A Little News From Waukegan

Jack Benny constantly and consistently promoted Waukegan, Illinois as his home town. But by the time he started in radio in 1932, not only had it been years since he lived there, his father had moved to nearby Lake Forest.

This did not stop the local papers from proudly hailing him as one of their own. Jack’s pull was big enough to have one of his movies, Man About Town, premiere in Waukegan.

In many stories, there was just a brief mention of him in connection with radio or movies. Here are a couple of little longer ones, both from 1934 when Jack began broadcasting for General Tire. The News-Sun printed this on May 19.

Jack Benny City’s Contribution To Radio World, Will Star In Picture
Comedian Scheduled To Leave In Two Weeks To Start Film In Hollywood, Cal.
Jack Benny of radio fame, who has helped put Waukegan and Lake county on the map in the radio world, has signed a contract to star in a film for United Artists, according to reports today. Mary Livingston, his wife and radio partner, will go with him and they will continue their Friday evening broadcasts from Los Angeles, it is understood.
Jack is scheduled to leave for the movie city, Hollywood, within two weeks to start on the picture, according to Larry Wolters, writer of movie star gossip.
Benny's father, Mayer Kubelsky, was for years a tailor in Waukegan but now resides in Lake Forest when he is not in Florida. He recently returned from the south nicely tanned and visited the News-Sun office to extend his thanks for the favorable publicity his son has been receiving. It is Jack's success which has made it possible for his father to enjoy life and spend the winter months in Florida.
The radio star is well known locally having played the violin as a boy on the stage of the old Barrison theater here. He was then considered a boy prodigy on the fiddle but he drifted away from playing as he grew older and established himself as one of the leading comedians of the country. The violin gets little attention nowadays.
Benny was in Waukegan only a few months ago and visited friends here, spending a good deal of his time with Julius Sinykin, local clothier, who has known Jack for many years.

The General Tire version of the Benny show debuted on April 6. Don Wilson was Jack’s new announcer, Don Bestor now led the orchestra, with Mary Livingstone and singer Frank Parker holdovers from his series for Chevrolet. The News-Sun of April 25 gave a roundup of reviews.

FINE TRIBUTES TO JACK BENNY
Radio Editors Of Various Newspapers Give Big Hand to Waukegan Star.
Radio editors of American daily newspapers speak their opinions frankly about the important coast-to-coast radio programs that are on the air. If they don't like a program, they say so, very distinctly. If they do like it, they say that, too.
Here are some of the editorial expressions of opinion that appeared in representative American daily newspapers as Jack Benny of Waukegan opened his series for General Tire:
New York Sun: "Jack Benny's salary on that Friday night broadcast is reported to be $4000 a week. We think he's worth it."
New York Evening Post: "Jack opened his new commercial series last night and put on a very funny half hour that won more than its quota of laughs without telling jokes . . . We anticipate substantial amusement to be derived from the Benny-Bestor conversations." Cleveland, Ohio, News: "Don Bester has his band on the Jack Benny program. Don and Jack are old pals having been on the stage together. Bestor’s arrangements are often the fine on the air.”
Newark, N. J. Star-Eagle: "We saw Frank Parker, radio’s romantic and talented tenor, in New York just after he had signed the contract as soloist with Jack Benny's new show and he was as gratified as we were. He likes working with Jack and Mary Livingstone. Don Bestor’s orchestra will be on the new series and the show promises to be a hit."
Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch: "One comedian with whom we can find no fault, possibly because he permits other entertainers to tell his jokes, is Jack Benny."
Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal: “If I were king of radio, I’d encourage programs as Jack Benny's comedy.
Camden, N. J., Courier: "Good news! There’ll be no uncertainty to whether Jack Benny remains on the air! Benny has just been snapped up by a rubber manufacturer."
Wilmington, Del., Star: “To top off the evening, what could be better than Jack Benny with Mary Livingstone and Don Bestor’s orchestra?”
Pittsburgh, Pa., Post Gazette: "It’s nice to set Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Frank Parker and Don Bestor lined up on that new program."
Newark, N. J., Evening News: "Maybe that top rating that Jack Benny got as a radio comedian by radio editors of the country means something, for Jack has just signed a new contract. Jack will have Mrs B.—Mary Livingston— with him as usual, and Frank Parker."

