Musicians Elsie Mae and Ralph Waldo Emerson Married on WLS

Falling asleep at night to the sweet strains of the popular Swiss instrument, the zither, played by her father and mother, is one of Elsie Mae Emerson's earliest memories as a little girl up in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. She loved it, for like the other seven members of her family, Elsie Mae Look was a born musician.

Every member of the family plays the piano. The guitar, the mandolin, and the violin were also favored instruments in the home. Emerson's mother taught all kinds of stringed instruments.

At the age of three Emerson amazed her family by sitting down to the piano and imitating a tune she had heard one of her elders play. From that time on until she began the study of music at five, she played by ear. She was so gifted and so full of music that her teacher had difficulty getting her attention fixed on the notes, for Emerson thought it was much more fun playing by ear.

During her girlhood days Emerson was identified with everything musical in her home town. She played for all school affairs, dancing classes, glee clubs, the orchestra, musicales and operettas. On Sunday she played for the church and choir. On week nights, she was pianist at the local theater. She studied voice, organ, piano and harmony at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Then Emerson came to Chicago to continue her study of music at the American Conservatory of music and at the Columbia School of music. Later she studied with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man she was to marry.

Together, Elsie Mae and Ralph came to WLS in 1925 as alternate organists. During the years that have passed, listeners have thrilled to the music of these two artists.

Working together in their mutual interest of music, each realized that they had so much in common that life without the other would not be complete. One of the outstanding events of the station's early days was the wedding of Elsie Mae and Ralph which took place before the microphones in the Sherman Hotel on April 9, 1925.

Two sons have brought added happiness to the Emerson home. Ralph Waldo Emerson Jr. (Skippy) was born on June 5, 1930, and little John Skinner Emerson (Jackie) was born on Halloween 1935.

According to Ralph, Elsie Mae is not only a fine musician but she is a splendid cook. In these modern days of bake shops, Elsie Mae bakes all the bread the family uses.

There is nothing Emerson enjoys as much as going swimming. She loves the great outdoors and though her home is in the heart of a great city, the farther away from civlization she can get, the happier she is.

She stands four feet, 11 1/2 inches and tips the scales at just 100 pounds. She has brown eyes and softly waving auburn hair. She was born in Kaukana, Wisconsin, November 18.

Jack Holden in Stand By, April 10, 1947

Old Time Radio · Elsie Mae Emerson · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Music · WLS · Chicago ·

Add a Comment · Link

Hazel Dopheide's Journey From Chautauqua to Radio

Both the training school and the practical school of experience made Hazel Dopheide the finished actress whom radio listeners know. After graduating from the dramatics department of McKendree College and the School of Speech at Northwestern University, Hazel entered Chautauqua and lyceum work. This was shortly before the rise of radio and Chautauqua was in its heyday.

At 18, Dopheide was billed as the youngest dramatic reader of plays on the lyceum platform. She read the parts of all characters -- men, women and children. Her repertoire included such plays as The World and His Wife, The Money Makers, Mary Magdalene and Friendly Enemies. The last named play Dopheide memorized by attending seven consecutive performances in Chicago.

Dopheide has plenty of memories of long sleeper jumps between towns, of leaky tents -- playing her part while the stage manager held an umbrella over her head -- blazing heat and shivering nights. She knows how it feels to go on when too ill to be safely out of bed, how it feels to lose her voice in the middle of a performance. And she loved every minute of her experience, really.

There were many compensating factors -- travel to strange towns, interesting countryside, amusing incidents of the show and the companionship and friendship of her fellow artists. One night Hazel was playing the piano accompaniment for a tenor solo. A bass singer stood beside her, turned the music, and with a palmetto fan, shooed the mosquitos away from her. Finally one skeeter that Dopheide says must have been the size of a hummingbird landed on her neck. The bass singer couldn't resist. He slapped her neck with a loud resounding crack. He got the mosquito, all right, but he broke up the tenor's solo.

Another time when Dopheide was in the tensest part of a dramatic reading, a half-grown kitten ambled onto the stage. Almost immediately a small dog in the rear of the tent -- "he was waiting for his cue," she says -- rushed happily down the aisle and with loud, ecstatic barks chased the cat from the stage. She had paused for this disturbance, then she picked up her lines and went on.

She enjoyed her association with such stars as Strickland Gillilan, Edmund Vance Cooke, the Rev. S. Parkes Cadman, Madame Schumann-Heink and many others.

