The Hustons' Song

I have not yet recovered from the stratospheric high that came from watching Anjelica Huston sing "September Song." One reviewer wrote that fans of "Smash" never saw it coming.  That made it even more special.  The great lady doing the song written for her Grandfather, Walter Huston in 1938. Recorded by dozens,  it will always belong to him. And now Anjelica, who never knew her grandfather, has paid him a splendid tribute. I'm not much for TV, I could get along without it.  But once in a while something great happens.  It's a SMASH with this old man.

Go Retro!

Here is one fine blog that you  need to visit.  It's beautifully and lovingly produced by Pam.  I think she's in Boston.  http://goretro.blogspot.com /  She says she writes it because "some of  us  still believe in yesterday."  Count me in, Pam.              

You could say my praise is a supreme compliment because I'm old enough to be Pam's father and the era and its people that she often deals with are a bit too recent for me.  Being a geezer, my interest in past popular culture, especially music,  goes way back  before the mid '50s and early '60s when the rock culture forever changed the world.  "Retro" as it's used today seems to generally refer to that period of Elvis, the Beatles and  on into the '80s.

But thankfully, giving me something I can relate to, Pam put a picture of old Satchmo on her page. She does lots of research, posts great illustrations and her style is fun to read.      

Pam's post that got me all excited is about the several versions of the Titanic tragedy that have been produced. She has seen them all, deciding that she likes the 1958  film,  A Night to Remember best.  I got all warm and fuzzy when she wrote that she watched it with her father.  I have a daughter just a few years older than Pam.  She shares much of my interest in old stuff . That's special.

To read Pam's whole story,  check out Go Retro.   The link is above the picture.  It's a good one.         



                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Anjelica's a SMASH

Stay tuned for ravings about Anjelica Huston after I look up some stuff. What an arresting face.  And a magnificent nose.  I'm glad she didn't get it fixed.
 

MASON ADAMS CADBURY BUNNY

 

We voice freaks are probably obsessive.  We  hear a voice and we go nuts 'til we can find out who it is. I'm crazed from trying to figure out if the cute Cadbury Bunny commercials still use the voice of the late Mason Adams.  The internet says Willard Scott replaced him on the Smuckers spots but I find no statement that Scott voices the Cadbury commercials. 

If it's Scott or someone else doing a superb rendering of  Adams,  he's very very good.  With practice, I guess any good voice artist could do the unusual inflections that made Adams so memorable and unmistakeable, but capturing the precise, grandfatherly timbre would be exceedingly difficult.  That's why I think the current Cadbury spots don't use the Adams voice.

HOWARD'S WEATHER

As Detroit Tigers radio engineer for 50 years used to say during the pregame feed to stations on the Tigers network, "IT'S COLDER THAN A WITCH'S TIT"

Howard is 94, still lives in Southgate.

Hermits and Howls

I listened to a 1940 broadast of  "The Hermit's Cave" last night.  The howling wind and wolves accompanying the heremit's demented cackle as he introduced his ghost stories gave me no nightmares this time.  I don't remember if they did back in the '40s when I and lots of other kids listened under the covers.

That's one of just a handful of big time radio shows that originated in Detroit.  The Hermit came from WJR while WXYZ produced "The Lone Ranger,"  "The Green Hornet" and "The Challenge of the Yukon."

When the Hermit moved to the West, several of the young broadcasters who worked on the show became very famous.  One was William Conrad, later Marshal Matt Dillon on radio's "Gunsmoke." I didn't watch the TV version.  It wasn't right without Conrad as the Marshal and Parley Baer as Chester. John Dehner, one of the best known voices of the Hermit, became Palladin on radio's "Have gun will travel."

I suppose I'm a foolish old coot to feel pity for the young pups who did not grow up during radio's golden era.  What a time it was.  You used your imagination.


 

Freakbook

I started to write a satire about Facebook.  Then it hit me that I could not possibly invent anything funnier,  crazier or scarier than the actual posts that the 750 million FB members put on it for the whole world  to read.

Call Me Paul

My blog name is now Paul Barbour.  It's a tribute to a favorite character on "One Man's Family," a radio drama that was on the air for 27 years.  I  wrote about it back in '08 here.

Winnie the Pooh

What a total delight.  Walt would like it. Being a voice freak, I was concerned that nobody could sound like Sterling Holloway.  But Jim Miller comes pretty close.

Dr. Phil's Looney Bin Again

Dr. Phil to his hopelessly screwed up, nutcase, high drama addicted guest who should be in a rubber room:  "Forget the cameras.  This is not about television."  Does he really believe that???

R. I. P. Norma Zimmer

Norma Zimmer has died at 87.  Known today mostly as Lawrence Welk's Champagne Lady, she was a busy studio singer, working in  background groups for all the famous stars. She is heard on Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," among dozens of other all-time classic recordings.

Oh Frances

I am in love with a younger woman.  Frances Sternhagen is about a week and a half younger.

JANE RUSSELL

We lost Jane Russell on the last day of February, 2011.  Here's my tribute, a post from last March

                                                            Supporting Jane Russell

I didn't see The Outlaw when it titillated audiences and irritated censors back in 1943. Turner Classics recently ran it for us who wonder (as in Wonder Bra) what all the fuss was about. I was mighty impressed with the cantilevered bra that Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell.

