And There I Stood with My Piccolo

28

AFTER THREE PLEASANT YEARS MAXwell House and M.G.M. decided to go their separate ways. So everybody shook hands all around, nostalgically happy—happy about a fine radio series, and nostalgic because this series was disappearing into the limbo—and Maxwell House gave birth to the Frank Morgan-Fannie Brice show which starred Robert Young as emcee, and again I went along with the deal. We used to go out to the Youngs' ranch on Sunday where Mr. and Mrs. Young sure threw some nice informal meals. Never forget when they went to Europe and came back with a wonderful story about being entertained in London by Lord Somebody. It was an intimate dinner with only His Lordship and Her Ladyship and Mr. and Mrs. Young. At the end of the dinner the host, with a great deal of ceremony, brought up from the cellar the last of the Napoleon brandy which had been handed down in his family—real Napoleon 185 2?. brandy, not the two-dollars-a-drink stuff that was made in the town where the grandson of the man who lived across the street from the nephew of the guy who used to exchange stories with Napoleon 's wine-cellar keeper lived. In other words, this was real Napoleon brandy and His Lordship had been pointing this out to Mr. Young while Her Ladyship and Mrs. Young were going yadat yadata-yadata over in the corner. Well, you may know Mr. Young was pretty impressed and stood breathlessly by while the host himself squeezed out the very last drop into four huge brandy snifters and carried the first one over to Mrs. Young. "What's this?" she said over her shoulder. "Dear," said Mr. Young in awe-stricken tones, "it's Napoleon brandy." "Oh, fine," Mrs. Young said. "Plenty of soda and not too much ice." If this had been in the funnies the last picture would have shown His Lordship flat on his back with his remarks ballooning out of his mouth somewhat as follows: "OW-OW-OW-OW." At any rate, conversation definitely waned and Mr. and Mrs. Young left very shortly after that and were given a somewhat formal, not to say cool, "Good night." Mrs. Young might have come from Iowa, not being impressed with Napoleon brandy, I mean. 186 Our state was prohibition long before the first World War, and Mason City was positively prohibition clear back to the days when it was Owens Grove, which was practically a present from the United States to my grandfather,Alonzo Willson, by way of a homestead at $1.25 an acre. We used to go out to my grandfather's farm in the summer to pick those little round, sweet, dark red plums, and we'd always hammer open the seeds, but I don't know whybecause that little nut inside tasted awful. We also used to open peach stones, and when I was in high school I firmly believed that the almond people watered the almonds with the nuts out of peach stones, which seems kind of silly, impractical, and rather uneconomical to me now. We also went to Grampa's for black walnuts and the stains stayed on your hands till sumac time in the fall. If you hear people call that "shoomac" they are from Iowa because that's what we call it. The kids all carried armfuls of it to the teacher in September—also violets in the spring. Grampa raised one family of five children back in New York. Their names were Aunt Emma, Aunt Alice, Uncle B.B., Uncle Bruce, and Aunt Norie. They all grew up and got married, so Grampa and Gramma Willson decided they would ox-team it to loway and look into the homestead department. They did, and settled in 187 Owens Grove and raised another family: Aunt Mae, Aunt Gertrude, and Papa, and that's how it happened that Papa had a sister old enough to be his mother and I've got an aunt pushing a hundred . She's my aunt Alice and she lives in Bushton , Kansas, and the last time I saw her she was driving her own car, eating with her own teeth, reading with her own eyes, and writing a gossip column for the local paper. Her married name is Shonyo and nobody ever heard of that name before. When I was trouping with...