Dopheide started in radio at KMOX St. Louis, playing the leads in scores of dramatic productions. One of her most successful was Memories, which ran for two and a half years. At KMOX she also was featured in short stories and plays in which she took all the parts. When she came to Chicago, her first regular work was on WLS in Cradle Dramas. In these she played mother roles and as a result was soon in demand, especially for mother parts. However, she does a wide variety of other parts from ingenues to character.

Her favorite role at present is the feminine lead of Ma and Pa Smithers, even if she does have to "hector" Pa frequently. She conceived and built the idea of House By the Side of the Road in which she and Tony Wons starred on NBC last year. Other shows in which she has appeared include Homemakers' plays, Station E-Z-R-A, Ma Perkins, Little Orphan Annie, Judy and Jane, Romance of Helen Trent, Just Plain Bill, Painted Dreams, Backstage Wife and others.

Dopheide was born in Palmyra, Illinois, on May 12. She's a tall girl, with gray eyes, brown hair and one of the grandest smiles you're apt to encounter.

From Stand By, November 16, 1935

Old Time Radio · Hazel Dopheide · KMOX · St. Louis · WLS · Chicago · Chautauqua · Ma And Pa Smithers · Ma Perkins · Little Orphan Annie · Judy And Jane · Romance Of Helen Trent · Just Plain Bill · Backstage Wife ·

Add a Comment · Link

The Biggest Boners from Radio's Golden Age

Ever feel like pushing yourself under the rug when your tongue tripped, slipped or balked and turned up with a neat little phrase you never should have uttered? Or hopelessly muffed an important introduction, or stuttered on the snappy comeback that should have panicked your dinner guests?

Then you can readily sympathize with the poor announcer or actor who suddenly finds themself pulling what they are sure must be radio's prize "boner." Though they can be laughed at later, these inexplicable twists of the tongue have given the boys and girls in the studios some mighty bad moments.

Such slips in no way reflect on a performer's ability, for practically everyone on the air -- veteran and novice, star and bit player -- makes his share of "fluffs." The phenomenon can't be explained any more logically than tripping on a sidewalk or spilling a glass of water on your vest. Boners just happen, and no amount of rehearsal and preparation can guarantee they won't.

Sometimes, the result of a jumbled phrase causes the listener to howl with far greater glee than could be induced by professional gag writers after a week of burning the midnight oil. While most of the quip are innocently humorous, some of them have sent the perpetrators off into a corner, blushing furiously, while censors gnawed their blue pencils in future indignation. Like the time that -- perhaps we'd better not go into that one!

High on the list of funniest twisted tongue lines is one that occurred during the broadcast of an NBC soap opera. The harassed heroine was aboard a ship riding a dense dog. In a voice taut with emotion, she proclaimed to her coast-to-coast audience that the fog was "thick as sea poop."

Another momentarily unhappy performer was the young man playing the part of an aide-de-camp to a German general on Mutual's Nick Carter. Said the general: "We are surrounded on all sides by the enemy, they come from the left, from the right, from the east, west, north and south -- and we are without food and water!" The aide was supposed to exclaim, "Is it that bad?" Instead the luckless actor found himself burbling, "Is that bad?"

Then, of course, there was the dramatic actress, appearing on a CBS serial, whose simple line, "We'll give the bell a pull," came out unexpectedly as "We'll give the bull a pill!" And young Bill Lipton, who has appeared in hundreds of roles since his air debut at the age of 11, once admonished a fellow actor in a soap opera to "Keep a stuff ipper lup, old boy."

It isn't always the players who supply unintentional humor in the dramatic shows. The boys in the sound effects department can claim their share of the scallions for boners and poor timing. Many an overworked producer and director has spent sleepless nights planning all sorts of medieval tortures to inflict on the hapless sound effects person who ruined a dramatic scene.

On one occasion, the breathless lovers in a popular soap opera were supposed to whisper their words of endearment against a soft, light background of summer breeze. The director signaled for his "light breeze" but the sound technician -- evidently in a slight state of confusion -- obliged with a gale of hurricane proportions. The young lovers were actually drowned out by the sound of nature run wild.

Then there was the time the plot called for the sound of surf beating against the rocks. What the listeners heard instead was a sound of a crowd cheering the players at a football game. The ocean waves are said to whisper many things. This was probably the first time in history that they roared out, "Hold that line!"

