried when Booth rehearsed the scene and, as reported by Cecil Smith of Los Angeles Times syndicate, the two long-time TV show-runners quietly marvelled to each other about her acting abilities.

Booth decided to retire not much later and lived until the age of 94, passing away in 1992.