Radio listeners got to know a pretty important geography of important addresses over the years. There was 79 Wistful Vista, Dodge City, The Big Town, The B-Bar-B Ranch, the Melody Ranch, 6121 Sunset Blvd (CBS Columbia Square in Los Angeles), 30 Rockefeller Center (NBC Radio City, New York), Maybeland (home of the Cinnamon Bear), and the little town of Summerfield (where Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve serves as water commissioner). Few addresses were as exclusive or was well listened to as Allen’s Alley.
Fred Allen was one of many vaudeville veterans to make the transition to from life on the road to life in front of the microphone. Allen was also one of the first to realize that even though the vaudevillians were getting the majority of the laughs in the early years of commercial radio, radio was not and never would be vaudeville! He could not understand why some of his fellow radio comics would perform while wearing funny hats or costumes, the audience at home couldn’t see what the studio audience was laughing at!
Radio demanded a constant supply of fresh material if it was going to work. Fred had gained the admiration of his fellow vaudevillians for never resorting to buying jokes from a joke seller or stealing material from other acts (but there were plenty who were willing to steal jokes from Fred!) The vaudevillian moved on after a short engagement, so his material was fresh when he got to a new town. In radio, he faced the same challenge that George Burns complained about when he said that the 17 minutes of material that he used for 17 years in vaudeville lasted for exactly 17 minutes in radio.
Fred Allen did hire a few writers as assistants (including future novelist Herman Wouk), but the staff writers were mostly there to assist and take care of the “grunt work”. For the most part, the ideas for Allen’s comedy came from Fred Allen’s active brain. It was a lot of material to come up with, too. Fred began on the radio in 1932 with The Linit Bath Club Revue and kept up a full schedule until he was forced off the air temporarily in 1944 with hypertension.
The many incarnations of the Fred Allen Show followed a similar pattern, and the evolution of the show came closest to its high point with what would become the hour-long Town Hall Tonight. The program saw its genesis in 1934 as the Hour of Smiles sponsored by Bristol-Myers Sal Hepatica laxative and Ipana toothpaste and eventually retitled (over Fred’s objections) as The Fred Allen Show. With the development of Town Hall Tonight, Fred and company put together a show based on a small town milieu which Fred was most comfortable with. The highlight of each episode was “The News Reel”, in various incarnations called “Town Hall News”, “Ipana News”, and “The March of Trivia”.
The News Reel used a succession of eccentric characters created by Fred’s stock company, “the Mighty Allen Art Players”. As outrageous as the news was, it was three times as ridiculous after Fred and his gang got to it, and the bit would influence later classics like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update”.
The show moved to a new network and sponsor as Texaco Star Theater in 1940. Unfortunately, Wartime gasoline rationing took its toll on Texaco, and one of the measures the oil company was forced to take was cutting Star Theater to a half-hour format in 1942. On one level, Fred should have been relieved to only need to write a half-hour’s worth of material, but he chafed due to the fact that there was no longer room for his beloved “Newsreel” segment.
Rather than cut the feature away completely, he retooled it. Rather than introducing new characters each week for commentary, he developed a group of regulars who the audience would know and not need to be reintroduced each week. Then he gave his new group a place to live, Allen’s Alley.
The Alley’s first resident was “Falstaff Openshaw”, voiced and largely created by Alan Reed. Openshaw and his odiferous poetry had been part of the show even before Allen’s Alley, and he closed the Alley segment for as long as Reed stayed with the program (when Alan Reed left to pursue other projects, Fred sold him the rights to the character for $1). Another longtime Alley resident was Minerva Pious playing Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum, who dispensed a brand of warped wisdom familiar to anyone who has known a Yiddish housewife.
Being a topical program, politics was never far from the world Allen’s Alley. Politicians, in general, were originally spoofed by Senator Bloat played by Jack Smart. The Senator spent his time pushing for his “Bloat Bill”, knowing that the legislation would solve whatever problems needed solving, usually with the expediency of wasting a lot of the taxpayers money.
The Alley temporarily closed down for the 1944 season when Fred’s doctors insisted he take some time off to treat his hypertension. By the 1945 season, Smart had left for Hollywood (where he would continue to delight OTR fans by playing The Fat Man), leaving the Alley without its resident politico. Veteran Minerva Pious, who had returned along with Allen Reed, suggested they adopt new announcer Kenny Delmar’s stock character “Dynamite Gus”. Gus was developed from an over-the-top oil man whom Delmar had gotten a ride while hitchhiking some years before. Kenny drug out the Gus character at parties and routinely brought the house down. Retooling Gus as Senator Claghorn, a man so dedicated to the South that he would only drink water from a “Dixie” cup and when he had chicken pox they were Southern fried, was not a great stretch. Claghorn would live on as the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn.
Allen’s Alley became the feature fans most closely associated with the Fred Allen Show. The Alley and its residents made a couple of attempts to transition onto the small screen, first in costume and then as hand puppets, but Fred’s enthusiasm for TV was even lower than it was for quiz shows. Allen’s Alley would live on as an actual address in Fred Allen’s hometown of Boston, where a spur off of Tremont St in the Theater District was officially renamed Allen’s Alley.
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