Jack had one special broadcast heard in Waukegan—and elsewhere—in 1934 in lieu of his regular half hour. On June 1, he was part of an hour-long a “Century of Progress Radio Invitation” that originated from the Chicago World’s Fair and was broadcast across the U.S.; KFI aired it beginning at 6:30 p.m.

It began with Bill Hays announcing from Chicago: “Ladies and gentlemen we are going to cut in on our Chicago World’s Fair program for a few minutes to bring you the General Tire comedian, Jack Benny. Jack and Mary did a routine from Hollywood but were supposedly on a train travelling there (Jack had moved the show from New York to shoot Trans-Atlantic Merry-Go-Round). Besides one of Mary’s poems, the show’s unknown highlight was the first appearance with Benny of Frank Nelson. Instead of playing the “Yehhhhs?” man, he portrayed Clark Gable. Jack’s old buddy Benny Baker also appeared a native American selling a Pullman blanket.

You can see from the ad to the right that a few of Benny’s old colleagues also appeared on the broadcast, but from the Fair site in Chicago.

Judging by the Associated Press’ radio listings, if regular programming had taken place that evening, Waukegans would have been able to pick either Jack on the NBC-WEAF (Red) Network, a string symphony orchestra on the NBC-WJZ (Blue) Network and Phil Spitalny’s Ensemble on CBS. Somehow, in Waukegan we don’t think Spitalny would have had a chance, even with Evelyn and her magic violin, and Jack playing his un-magic one.

Ray Goes Krazy

Not being a Disney-phile, I associate Ray Huffine’s name with the Walter Lantz studio, where he took over from Ray Jacobs. His first cartoon was U-113 Hunger Strife (1960), directed by former Disney veteran Jack Hannah (title card to the right) and he continued to work for Lantz until a year before his death. Huffine was in Hannah’s unit with animator Al Coe at Disney and when the studio broke it up, the three ended up at Lantz.

Before Disney, Huffine was employed by Charlie Mintz. He was interviewed by his hometown paper, The Montana Standard, which published this story on February 8, 1934.

Ex-Butte Youth Discloses Secrets of Krazy Kat and His Companions of Screen
How Krazy Kat and that comic strip boy-character, Scrappy, are sent through their capers across a motion picture screen to amuse theater-goers throughout the nation was explained yesterday afternoon by Ray Huffine of Los Angeles, a former Butte youth who made good in the movie capital.
Mr. Huffine, art editor of Butte public high school's annual, The Mountaineer, in 1923, now is manager of the background art department of the Charles B. Mintz Cartoon studio, which distributes Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons through Columbia Pictures. With his wife, a California young woman enjoying her first visit to the Treasure state, he has been spending a two-week vacation at the ranch home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Huffine, near Bozeman. The two will leave by car this morning on their return to Hollywood.
At his room at the Leggat hotel yesterday the young artist exhibited a number of samples of his work, and explained that his position with the studio was similar to that of the director of the scenic department of the average motion picture plant.

