Modern Screen (Dec 1953 - Nov 1954)

miles from the Citizen-News. The family moved there en masse every June and stayed until Labor Day while the Judge commuted. Picture companies went out there on location. By earned his three bills for waving from a flimsy dock as Wallace Beery and Marie Dressier pretended to be on San Francisco Bay in Tugboat Annie. It wasn't any special honor that he got in the extra line. All the vacation kids got rounded up and pressed into service, if they were old enough to lift their arms. While these studio visits were pleasant vacation diversions, they weren't By Palmer's big charges. Those were swimming, riding, fishing and climbing the rocky knobs — with a female audience if possible — and if the easy movie money came along that was swell. What started him off on theatricals were family projects, right in his own conservative, middle-class home. His big brother got a home movie camera for Christmas, and his mother took Byron to see The Desert Song. That did it. Byron asked Santa for a scarlet hood, cape and mask so he could be The Red Shadow from that operetta — all over the place. "I ran around looking like Flash Gordon for weeks," he recalls fondly. "I was a sensation until the thing wore out." A record of this glory still exists in the Palmer family archives in the form of a home-made film thriller, The Noose Hangs High. Harlan, Jr., wrote and directed it and the whole family emoted. "Dad was the villain. I? Oh, the hero, of course," grins By. That's how Byron Palmer's folks stamped an affirmative seal on any kid project. "They always went along with any crazy notions we had," he says gratefully. "They even bought — and what's more drank — the lemonade we kids squeezed with our dirty mitts and tried to sell. I really can't remember a crackdown in all my life." With such a free-wheeling homelife it was only natural that skinny, gangling, handsome Byron Palmer should pack few inhibitions once he put on long pants and got out in the world. He immediately became a big operator in school politics, a leading light in shows and a juvenile Don Juan on the side. There wasn't much on either campus that Byron Palmer wasn't in, and looking back, By is pretty sure his successes there are what originally planted the performing bug deep in his noggin. "I was a show-off," he cheerfully admits. "I hammed up everything, but the ham got results." They elected him vice-president of the student body, then prexy, director of talent and head cheer leader, too. A big bloc of his constituents wore skirts — also red roses which Byron thoughtfully took to his favorites each morning. When the outcome of an election looked at all shaky, he instinctively turned on the heat with a fast bit of show business. Sometimes his gags backfired, like the time he dressed as a nurse in a burlesque male fashion show he staged, tripped over his skirts and slammed down on a big glass bottle he carried. That cut an artery, and they sewed him up with twenty -two stitches. But usually Byron Palmer found that projecting his attractive personality paid off, and too, that he was happiest when he did it. A boy has to shine at something, and usually he likes what he's good at. As By admits, "I wasn't any shakes at sports — just a second string basketball forward and a so-so swimmer. I wasn't any young Einstein either. My kick was performing. I liked the excitement. I liked the applause. I still do." Dv graduation time he knew what he wanted. It wasn't the newspaper business. Like all the Palmers, he had already been exposed to printer's ink just to see if it took. Two summers his dad gave him 58 a job on the Citizen-News. The first time he was a copy boy. By the second season he had progressed to cub reporter. Unfortunately, most gems of prose By was assigned to write were in the obituary column. Once, he did break loose on an interview with Sonja Henie and actually saw his byline on the scoop. But none of this excited Byron enough to wink out the stars in his blue eyes. As usual, his folks backed him up and sent him to Occidental College, which has a top drama and speech course. Byron lasted almost a year, and a pretty good year it was. He turned in fine grades, acted in college radio skits, got a part time job at Station kfac in Hollywood and made the frosh swimming and basketball teams to boot. All the time something else was crowding his mind and his heart. One of those girls he used to give red roses. Her name was Joann Ransom, a tall, striking brunette beauty who looked enough like By to be his sister. She had been in his class all the way through high school. There had been others but no one like Joann. He kept his blue ModelA roadster hot, racing back and forth to Los Angeles. When spring filled the air, Byron couldn't wait any longer. One balmy March day he quit school, drove Joann up to Santa Barbara and married the girl. He was nineteen and so was she. All he had to support a wife was his salary of $18 a week as a CBS page boy. But of course that minor matter didn't bother a pair of nineteen-year-old newlyweds — or the groom's parents