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GOOD evenin', everybuddy. . . ." Yep, it's Uncle Ezra broadcasting from his "powerful little five-watter down in Rosedale." You hear him three nights a week at 7:15 on the NBC Red network, as well as on Saturday night's National Barn Dance. And to listen to his shrewd rural philosophy and friendly fireside gossip, one can hardly conceive the story behind those broadcasts, of a twenty-year battle between the private and professional sides of a man; of Uncle Ezra, a witty old codger of national fame, and Pat Barrett, a vigorous young man who wanted to be just himself . . . and couldn't!
Of course, Uncle Ezra and Pat Barrett are one and the same person, yet this is really the story of two men within one, who fought each other grimly through the years, finally to find, only in the last few months, a strange and unique compromise which more appropriately might be limited to the pages of fiction; a truce which has split Pat Barrett's life into two worlds, like the eccentric duality of a mythical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I don't know why Pat Barrett told me this story, but I
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think it came through my insistent questioning on the one thing about him which mystified me most — his youth. How could a man so actively young at the half-century mark, looking like a kid of twenty-five, so unerringly portray the bewhiskered Uncle Ezra? And since he writes his own scripts, where do the ideas come from? What was behind that broadcast? Pat's subsequent answers revealed how the character of Uncle Ezra came into being long before the advent of radio, how it developed almost to the point of completely suppressing Pat's personal character, and finally, how Pat Barrett became the master of the situation with what he smilingly refers to as his "double life."
Pat Barrett, near the turn of the century, was a towheaded youngster in the small town of Holden, Missouri — just an ordinary American boy, with but one exception. And that exception was the foundation of his later success, of Uncle Ezra, and of this story.
You see, as a boy Pat idolized a group of old men. He loved to sit around Brad Harmon's drug store, or in the shade of Fred Tesche's livery stable, listening to the whitebearded patriarchs of the town: Uncle Johnny, Pleas Ferguson, Judge Bothwell, and a half a dozen more. He preferred sitting silently on his haunches, all ears, while his bewhiskered friends swapped {Continued on page 61)
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