From Tune In, July 1945

Old Time Radio · Soaps · Nick Carter · Mutual · CBS · NBC ·

Add a Comment · Link

How Two CBS Sound Technicians Created a Horde of Rats

When the script for CBS' Escape called for the sound of a horde of rats attacking a lighthouse, squealing, clawing at the windows, gnawing through a trap door and boarding a ship, it would seem almost enough to stump even a veteran radio soundperson. Escape's two veteran radio technicians, Bill Gould and Cliff Thorsness, admit that creating this effect was certainly about their toughest challenge. Their work on it deserves a Distinguished Achievement Award.

"It was a tough show to work out the sound on," the technicians acknowledged when we cornered them for a behind-the-scenes discussion, "because none of the effects called for were straight, legitimate ones. They couldn't be found in any sound library -- and CBS had the finest. We had sound recordings of individual rats, but none of them in quantity or doing the things this script called for them to be doing. So we had to start strictly from scratch."

Working under the supervision of Al Span, head of the CBS sound department, Thorsness and Gould set about manufacturing the realistic noises of a rat attack.

Three full days of preparation were required, including one day of special recording. To create the noise of rats in great quantity, the sound technicians combined recordings of mice, birds, pigs and monkeys, playing them back at diverse RPM speeds. They recorded for four solid hours, employing 10 turntables.

To create the sound of rats clawing at the windows, a big round stiff brush (off the janitor's giant sweeping broom) was hit upon as the most effective prop. The noise of the brush being swept across actual glass, amplified through a contact mic (the "throat mic" such as was used by Army pilots during the war) produced the desired effect.

For the sound of the rats gnawing through a wooden trap door, berry boxes were crunched, not as customarily in the hand, but in the technicians' mouths, because the actual noise made by the contact of wood against teeth made the difference between an unconvincing sound and a startlingly real one.

For the sound of the rats' teeth working on the metal parts of the trap door, tin cans were used and again a contact mic was employed.

The technicians reported that one of the most difficult effects to create for the show was the noise of the rats as they cling to the revolving beacon atop the lighthouse. For this, the volume of the rats' squealing was increased, then faded out, to produce the realism of their closeness as they were swung towards the hearer.

Another of the more difficult effects, according to the two technicians, came about when the script had one of the rats breaking away from the park, calling for the noise of a single rat to be heard effectively against the combined squealings and clawings of the horde.

The final difficult effect called for was the sound of the rodents vacating the lighthouse to scamper aboard a boat.

An additional reason the show was particularly challenging, the two sound effects people declared, was the fact that Escape's producer William N. Robson is a strong perfectionist. "An effect might sound very satisfactory," they clarified, "but with Robson, it had to sound really real."

"We were pleased," they admitted, "when Harry Bartell, one of the actors, told us we'd made the rats real enough to smell them."

Billy Gould laughed. "They became real enough to me -- I actually found myself not able to eat."

Escape's rats, however, weren't the first eerie effect which Gould and Thorsness have been called upon to produce.

"Remember," smiled Billy, ready to spoil his appetite again, "Arch Oboler's man-eating spider on Lights Out?"

"And," supplied Cliff, with a weak grin, "the attack of the ands on Escape's broadcast of Leiningen vs. the Ants!"

Thorsness also recalled working on the Norman Corwin production which starred sound entitled The Anatomy of Sound.

"That one wasn't easy," he remembered. "It was a narration built around all the ordinary sounds one hears throughout a day. It was a problem of producing simple sounds in a natural way yet making the listener very aware of them."

In addition to Escape, Thorsness works sound on other drama shows as Family Hour and Philip Marlowe, and has created effects in the past for Norman Corwin, Orson Welles, Man Called X, Big Town, Hollywood Star Time and Blondie.

Gould is soundperson on Escape, Johnny Dollar, the Joan Davis show and Our Miss Brooks, and previously worked Suspense, The Whistler, Fletcher Markel's Ford Theater, the Jack Kirkwood series, and the Jimmy Durante program.

Both Gould and Thorsness have been with the CBS sound department for more than 10 years.

Prior to this, Thorsness have manager of LA's downtown Orpheum Theater, and Gould was show-business veteran, having worked in vaudeville and tent shows since the age of seven.

Gould's goal is to produce and direct variety shows for television. Thorsness aspires to the production end of radio dramatic productions.

As a perfect tag for this story dealing with their creation of realistic radio rats, Thorsness made a confession.

"I can't stand mice. When it comes to taking a mouse out of a trap, I make my wife do it."