"My three assistants and I prepare the setting or background for the cartoons," he said. "There are from 40 to 50 scenes in a 7-minute, 700-foot cartoon, and it takes about 13 days to complete a set of backgrounds. We put out 13 sets of each cartoons, or about 26 pictures a year."
Guiding Krazy along his adventurous course is not so simple a task as it appears on the screen, Mr. Huffine pointed out. First, the continuity and “gags" are worked out, and then the music is filled in so that the story may be timed and the characters animated to each musical beat.
After this, ''animators," using thin sheets of paper over a strong light, trace out the characters in the extremes of action, such as at the start, high point and finish of a jump. "In-betweeners handle the tedious detail of drawing the thousands of intermediate films, of which as many as 10,000 are necessary in one film.
These characters, in their 10,000 changed position[s], are then photographed over the appropriate backgrounds prepared by Mr. Huffine and his staff. "In pictures where Scrappy appears to be dashing along past a variety of scenery," Mr. Huffine said, "the figure actually is remaining in the same spot and the background, in the form of a long roll or panorama, is moving past instead."

Huffine’s watercolours were exhibited in the Los Angeles area; one October 1937 showing at a bookstore was announced in a newspaper story, with word that he was now employed by Walt Disney. Another in 1942 was for the war effort; it raised money for the Red Cross. A story in the Nov. 1942 edition of Screenland revealed he painted Disney characters on the walls of the girl’s bedroom in Dennis Morgan’s home.

The most interesting story about Huffine appeared on the wire in 1940. I can’t find the original story, but came across this re-write on the woman’s page of the Miami Daily News of Nov. 29, 1940.

Ideas born through necessity are often the most lasting. For instance, here's a story of how a color came into being sent by the United Press. A jar of Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry jam has made history. It all happened like this: Ray Huffine—Mrs. Huffine's husband—was sulking and fuming around his studio room one day. The studio happened to be one of those on the Walt Disney lot in Hollywood. Mr. Huffine is an animator for Disney.
This particular day Huffine was baffled completely in his search for a new and different color. He needed it for a certain layout in the Beethoven "pastoral" scene of Fantasia. Fantasia was then in the making.
So he paced the floor munching all the while at sandwiches from his lunch box, and, occasionally, dips into the jam jar. That was all the inspiration he needed. He smeared a delicate boysenberry wash over the background and results were highly satisfactory. The celluloids shot over the background didn't stick to the jam, either.
And so Mrs. Huffine's boysenberry color takes its place with the herb - root - berry - vegetable tints of the old masters.

Huffine was born in Missouri on October 12, 1905. After graduation, he was a bookkeeper for a glassware company in Butte in 1925, living at the YMCA. Disney evidently paid him well; the 1940 Census shows he had a maid. He took time away from animation during the war, working as a ship builder. If you see the name Charlotte Darling or Charlotte Huffine in animation circles, that was his second wife. They were married in 1959. His first wife, Beulah, ran a ballet studio. He died November 4, 1967.

More Van Beuren Heads

Time for some more zooming heads from a Van Beuren cartoon, this time from Midnight (released Oct. 12, 1930).

The storyline is basic. A revamped version of Farmer Alfalfa is trying to sleep but is awoken by a quartet of cats singing “Ida.” To stop them, he calls in the dog catcher, who releases a pile of dogs into his back yard (the dogs beat the crap out of the cats in cycle animation). But then Farmer Al can’t sleep because the dogs start singing to the “Sextette from Lucia.” A Jewish stereotype kicks him in the butt several times, which causes the farmer to go insane, as he dances and sings along with the doggie quartet.

The singing causes him to rise into the air.



Uh, oh. He realises he’s falling to the ground.



After watching the thud to the ground, the dogs resume singing.



They stop and everyone turns to the camera.



Here’s the zoom for two more notes. You’ll notice how the background goes black. You can’t tell with one frame, but these zooming heads always stopped and alternated two drawings, one with wavy lines and one without to animate the vibrato.



After holding the characters, their mouths resume their zoom toward the theatre audience.



John Foster and Mannie Davis get the "by" credit.

Borrowing

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera weren’t above re-using and borrowing, even before opening their own studio. The Tom and Jerry series went on and on and, after a while, new ideas get harder and harder to find. So Bill and Joe populated the cartoons with an annoying duck. And because of the Oscar win of The Two Mouseketeers (1952), Bill and Joe went to the well two more times with cartoons that had a French Revolution-era setting and morphed Nibbles into an annoying French accented little mouse. They were nominated for an Oscar for Touche, Pussy Cat! (1956), then tried again in Royal Cat Nap (released in 1958).

