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fjlie 19fd fjwe !JladW. eiuft Established 1975 Number 251 August 1997 Publication of the Old Time Radio Club Membership Information Club Officers and Librarians New member processing, $~ pius club membership President of $15 per year from January 1 to December 31. Jerry Collins (716) 683-6199 Members receive a tape library listing, reference 56 Christen Ct. library listing, and a monthly newsletter. Member Lancaster, NY 14086 ships are as follows: If you join January-March, $15; April-June, $12; JUly-September, $8; October Vice President & Canadian Branch December; $5. All renewals should be sent in as Richard Simpson soon as possible to avoid mi~sing issues. Please be 960 16 Road R.R. 3 sure to notify us if you have a change of address. Fenwick, Ontario The Old Time Radio Club meets the first Monday Canada, LOS 1CO of every month at 7:30 PM during the months of September to June at 393 George Urban Blvd., Treasurer, Back Issues, Video & Records Cheektowaga, NY 14225. The club meets informally Dominic Parisi (716) 884-2004 during the months of July and August at the same 38 Ardmore PI. address. Anyone interested in the Golden Age of Buffalo, NY 14213 Radio is welcome. The Old Time Radio Club is af filiated with The Old Time Radio Network. Membership Renewals, Change of Address Peter Bellanca (716) 773-2485 Club Mailing Address 1620 Ferry Road ·Grand Island, NY·14072 Old Time Radio Club P.O. Box 426 Membership Inquires and OTR Lancaster, NY 14086 Network Related Items Richard Olday (716) 684-1604 Back issues of The lJIustrated Press are $1.50 post 100 Harvey Dr. paid. Publications out of print may be borrowed Lancaster, NY 14086 from our Reference Library. Tape Libraries Deadline for The Illustrated Press is the Cassettes 1st of each month prior to publication. Don Friedrich (716) 626-9164 21 Southcrest The lJIustrated Press is a monthly newsletter of The Cheektowaga, NY 14225 Old Time Radio Club, headquartered in Western New York State. Contents except where noted, are Reel-to-Reel and Reference Library copyright 1996 by the OTRC. Ed Wanat Sr. (716) 895-9690 393 George Urban Blvd. Cheektowaga, NY 14225 Send all articles, letters, exchange newsletters, Tape Library Rates: All reels and video cassettes etc. to: The Illustrated Press are $1.85 per month; audio cassettes and records c/o Ken Krug, Editor (716) 684-5290 are $0.85 per month. Rates include postage and 49 Regal Street handling. Canadian rates are the same as above, Depew, New York 14043 but in Canadian funds. (lUfjU6t1997 Publication of the Old Time Radio Club The Missing Chapter In ? • • • • Fred Allen's Life ByStuMpn by Norton Russell Just as the strains of an old song have power to trans port us back in time, so the mention of a name, perhaps When you finally meet Fred Allen, you have to keep long forgotten, can take us back to another day, or an reminding yourself that your talking to a famous come other place. Do You Remember will try to let you know dian. Noone ever looked less like one. What he really what happened to some of these people you may re looks like is a serious, sensible New Englander in a good member. conservative business suit. ARTHUR LAKE Fred was born, you know, in a house which stood on the boundary line between Somerville and Cambridge, Mas sachusetts. His first job, when he was fourteen, was in "Dagwood Bumstead" (as he was known to millions) the Boston Public Library. Nobody in his family ever was born in 1905 in Corbin, Kentucky. He attended showed any inclination to go on the stage. His people school in Nashville, Tennessee, but spent most of his were, and are, the sort to whom the world of spotlights boyhood traveling with his family. His father and his and backdrops seems completely alien, inhabited by father's twin brother had an aerialist act called "The foreigners. Flying Silverlakes". His mother was a stage actress known as Edith Goodwin. Arthur and his sister Flor Yet today Fred Allen is a successful comedian, in radio, ence became part of the act as soon as it switched to moving pictures, and the stage. How did it happen? How vaudeville and was renamed "Family Affairs". did he make the transition from public library to Town Hall? Arthur's last name was shortened to Lake by his pro ducer Carl Laemmle, Jr. when he went into the movies. The answer lies in the woman who molded Fred Allen's His first role was in Jack and the