It gets even better when you know what a cantilever is. It's a beam supported on only one end. It carries the load to the support where it is resisted by shear stress. They use them for building bridges and structures that project horizontally into space.

Why do I keep staring at photos of Jane's horizontal structure and the marvelous appliance that  engineer Hughes designed to support it? Why can't I leave 'er?
                                             ----------------------------
Friend Harry Heuser's punny comment is the best part of this one:

Bra-vo! Rarely has the matter in question been captured so well.


There’s a tricky design

of the cantilevered kind

of which canny Mr. Hughes,

made such clever use

that I’ve got “cantaloupes” on my mind.

The Lone Hornet

Three of my otherwise splendid offspring do not read the newspaper.  Only first-born Clifton Jr. and his community activist wife, Ann, keep up with what's up the old fashioned way. For those three and all others of the digital generation, Here's my  letter to the Chronicle about the true origin of the Green Hornet.  Incidentally, I don't hear much good about the film.

A review of "The Green Hornet film in the Jan. 20 Chronicle said  the story began as a movie serial in the 1940s.  Wrong!
Britt Reid, publisher of the Daily Sentinel, first drove the Black Beauty on Detroit's WXYZ Radio in the mid '30s.
The series was created by the people who had come up with "The Lone Ranger" and " Challenge of the Yukon." They thought it was time for a more contemporary, urban crime fighter.
They invented Reid as the great  nephew of the Lone Ranger, Dan Reid.   

Larry Listened

Can a compulsive talker be a good listener? Anything's possible but it doesn't happen often.  Can a professional talker ...news person, public speaker, commentator, broadcaster, talking head ... be a good listener?  The best  ones are very good listeners.  Larry King did it.

What's a woot?

I suppose it's quite normal for the Facebook Generation to use some old words that shock the old folks and invent some new ones to confound us. There's a strange word that one sees all over the social network world these days.  It is apparently an exclamation, usually to express great pleasure.  This is the only time I will ever type it and I refuse to say it. That's good because the Facebookers would get a good laugh upon hearing a geezer use their word.  Woot!

That was Burlesque

I'm not yet sure if I want to see "Burlesque." I prefer to remember the not-so-glitzy Avenue
Burlesque in Detroit.  I showed my birth certificate to get in to see Scurvy, the baggy-pants comic and
Blaze Fury, the original garter girl.

I won't play Misty for you, Evelyn

I've been thinking about Clint Eastwood's 1971 film, Play Misty for me.  He was a deejay and Jessica Walter was his crazed fan, Evelyn. Every deejay, especially those of us who worked overnight, know  there are some dangerously lonely women out there in radioland. Viewing that film has helped many an overheated deejay to keep his pants on.

Bob Hope's Writers

I was not a big Bob Hope fan.  Oops, I should fix that before I get deported for un-American activities. I might better have said I am not a fan of the snappy, topical one-liner kind of comedy that Bob did so well. Old ski-nose was a great and giving entertainer who probably made more people laugh, including our  service men and women, than anyone before or since.

Being a serious student of humor and comedy, I have  greatest admiration for the writers who put all  those gags in Hope's mouth. To his  credit, he often praised his writers for their good work.  There's a book, THE
LAUGH MAKERS  by Bob Mills, one of Bob Hopes best writers. If you want to know how it was done, this  will tell it all. Just think of the leg work and research it took to make every one of Bob's shows topical and local, something the members of each audience would relate to. When he did a show in my town he fired off a one liner about Nunica, a very small village near here.  He did that wherever  he went, making the audience laugh at things they know about. His overseas trips are full of topical gags that poked fun at something about the war or the particular military base where he was performing.

 I took a comedy writing course years ago and turned out quite a few groaners. When I am about to undergo some sort of surgical procedure I think up a topical  line to amuse the doctors and nurses. It doesn't always  work.  But my colonoscopy nurse thought it was real funny when I told her I drank my gallon of  Kickapoo Joy Juice to get cleaned out.  She was too young to know about Li'l Abner and  Dogpatch, so she thought I made up a funny word that had "poo" in it. If you don't know anything about that procdure I won't tell you why it was funny. An old friend told me my sense of humor is warped and untimely.  A local priest says it's devious.  They are both right.  That's why it's so much fun.

Zippy one liners are not my chosen brand of  humor.  I like a story or monologue that might or might not have a punchine but has laughs along the way.  If it's topical, that's even better.
Garrison Keillor does that well when he takes the Prairie show on the road. He always has something local and topical for the audience.  If he's in Florida his Lake Wobegon tale might include a bit about a Minnesotan vacationing in the Sunshine State.  If he's out West he speaks of a Lake Wobegon rebel who left the Lutherans and joined a California cult.

I guess I can't handle the shotgun comedy style.  I need to savor the humor. A belly laugh is always good but a  knowing chuckle is nice, too.
.

I Love Wires

Do I know where all these wires go and what they do?  More or less.  Sort of.  How many wires does it take to go wireless?  As many as I can find places to plug them into.