It wasn’t only this setting that was re-used. There’s a gag that dates back to Puss Gets the Boot (1940), Jerry and Nibbles throw dishes from high up, and Tom catches them every which way to stop them from breaking.



In Royal Cat Nap, Tom runs outside to a nearby hill to deposit the chinaware.



Hey, wait a minute! Isn’t this a Tex Avery gag?

Well, yes. After all, Bill and Joe borrowed Tex’s snickering dog concept (turning it into Muttley) and made his Southern wolf into a dog (Huckleberry Hound). In this short, Jerry spreads Tex tax onto the floor. Tom stifles his noise so he won’t wake up the King, running outside to the hill to scream. This is right out of Tex’s Deputy Droopy and a few other of his cartoons, except Tex and Heck Allen came up with variations to build on the gag.



Remember how Avery and Mike Maltese had Charlie the polar bear play “Brahms’ Lullabye” to put a watchdog to sleep in The Legend of Rockabye Point? Tom pulls the same stunt here with the King.



The animators of this undistinguished short are Ken Muse, Lew Marshall and Carlo Vinci, with backgrounds by Bob Gentle and layouts by Dick Bickenbach. By the time this cartoon was released, they were all working for Hanna and Barbera making Ruff and Reddy for NBC.

The Senator, I Say, The Senator

Fred Allen returned to the airwaves on October 7, 1945 after a year away for health reasons. He changed networks (NBC from CBS), sponsors (Standard Brands from the Texas Co.), and supporting players. Newspaper stories and ads (like the one to the right) mentioned a change in Allen’s Alley, but omitted the most significant change of all.

Listeners were told Parker Fennelly (Titus Moody) and Irving Kaufman (one half of the songwriting team of McGee and McGee) would be replacing Alan Reed (Falstaff Openshaw) and Charlie Cantor (who had left the show before it went off the air and was replaced by Greek dialectician Pat C. Flick as Pablo Itthepitches). There was no mention of the character that would outshine all of them.

Scott Smart had been at the first door in the Alley as Senator Bloat. Smart left the show when it signed off in June 1944. Allen found another politician, one he could hang a “Southern superiority” routine on. That was actor Kenny Delmar, whose Senator Claghorn became an instant hit. Delmar doubled as the show’s announcer and tripled for a while as one of the other singing/songwriting McGees. The pair didn’t last long and Reed returned at the start of 1945.

Claghorn wasn’t altogether an Allen or Delmar invention. He had a different name, and without the Dixie gimmick, on The Alan Young Show. The sponsor, in an incredible display of stupidity, ordered Delmar’s Councillor Cartenbranch taken off the show.

Here are a couple of stories giving some background. This is an unbylined feature piece from the Port Clinton Herald and Republican, Jan. 4, 1946.

The Senator Is Really Announcer Ken Delmar on Fred Allen Program
NEW YORK, N.Y.— Our loudest, most articulate legislator, “Senator Claghorn”, is otherwise known as Ken Delmar, announcer on the Fred Allen show, and although he sounds mighty southern he was born in the land of the bean and the cod.
“That’s Massachusetts, son, that’s Massachusetts."
The "Senator”, called by admiring columnists "that pro-Confederate windbag”, is fast becoming a national figure. His manner of interrupt himself constantly to ejaculate “I say," and then repeating what he said before to drive home his gags, is being copied the country over.