either. As I SAW IT HAPPEN A friend of mine who has a house at the shore lived next door to a young fellow who wanted very much to be a great tenor. Every night after dinner he would exercise his vocal cords on the back porch, and because it was summer, and all the windows were open, the whole neighborhood could hear him. One evening, when I was visiting my friend, she decided she couldn't stand the disturbance any more, so as soon as the young tenor started singing on the back porch, my friend began pounding on the piano as loud as she could. What a good job she did of drowning out the tenor! A little later that evening, the young hopeful came over to the house and inquired about the piano playing. When he was told it was my friend, he replied, "Thatfs the best I've ever heard you play." The young man's name was Mario Lanza. Dolores Jones Philadelphia, Pa. always, they were with him. A little family financial help and an extra job at the studio tapping out time signals and station breaks on the graveyard shift took care of the tiny Hollywood apartment where Mr. and Mrs. Byron Palmer started housekeeping. As for entertainment, well, they were in love. The biggest hardship, as By remembers, was leaving his happy home at midnight to sit in a six-by-six booth and drone out endlessly — "Station KNX, Columbia Broadcasting System. It is now two a.m., Bulova Watch time." Then Byron had a better idea than sitting up all night telling people the time. He signed up with the Air Corps, and in no time at all he was on the Arizona desert near Tucson at the Marana Air Base, a barren spot which later moved Red Skelton to observe feelingly, "The Army can find places that God forgot!" The Byron Palmers sweated out fourteen months there until Byron was "transferred immediately to Los Angeles for training preparatory to shipment overseas." That's what he got for telling everyone he was a radio announcer. T-Je learned his stuff at the Armed Forces Radio Service right back in Hollywood where he started, under Colonel Tom Lewis, who is Mister Loretta Young these days. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Johnny Mercer and about every important Hollywood star who could carry a tune strolled in and out those days for Command Performance and various G.I. transcription shows, but By Palmer had little contact with them. He was in the lower echelons at AFRS and in the end was shipped out ignominiously from Seattle crammed in the steamy bow of a liberty ship. He came up for air in Hawaii, but before he could buy a grass skirt for Joann he was whisked off to Eniwetok. Neither sheltering palms nor dusky vahinis with hibiscus in their hair swayed on that South Sea isle. Naval shells had thoroughly scalped the place when the Marines landed, and only two palm trunks stuck up like drunken telephone poles. As for women — there wasn't anything in skirts on the whole atoll. Still, By Palmer looks back on Eniwetok with a special fondness. Not only because it was there he realized what he wanted to do — sing and act — but because he put over his first real man-sized job. Bucking Tokyo Rose wasn't easy. GI's laughed at her insidious guff but they liked to listen; she had a typical American co-ed voice that made pleasant music to girl-starved ears, also a stack of the solid Stateside recordings. When Byron and his buddies set up their transmitter under one of those crazy palm trunks straight news was all they had to compete with T.R. A morale job needed more than that, Byron reasoned. He dug up a Seabee who could pat a piano, a couple of sailors who could sing, and with his own baritone "The Music Mates" went on the air. They clicked. Byron Palmer's trio got more G.I. fan mail than Betty Grable. And that's when he started thinking seriously about his post-war plans. Byron wrote, produced, acted and sang on his wxle program in Eniwetok for eight months, cutting Rosie down to size. The mission broke up when an inspection officer took one look at his cadaverous figure— shriveled from 180 to 130 pounds — and hustled him back to Hawaii for recuperation. The climate, canned rations and hard work had riddled his health. He spent six months knocking around Honolulu beaming OWI news broadcasts, announcing G.I. boxing contests and restoring his tissues. Then they shipped him home for a look in at AFRS, where he took over a Bob Crosby show for a while. Next came a reward for pitching in the South Pacific — Officers' Training School at Camp Lee, Virginia. He was almost through the course when V-J Day came and as By says, "I sure wanted those bars, but I wanted a chalk-striped suit a lot more." He came out a staff sergeant. Young gentlemen in new chalk-striped suits were a penny a pound back in 1946. And Byron Palmer found himself with a wife to support and a baby on the way. He didn't let go his dreams but he took what he could to earn a buck. For a while, that was announcing girlie-girlie shows at Earl Carroll's. Then understudy and bit jobs in operettas like New Moon, The Firefly and Rosalie at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, playing things like