Lynn Roberts in Radio-TV Life, March 24, 1950

Old Time Radio · Sound · Bill Gould · Cliff Thorsness · Escape · William Robson · Lights Out · Arch Oboler · Norman Corwin · Orson Welles · Johnny Dollar ·

Add a Comment · Link

Bobby Benson Star Billy Halop Led the Dead End Kids

Bobby Benson was one of those rare network shows that had two distinct radio series, with over a decade separating both runs. The original show was aired on CBS from 1932 to 1936. Thirteen years after its demise, it was resurrected with a new cast on Mutual in 1949 and it continued on the air until 1955.

Despite the fact that both versions were of relatively short tenure, and were aimed almost exclusively at a juvenile audience, the Bobby Benson show did accomplish at least two significant things. It permanently forged the personality of the leader of the Dead End Kids and it launched the career of a comedian who eventually won five Emmy Awards on network television.

Herbert C. Rice gets the credit for creating the Bobby Benson show. The premise of this kids' adventure program was that a young boy inherited a ranch in the Big Bend country of Texas, near the banks of the Rio Grande River. Aided by his foreman Texas Mason (originally named Buck Mason) and a bunch of other adult cowpokes, including Waco, Harka and Irish, this young lad rode the range to adventure and mystery on a white horse named Silver Spot.

The 1930s show was sponsored by the Hecker H-O Company, the makers of H-O Oats, Hecker's Cream Farina, Presto Cake Flour and other grain products. In deference to the sponsor, Bobby's cattle spread was called the H-Bar-O Ranch.

I haven't determined how many youngsters were the radio voice of the Cowboy Kid in the 1930s version, but the principal one was Billy Halop, who was about 12 years old at that time. His sister Florence was also in the cast and she played Polly Armstead, Bobby's companion. Both of the Halops had started early in New York City radio; Billy was on Skippy, The March of Time, The Children's Hour and Lady Next Door.

Billy Halop was given star treatment as Bobby Benson; his photo was prominent in several radio premiums and he toured the U.S. in W.T. Johnson's Circus Rodeo as a feature act. It was heady stuff for the young radio actor and Halop never got over it, despite his later success on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In the fall of 1935 Billy left the Bobby Benson show to join rehearsals of Sidney Kingsley's new play Dead End, which opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theater on October 29, 1935. Halop, then 16, portrayed the leader of a gang of street urchins, some of whom were played by other young radio actors. Henry Hall, using his childhood nickname of Huntz as his stage name, was the same age as Halp and had been in many a series: Coast to Coast on a Bus, Home Sweet Home, The Rich Kid and Life of Jimmy Braddock. Bobby Jordan, youngest of the gang at 13, was also on several radio programs, including Peter Bachelor.

Rounding out the Dead End Kids in the play were Sidney Lumet, Gabe Dell (who was born Gabriel Del Vecchio), Charles Duncan, Bernard Punsley and the Gorcey brothers, Leo and David. Dell, Duncan and Punsley had some stage experience but none on radio. The two Gorceys had no acting experience at all, but their father, diminutive Bernard Gorcey, had been a lead in Broadway's long running Abie's Irish Rose and also played radio's Popeye. Billy's sister Florence was not cast in Dead End but Gabe Dell's sister Ethel was.

Dead End did not open to critical acclaim, but it slowly built its popularity and eventually ran for 687 performances, a fine record for those days. For comparison, the original Broadway runs of Our Town and The Little Foxes totaled less than 300 and 400 performances, respectively.

Duncan, who had the secondary lead in the gang, quit the show in the summer of 1936 to take a major role in another drama called Bright Honor. Leo Gorcey, his understudy, took over the role. Bright Honr was anything but; it closed after 17 performances and Duncan disappeared with it.

By that time Warner Brothers had bought the movie rights to Dead End and all the major kids in the cast (minus Duncan and Lumet) headed for Hollywood. The wise-cracking hoodlums made about half-a-dozen successful films for Warners, supporting leads like Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O'Brien and Ronald Reagan. Eventually, minus Halop, the boys went on to make nearly a hundred movies as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys.

In August 1974 I interviewed Huntz Hall in St. Louis where he was making a stage appearance on the Goldenrod Showboat, a riverboat theater. Speaking of his Dead End Kids days in New York and Hollywood, Hall said, "It's sad, but Billy never got along with us and we never got along with him. He just never got over being Bobby Benson. He had to be the star and insisted on making more money than the rest of us. It just wasn't fair. Between movie scenes at Warners, Billy would be arguing for more money in his contract while the rest of us kids were playing on a mock-up pirate ship on the back lot."