It was Fred Allen who named him "Senator Claghorn" after he heard him talk like that.
Born in Boston, Kenneth Delmar was brought to New York City with his family as an infant. He toured the country as a child-prodigy, vaudeville performer, and did blackface, drama, comedy, anything.
During the depression he abandoned the stage and went into the importing business mostly olives and other foodstuffs, with his step father for a number of years.
But Ken was always the "life of the party” and liked to make people laugh. He broke away from the olive business by opening a dancing school where he met his wife who was the ballet teacher.
Finally a radio audition at a local New York station netted him a $20 a week job. Soon after that he was asked to make a network audition for a commercial show and was so nervous that he couldn’t read the script.
So Ken told jokes in dialect. He even imitated W. C. Fields whom he’d seen in a movie the night before — and that was exactly what the director wanted. Ken got the job and held it for seven years.
Curley-haired, spectacled 33-year-old Ken was first called to Fred Allen’s attention by Minerva Pious (Mrs. Nussbaum) who thought he was so clever that Allen ought to know him. Allen, who knows a good thing when he hears it, caught right on.
He doesn’t even care when "Senator Claghorn” yells at him, "that was a joke son, that was a joke. Don’t let them get by you, son.”

Delmar explains Claghorn’s origin in Marvel Ings’ radio column of The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, March 24, 1946.

A PICTURE STORY of Allen’s Alley appears in the April issue of Pic magazine. It features the newest Alley resident, Senator Claghorn, portrayed by Ken Delmar. There are also sketches of

Minerva Pious, Parker Fennelly, Alan Reed, Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa. The picture story includes interesting quotes from all the characters on, NBC-WIBA’s Fred Allen show.
The bombastic Senator Claghorn may sound more southern than shortnin’ bread, but he was born in Boston 34 years ago. His family came to New York City when he was an infant, and he picked up that repetitious talk from a Texas farmer.
The Texan gave Ken Delmar a lift in his rickety car once when the then undiscovered senator hitch-hiked to California. Hour after hour, the rancher spouted about his ranch: “I’ve got 500 acres, 500 that is, of the best grazing land in the country. I say, son, the best in the country, you understand." Ken never forgot it.
He entered radio in 1936 on a local New York station, the same year that he married Alice Cochran, with whom he opened and closed a dancing school. Prior to that he worked for a short time with his step-father in the importing business. As a child, he played in the D. W. Griffith motion picture, “Orphans of the Storm."
Versatile is a word applied to Delmar, who, in addition to being Claghorn and announcer on the Fred Allen show, is also protagonist for jazz as emcee of the RCA Victor show also heard Sundays over WIBA. He’s also announcer on at least four other important network programs.
The Delmars live in Manhattan and have a son, Kenneth, Jr., age four, who likes to imitate his father.

Delmar was a fine actor, appearing on The Cavalcade of America, The Columbia Workshop and other dramatic shows, but Claghorn was his best-known role. It vaulted him into a starring role (as the Senator) in Eagle-Lion’s “It’s a Joke, Son,” and resulted in Mel Blanc modifying his voice for Foghorn Leghorn (it originally was based on a sheriff that appeared on Blue Monday Jamboree and other West Coast-based radio programmes of the early ‘30s).

Allen apparently felt Claghorn had run his course and gave Delmar a Russian character to make fun of Soviet braggadocio and lack of freedoms. Sergei Stroganoff never caught on with the audience (his name was changed after a $50,000 lawsuit was filed by a real person with the same name) and the Senator continued to appear off and on until Allen went off the air in 1949 (the real Sergei N. Stroganoff was an accountant who died in Cedar Grove, N.J. in 1965).

There was life in the Senator afterward. Delmar appeared as a Claghorn knock-off on Broadway in Texas Li’l Darlin’ and then again as a Texas oil man on the CBS radio quiz show Funny Side Up. Into the 1960s, Delmar gave motivational talks and appeared at sales conferences as the Senator. And there was a re-creation of the Alley with Min Pious, Parker Fennelly and Peter Donald on Les Crane’s Nightlife late night show in 1965, again on PBS in 1972, when Delmar had retired to West Palm Beach, and again on WBZ Boston in 1975 (Delmar’s appearances in the Alley would not have heard on that station as it was a CBS affiliate).