Beanstalk (1917). In life - the one person who always thinks of him, and still 1924 Arthur began making Sweet Sixteen Comedies speaks of him, by his real name of John Sullivan. Few of which typecast him as a teenager, a part he played until Fred's friends and business associates have ever seen he was into middle age. her. Most of them, I imagine, don't even know of her existence. Yet she has had a profound effect on Fred's Arthur played the original role of Dagwood, and stayed character and career, and even now, in everything he with the series in motion pictures, radio and television. does, he is motivated by the wish to please her, to help When Penny Singleton left the radio version after seven her. years, Mrs. Lake, the former Patricia Van Cleve, took over the role for the remaining five years. When it be She lives in a Boston suburb, her name is Mrs. Elizabeth came a TV program in 1954, Blondie was played by Lovely, and she is Fred Allen's aunt. You'd do better to Pamela Britton. It premiered in January and was call her his mother, though, because she's the only one dropped in December. In July 1958 it commenced again, he's known since he was four years old. but this time it lasted four months I visited her in her second-story flat just out of Boston It was in Santa Monica that Arthur, following his re - five sunny rooms, not very large, filled with comfort tirement, opened a bar which lasted all of six weeks. able elderly furniture. "I've lived here for eighteen Along with his large earnings during his heyday, the years," she told me. "John wants me to move into an Lakes were well remembered in the will of Marion apartment closer in to town, but you'll never catch me Davies who had a great affection for her niece - Ar living in one of those little boxes." thur's wife. One of Patricia Lakes trinkets that would be beyond the Bumstead family budget was a $600,000. I believed her, because I couldn't imagine Elizabeth Cadochon cut-star sapphire necklace. Lovely doing anything she was convinced wasn't right and sensible. She is seventy-eight now, an alert, strong Arthur Lake was born April 17, 1905 and died in 1987. seventy-eight. Her near-sighted eyes indicate her hu~or and kindness, but the lines of her face, the firm chin, indicate her will-power. Clu.gu.6tI997 Publication of the Old Time Radio Club And again, looking at her, I wondered how in the world some serious objections. He had been performing in Fred had gone on the stage when he was scarcely more amateur night shows for some time, she learned, while than a boy. Surely his Aunt Elizabeth must have she thought he was safely at work in the library. opposed it, not on any narrow-minded or intolerant grounds, but simply because of its hazards and "The idea at first did seem utterly fantastic to me," she insecurity. ~ said. "Why John had been studying for a business career! But as I thought it over, I began to see his As she told me her story, though, I began to understand. viewpoint. I knew him so well that I could understand It's her story, and a part of Fred Allen's story that's why he'd kept it all a secret. If he hadn't been afraid I'd never been told before, as well. "John's mother - she forbid him to enter the amateur competitions, he'd have was my sister - died of pneumonia when John was four conflded in me - and that he hadn't done so it proved and his brother Robert two," she said. "His father was that entering them meant a good deal to him. Without busy all day in the Boston Library, where he was a book saying anything to him, I found out the next time one of binder, so of course he didn't have time to raise the the theaters was going to present amateur acts, and boys. I decided it was up to me to take care of them, and went, sitting in the back of the auditorium where he their father too." couldn't possibly see me. I admit I was a bit excited." It was not a new sort of job for her. Her own mother had "I guess I was a lot more nervous than he was when he died when she herself was only fifteen, the oldest of a came on the stage. He started his act with some family of six. Already she knew how to rear a family, juggling, and everything went along all right until how to make a home run smoothly. She'd mothered her somebody in the audience cried, 'Give him the hook! father, her brothers and sisters, since before she was old Give him the hook!' If it had been me, I'd have run right enough to put up her hair.