Jack French in OTR Digest, May to June 1991

Old Time Radio · Bobby Benson · Billy Halop · Westerns · Children · Dead End Kids · Bowery Boys · East Side Kids · Florence Halop · Huntz Hall · Herb Rice · Sidney Lumet ·

Add a Comment · Link

The Doctors Talk It Over Envigorates Medical Audience

They laughed when the after dinner speaker, talking about the shows and ratings, referred to Lederle Laboratories' The Doctors Talk It Over. When the snickers died down, an advertising agency executive remarked, "The program must have something. It's in its third year on the air and the American Cyanamid Company (Lederle's parent company) doesn't throw away a quarter of a million dollars a year for anything, not even a broadcast program."

Lederle spends more on its air program than the entire advertising budget of all the rest of Cyanamid's units. It spends it to reach a tiny segment of the dialing audience, the medical profession. It has nothing to sell the public. It sells only ethical pharmaceuticals and biologicals, products used by hospitals and dispensed by druggists upon doctors' prescriptions. It sells nothing on the air, the program having none of the aspects of commercialization expected on a sponsored program. Sole identification of the billpayer is the opening, which states:

Lederle Laboratories, Incorporated, a unit of American Cyanamid Company and manufacturers of pharmaceutical and biological products, present transcribed: The Doctors Talk It Over.

That's all that directly or indirectly ties into the business of the sponsor until the signoff, when once again the announcer states:

The Doctors Talk It Over has been a transcribed presentation of Lederle Laboratories, Incorporated, a unit of American Cyanamid Company, and manufacturers of pharmaceutical and biological products.

There is generally also an offer of a free copy of the talk to professional listeners "by writing to Lederle Laboratories, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, New York."

Just three mentions of the corporate title, that's all, weekly at 10 to 10:15 p.m. EST for well over $300,000 a year.

The program rating is usually between 1 and 2 (March 2 broadcast reached a 2.2), ranking, report after report, at the bottom of all sponsored shows on the air.

Lederle wants to reach just one audience -- MDs. Its rating is so low that there are no audience composition figures available from normal rating sources, nor are these same sources able to produce sponsor identification figures. That necessitated a special study, for it couldn't be taken for granted that The Doctors Talk It Over was reaching the correct audience. These special studies have been made three times. The returns indicate that doctors are listening and that regardless of the restricted air commercial, they know who is sponsoring the show.

The apparently small percentage of those who have heard the program who listen regularly is not unusual in the medical segment of the listening audience, since medical professionals are for obvious reasons in no position to listen regularly at any time of the day, although 10-10:15 p.m. is a period when the greatest percentage of medicos is likely to be available to listen.

It is also impossible to choose medical subjects that are of interest to all doctors, since of necessity some of the programs are addressed to specialists and others to general practitioners.

Finally, the program has to fight for medical ears against purely entertainment programs. For the latter reason the program has switched from Friday to Tuesday to Monday seeking a period when it wouldn't have to fight Bob Hope, Fibber McGee or Bing Crosby. That it does reach and influence as large a segment of the medical profession as it does is a tribute to the thinking behind the program.

It is not a pseudo-medical broadcast. The doctors who talk it over are leading figures in the medical field. At first they looked with a suspicious eye upon broadcasting under the sponsorship of a commercial firm. Most of that looking askance is no longer evident. Even the medical associations, both country and national, now feel that The Doctors Talk It Over is the nearest thing possible to a closed-circuit meeting with the people who mean the most to the professional. It is "ethical publicity" for the doctors who talk and a professional brush-up for listeners.

Like all successful broadcasting, and The Doctors Talk It Over is successful despite its bottom rating, the program is not required to travel under its own steam alone. Promotion of the program differs from that for a general-appeal air show.

The direct mail and giveaways are sent 100 percent to the medical professional. Over 123,000 announcement cards are sent out monthly to the medical and allied professions. They are decorative as a railroad timetable, but they do list the subjects, the authorities and the stations.

Each week an average of 1,800 reprints of the broadcast are requested and sent out. An offer of two bound volumes containing the actual scripts of the first 52 broadcasts brought in 85,000 requests. That meant 85,000 doctors impressed with Lederle Laboratories. Disks of each broadcast are made part of a circulating library and are drawn upon regularly by schools, medical societies, nursing schools and allied professional groups. This service, provided without charge, has built extra respect among these groups for the ethical character of the program and its sponsor.