The Senator was a Dixiecrat, but Allen was no partisan political humourist—he had Delmar take cracks at President Truman now and then. These days, jokes involving American politics bring out an extreme nastiness and cruelty in far too many people (especially on “social” media). I’d like to think audiences can still laugh about Senator Glass being “broken up,” Senator Byrd “ravin” and Senator Aiken “back,” spoken by a character so loyal to his part of the country, he only drank from Dixie Cups and refused to wear a Union suit.

Kenny Delmar, who brought the Senator to life, would tell you it was all a joke, son. And he told them very well.

Perspective Pig

Porky Pig, in an airplane, chases a fish in Plane Dippy, the third short by director Tex Avery released by Warner Bros.



For a while at Warners, Tex tried to make things interesting visually with various camera angles and perspective animation. In this short, the chase is done in cycle animation for a bit, with both the fish and Porky’s car coming toward the camera. Some random frames.



As far as I know, this is the first Warners cartoon where Virgil Ross got screen credit for animation, along with Sid Sutherland. Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett were also animating in the unit.

Bernie Brown’s score is full of “I’d Love to Take Orders From You” (military scenes) and “When I Yoo-Hoo in the Valley” (the significance is lost on me). Joe Dougherty is Porky in this one and we get to hear Berneice Hansell’s annoying squeaky giggle.

The Motion Picture Herald gives two different release dates for this short, Dec. 21, 1935 and Jan. 4, 1936. The earliest screening I’ve found is at the Majestic in Abilene, Texas on Dec. 29th. It wasn’t copyrighted until the following April.

UPA Fudgets

Fudget’s Budget won first place in the animated short subject category at the Venice International Film Festival in 1955. Donald Heraldson, in his book Creator of Life, A History of Animation (1975, Drake Publishers), describes the animation gimmick employed:

“Fudget’s Budget” used backgrounds that were psychologically interlaced with the animation — graph paper. Family members would come and go, like stock market statistics, by vanishing in and out of the graph paper backgrounds.

Here’s an example from the start of the cartoon. George Fudget is formed from a question mark on a title. He is a straight line that expands to human outline form (one drawing every two frames).



Irene Fudget comes into the scene in between lines on a graph. We’ve skipped some drawings but you can get the idea of how the animation worked.



An article on future styles in animation in the April 1959 edition of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound points out

Movement now rarely involves the whole figure...In Fudget’s Budget (’55) a couple twice get up to dance, “because they enjoy it,” then return to sit completely motionless at their nightclub table. This deliberate alternation of stylised movement and total immobility can be used to obvious satirical effect.

Yet the article isn’t altogether praising this type of movement, calling the limited animation in UPA’s Ham and Hattie series “humourless stiffness.”

Pamela Anne King, reporting on the Edinburgh Film Festival in the October 1955 issue of Films in Review proclaimed Fudget’s Budget “an ideal cartoon for this inflationary decade” but admitted the Scots in the audience didn’t really get it because the short was “a bit too tangibly American.” And Ernest Callenbach, in his review of Flebus in the spring 1959 edition of Film Quarterly, termed Fudget’s Budget “UPA’s last creative gasp.”

The cartoon was directed by Bobe Cannon, straying away from his seeming preference for shorts starring children. He co-wrote the cartoon with Tee Hee and Tedd Pierce. Adam Abraham, in his superb book When Magoo Flew noted:

Hee’s own financial troubles inspired the film, which presents Mr. and Mrs. Fudget as neon-outline figures on ledger paper to suggest a world composed of numbers and sums. Hee worked closely with Jules Engel to accomplish the film’s look.

George Bruns provides an old-time, barroom-like piano score that is jaunty enough to lessen any pretensions the film may have had. Gerry Ray, Alan Zaslove and Frank Smith are the credited animators.