Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Lum and Abner

Lum and Abner In  two Arkansans burst onto the national entertainment scene when the Lum and Abner Show radio program began broadcasting nationally. The show was set in the mythical town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas, but it was modeled on the settlement of Waters in the western part of Montgomery County.Broadcast from  to ,the Lum and Abner Show was a national smash, with millions of Americans gathering around their radios several times weekly to listen to the fifteen-minute serials. The success of the Lum and Abner phenomenon was due in large measure to the brilliance of the men who created the show, wrote the scripts, and played the leading roles. Chester “Chet” Lauck played the role of Lum,while Norris “Tuffy” Goff was Abner.Both men were from Mena in Polk County in west-central Arkansas near the Oklahoma border. Lauck, born in Little River County in , and Goff, born four years later at Cove in Polk County, were naturally gifted comedians. While still in elementary school they were known as class clowns.Both boys came from prosperous families. Chet’s father was a banker with lumber interests, and Goff’s father had a wholesale general merchandise business. Lauck and Goff both attended the University of Arkansas, with Lauck receiving a degree in art and business. Goff later took his business degree from the University of Oklahoma. Both returned to Mena after college,joining their family businesses.Photos of Lauck and Goff show handsome young men with full hair and Goff sporting a mustache . At more than six feet, Lauck was both tall and thin, while Goff was short and stocky. A common story holds that young Goff came to know of Dick Huddleston’s general store in the tiny town of Waters as he made deliveries for the family wholesale company. Other stories say the Goff and Lauck families hunted in the Waters area.  Goff and Lauck were active in the Mena Lions Club, and they engaged in various amateur theatricals. Their specialty was blackface, in which they performed racist parodies of black characters—which was popular across the nation at the time. In  the two men went to Hot Springs to participate in a talent program sponsored by the prominent KTHS radio station. Upon discovering, as one journalist later wrote, “the program already filled with burnt cork,” they switched to a routine involving two country merchants: Lum Edwards, played by Lauck and pronounced “Eddards,” and Abner Peabody,portrayed by Goff. The routine was an immediate success, and KTHS kept them on the air for a few months—time they used to develop the story and hone their portrayals. After an audition in Chicago, the show was picked up by NBC radio.For almost twenty-five years,Lauck and Goff entertained Americans by the millions. The Lum and Abner Show was simple but classic radio acting. The story line involved two older men running the Jot ’Em Down General Store in Pine Ridge. Kathryn Moore Stucker, owner of the store building and manager of a small museum in it,described the characters this way: “Lum was a bachelor with an eye for women, and his ego usually got in the way of common sense. Abner was a hen-pecked married man, and his gullibility was enormous. They were civic-minded merchants who never seemed to have any money in the cash register.Their schemes for grandeur always brought them to the brink of tragedy.” As the plot developed, a whole cast of new characters evolved. Lauck played the appealing but dimwitted Cedric Wehunt and patriarch Grandpappy Spears, while Goff portrayed such characters as the scheming Squire Skimp, the town barber Mose Moots, and the unsavory Snake Hogan.Goff also played Dick Huddleston,a character who was in real life the owner of the store in Waters. Historian Randal L. Hall, who published a book on the Lum and Abner Show,believes Lauck and Goff should get credit for “defying the widespread stereotypes of hillbillies.” The shows tended to feature gentle humor, perhaps in the mode of the later Andy Griffith Show on television. Until ,Goff and Lauck wrote the scripts and performed them. Lauck would sit at a typewriter while Goff would pace the room brain-  ENTERTAINERS AND PERFORMERS storming aloud. Sometimes the team would complete scripts only minutes before live broadcast from the NBC studios in Chicago. Between  and ,Lauck and Goff made six...