Not only has the program given Lederle the medical personality it desired but its medical representatives, numbering about 250, find it has made their job of contacting the profession and hospitals far easier and much more productive. The 50 branch offices also note that direct calls from pharmacists have increased progressively as the program has been on the air.

Nurses and attendants also feel a glow when Lederle is mentioned, for several broadcasts have placed the nursing profession before the medical profession. A recent program was devoted 100 percent to the Massachusetts Plan, which establishes regular increments for not only the nurses in hospitals but attendants as well. Since the plan also regards the nurse as a professional person and looks forward to the day that nursing will not include maid and porter duties, it's natural that Lederle, who brought information about the plan to the profession and the public eavesdroppers who listened in on the program (March 17), won more friends through the broadcast.

The presentation was one of the first network transcribed programs. The reason it is transcribed is that it would be impossible to guarantee that any practicing physician could be available for broadcast at any specific time. Then too a doctor is not a professional broadcaster and plenty of work with each guest authority is essential if they are to sound as their coworkers in the field expect.

Milton Cross is the reporter on the show, and with Joseph L. Boland, Jr., of the agency travels to each recording date, with the authority outlining the scope and factual context of the show for the writer.

The Doctors Talk It Over may not rate among popular broadcast vehicles but it's right for the profession to which it's addressed and has justified its cost of a quarter of a million a year to a firm that had spent practically nothing before for advertising.

Today the outstanding ethical pharmaceutical house -- to the medical profession -- is Lederle. The company has arrived at that pinnacle through not selling on the air.

From Sponsor, April 1947

Old Time Radio · Doctors Talk It Over · Medicine · Sponsors · Joseph Boland Jr. · Milton Cross ·

Add a Comment · Link

The Old Maestro Ben Bernie Was a Lousy Violin Salesman

It was really aversion to silence that resulted in the professional debut of Ben Bernie. Years ago, but not too many says the Old Maestro, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in a tiny blacksmith shop, a son with a rhythmic cry was born.

The father, a master smithy, wanted him to become an engineer, but the mother, a gentle-voiced little person who was sometimes discovered gazing entranced into a violin store window, held out for their son to be a musician. Bernie developed into a dutiful son. He studied to be an engineer and learned to play the violin in his spare time.

But fate interjected a long slim finger which pointed another way. Bernie was seventeen and he was a violin salesman in a New York department store. It was his duty from nine to five each day to produce melodies of one kind or another on the $4.98 instruments marked down from $7.50.

They were pretty bad as fiddles go, and so apparently was Bernie. He took to explaining to what prospective customers there were that if his playing annoyed them, it was even worse on him because he had to stay with it.

Somehow the patter caught hold, just as it did years later on dance floors all over the country. Crowds fell into the way of gathering around the original violin salesman. Because he told them that the violins were awful and the upkeep was something terrible, he sold more than anybody else ever had.

One night Bernie wished on the stars on his way home and the next morning a visiting booking agent happened along. He veni-ed, he vidi-ed, he vici-ed and Bernie signed on the dotted line. The Old Maestro was launched in the show business!

After success as a single act in which he discovered his patter combined with his violin was an unbeatable team, he found himself on the same vaudeville bill as Phil Baker. They tell this story that happened in a small Minnesota town. Bernie was standing out front one evening talking to the cashier when a husky miner came up and put down a quarter.

"But it will cost you 50 cents," said the cashier.

The customer pointed a knobby finger at a sign reading "Evenings, 50 cents; matinees, 25 cents," and demanded, "How about that?

"Yes, but that 25 cents is for the matinees."

"Oh, that's all right," responded the son of toil. "I'd just as soon sit in one of those."

After the war, Bernie organized an orchestra with himself as its wise-cracking leader. It was an immediate vaudeville hit and a one-month engagement at the Roosevelt Grill in New York stretched into five years. His stomping ground of late has been the College Inn in Chicago.

It was there that he developed his penchant for 20 long, black cigars a day; there, too, that his love for horse racing first became known. Bernie says he has paid for more horses than the Whitneys or Vanderbilts, but they never let him take them home.

Right now Bernie and his orchestra are on tour, but in the fall they will be back at the Inn. "I hope you like it," says Bernie, and slowly knocks the ashes from the end of his slim cigar.

From Radio Guide, July 23, 1932

Old Time Radio · Ben Bernie · Music · Roosevelt Grill · New York City · Chicago · Vaudeville ·

Add a Comment · Link

Read More Entries