We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
A FEW weeks ago the last of the old-time comedians went on the air for the first time. His name is Jack Haley — that's right, the "Wake Up and Live" guy with the wild eyes and the sappy look. He followed — at last — the long parade of his old pals, guys who had pounded the boards of vaudeville way back in the old days — Phil Baker, Jack Benny, Joe Penner, Fred Allen, Nat (now George) Burns. He followed — at last — their path to the greatest stand a gag and patter man ever played — radio, a country-wide, audience, the Big Time.
That in itself is a news item. Because there aren't any more of that breed left, and there aren't any more of them these days coming up the hard way, the only way that ever produced a great laugh artist.
But the story I have is what kept Jack Haley off the air all these years — and why he's taking the plunge at this particular time. Both may hand you a surprise.
Don't think I'm talking about Jack Haley and the Show Boat. Show Boat isn't his show and Jack knows it. It's Charlie Winninger's show. Jack's just been around in a warm-up spot. Here's the inside: they were breaking him in for a ready air audience when he starts his own program for Log Cabin Syrup October 5, over NBC. You'll have him then, unadulterated — a half hour of Haley, and I hope you like him. If you don't, a lot of people 1 know will be pretty disappointed and Jack Haley might shrink back into his shell for another eight or ten years. Just as he did the first time.
I suppose I don't have to explain that Jack Haley holds a clear title to the most colossal inferiority complex Hollywood ever ran across. He worries constantly; he frets; he takes every skin scratch to heart; he's as sensitive as a seismograph, as easily depressed as a barometer on a cloudy day. Everyone in Hollywood knows how Jack fretted himself out of screen stardom for years and years. The story of "Wake Up and Live" is one of those stories that usually happens only in books like "Wake Up and Live." How he busted through that complex and came to life at last is a classic by now.
But not many know about the incident that sent him scurrying away from radio, so thoroughly disgusted and downcast that for years he turned a stony ear to air offers and refused any part of a program.
It happened {Continued on page ^\)
B ASKETTE
20th Century-Fox
HE'S THE SURPRISE OF THE
YEAR^THE GUY WITH THE
WILD EYES AND SAPPY EX
PRESSION BUT IT WAS HIM
SELF HE SURPRISED MOST