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ROUND
oar ties, they've made up for it since!
Fran Allison, Patsy Lee, Don and Sam Cowling (on truck) helped make the Reverse Giveaway deliveries. Families were designated by the welfare board.
Christmas Week baby! Unless it happened to you, it's difficult to appreciate just what that means. It isn't only a matter of receiving half the normal number of presents. You grow accustomed to having gifts arrive late, tagged "Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday." The cheated feeling goes far deeper than that.
It's more a sense of having no birthday at all. Where every other child has a day when the whole family celebrates his arrival into the world, the Christmas Week baby gets the idea he sneaked in when no one was looking and his coming caused no end of bother.
Don and I were both Christmas Week babies. We grew up — he in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, I in Milwaukee — with that secret, puzzled resentment. While being the first to say Christmas was wonderful, we also used to think why, oh why, did Christmas have to come so close to our birthdays?
Years later, after we met and, eventually, were married, I added a private, silent promise to the usual "love, honor and obey." It was — "and remember my husband's birthday."
I kept it, too, until — you've guessed it. It was the Breakfast Club which made me forget, that first Christmas broadcast.
Tommy was just fourteen months old, and Don had his heart set on having his Breakfast Club listeners meet his son. Paternal pride, however, didn't compensate for Tommy's lack of vocabulary. My birthday
and Don's birthday slipped by unnoticed in our concentration on teaching the baby something to say and in doctoring his cold so I would dare take him out in the stormy weather to go to the studio.
Our child rewarded us handsomely. He not only said Mama, Daddy and bow-wow, he also recited glibly, "Hi diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle," right down to the last word.
You people out in the audience loved it. You told us so in hundreds of letters and asked for a repeat performance the next year. By that time, Don had two sons and a bright idea that for a Christmas present he wanted one morning when he didn't have to get up to go to the studio. Instead, he would have breakfast in bed.
The microphone got smeared with jam and bacon before that was accomplished, for with two lively boys squirming over the covers and listeners expecting a play-by-play account of their antics, Don was too busy to be concerned about table manners.
Those first two Breakfast Club Christmases set the precedent, and I turned into the shortest-shining star in radio. Escorted by our boys, Tommy, Donny and Bobby, I arrive to the jingle of sleigh bells promptly at 8 A.M. Central Standard Time, on December 25, and at 9 A.M. my career is over for another year.
The only Christmas broadcast that I've ever missed was one that didn't happen on Christmas day at all, but
Don McNeill's Breakfast Club is heard Mon.-Fri., 9:00 A.M. EST, over ABC.
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