And There I Stood with My Piccolo

37

37. WELL, AFTER FINISHING MY FIRST season back with Maxwell House since my Army discharge, there came the matter of a summer replacement, and George and Gracie wanted me to be it and I was anxious to get the job so I could try out my own musical. But I still hadn't figured out a way to do it that wouldn't be so danged expensive, so the sponsor and the agency finally decided that for economic reasons I had better go on with just a garden variety and-nowthe -orchestra-asks-the-musical-question-who type of show and I got to thinking about Martha Rinsenhauser, and one day up at the agency office, discussing the plan of the summer program, I started sounding off: "Of course the program will be mostly music-WHY WOULDN'T IT BE? Americans are crazy about music, aren't they? They buy millions of phonograph records, don't they, and every kid knows who played second alto with Duke Ellington in 1930—but can't we make 242 the program INTERESTING? Do we have to say, 'And now the conductor raises his musical baton and asks the musical question: "Who?"' Even if we only say, 'Did you know there are more cats in New York City than there are people?' an unfamiliar fact like that will get the listeners' attention, maybe, and then I could say: 'I threw in that unfamiliar fact because our opening number is an unfamiliar number and I wanted to show you how interesting an unfamiliar thing can be and why should an unfamiliar number scare anybody ? After all, "Stardust" was unfamiliar before Hoagy Carmichael wrote it, wasn't it?' And then we could play some nice refreshing tune instead of always 'Make Believe' from Show Boat to whisk you away for a wisp of a while from the cares of the workaday world!" Well, the agency people at the meeting didn't know I was just shooting off my mouth—they thought I wasad libbing some pretty good material for the program, so before I knew it the script girl had taken down my spleen in shorthand and I went on the air that summer, June 6, 1946, to be exact, with my own show, and if you happened to be among those who heard it (we opened with a 4.5 Hooper) you heard the above remarks, seeing as that's exactly what I said on the opening program that night, starting with, "Of course 243 the program will be mostly music. WHY WOULDN'T IT BE . . ." Well, before we knew it, the summer was over and guess what our Hooper rating was? Yeah—4.5. But anyhow, maybe summer Hoopers don't mean anything on account of many million listeners can be catching your show in the car or at the beach where the Hooper people can't get 'em by phone. That's one nice thing about radio surveys—you can interpret them according to whether your rating is up or down—your belief in their accuracy is connected to your rating like a Siamese twin. If your rating is up you say, "After all, the Hooper comes the closest to being a real accurate yardstick. It certainly is the best measuring device we've had, and I for one will accept it till we get something better." And if your rating is down: "After all, what does the Hooper mean, actually? You can't tell me there isn't something very screwy about the whole setup. If you ask me, I say it's the scourge of the radio business, creating entirely false values. Did you ever know anybody who ever knew anybody who had ever been called on the phone by any Hooper representative? Well, neither did I—and how about the rural areas and the small towns and the . . ." So on and so on and so on. Well, anyway, thanks to Benton and Bowles and George Burns and General Foods, I'd had 244 my fling and whadayaknow—before August set in Canada Dry bought the show for fall. It all happened because one day the side door to the Daily Variety office on Vine Street got smashed. Newspaper offices being traditionally untidy, and California weather being traditionally tidy, not to say dependable, nobody bothered to fix the door. Instead, they just put a two-by-four across it...