Will the Mystery Guest Sign In Please

John Charles Daly with the original regular panel, Dorthy Kilgallen, Louis Untermeyer, Arlene Frances, Hal Block.

On September 3, 1967 What’s My Line, the longest running game show in the history of prime time television, ended a 17 year run on CBS, all but the first few months in the same familiar Sunday night time slot.  And for all 17 years the program was hosted by the suave, but sometimes supercilious, John Charles Daly, who in that entire run missed only four shows.

The Irish-American Daly was born in 1914 in South Africa where his father was working as an engineer.  After the senior John Charles died of a tropical illness the family returned to its roots in Boston.  He was educated at the Tilton School, a progressive boarding school in Tilton, New Hampshire and at Boston College, one of the most prestigious American Catholic institutions.  He was particularly devoted to Tilton, on whose board of trustees he served and to which he donated substantial sums for the restoration and preservation of its historic building.  Daly credited his suburb diction and vaguely Middle Atlantic accent to his training there. 

After a brief stint as a reporter on an NBC station, Daly’s radio career began to take off when he signed on the local Washington, D.C. affiliate where he was soon doing double duty as the network correspondent at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House.  Soon he was regularly introducing Roosevelt’s speeches to the nation.  Late in 1941 he transferred to the network in New York where he became anchor of The World Today broadcast. 

He arrived in New York in time to be the first voice that broke the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Later, be broke the news of F.D.R.’s death.  In between, he broadcast the news from London and was a war correspondent in North Africa and Italy.  After the war in addition to his reporting duties he hosted CBS is There which recreated historical events that were “covered by actual radio reporters.”  That program later became You Were There on television with Walter Cronkite.

After a brief stint as a panelist on a short lived game program producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman tapped him to host What’s My Line which premiered on February 2, 1950.

In 1953, Daly abandoned CBS news and became Vice President of ABC and the face of its fledgling TV news department anchoring its evening news program.  He became one of the few people to be featured proximately at two networks over a long period.  Daly abruptly resigned in November 1960 when the network chose to run cartoons instead of the first half hour of coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon election. 

It would not be the last time Daly resigned on principle.  After the end of the What’s My Line’s run, he was appointed Director of the Voice of America but quit after a few months on the job because the head of the U.S. Information Agency made personnel changes without consulting him. 

After that Daly retired.  He died at the age of 77 in Chevy Chase, Maryland on February 24, 1991 leaving behind his second wife, the former Virginia Warren, daughter of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren, and six adult children from his two marriages.

What’s My Line, under Daly’s stewardship, was a quintessential New York show.  Its celebrity panelists were for the most part not Hollywood or music industry types.   The members of the panel on the first show were poet Louis Untermeyer, former New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, psychiatrist Richard Hoffman, and Dorothy Kilgallen, a gossip columnist for the New York Journal-American.  Kilgallen remained a regular on the panel until her death in 1965 at the age of 52.

Soon a regular panel included Untermeyer, Kilgallen, Broadway actress Arlene Frances, and comedy writer Hal Block.  Frances remained on the show the rest of the run and into a later syndicated version, wearing the same heart shaped diamond pendent for every show. 

Untermeyer was swept up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the period and was forced off the show over the objections of Daly and the producers at the instance of the sponsor, Stopette deodorant.  The poet’s place on the panel was taken by publisher Bennett Cerf of Random House.  Cerf also stayed on the program the rest of its time on the air and appeared on the syndicated version until his death in 1971 at age 73. 

Block left the show in 1953 and the “comic’s” spot on the panel was filled for a year by Steve Allen and then by the acerbic Fred Allen until his death in 1956.  After that the fourth spot was not regularly filled but frequent panelists include Frances’s husband Martin Gable, Orson Bean, and sometimes by regular panelists on other Goodson-Todman programs like Betsy Palmer, Bess Myerson, and Robert Q. Lewis.

Daly ran the show with a certain dignity and formality.  He always referred to the panelists as Mr. or Miss.  After 1953 he insisted the dress code be more formal.  Gentlemen wore black dinner jackets and bow ties.  The ladies were in formal gowns, and frequently white gloves.

About the only thing that changed on the show was the set.  New sponsors would have their names emblazoned on the panel’s desk.  The moderator’s background changed from paneling to drapes and back again.  But the game remained the same.

Daly would invite contestants to “sign in please” on an ordinary blackboard.  In the earliest shows they would parade in front of the panel who were invited to make wild guesses as to their occupation, but later they came directly to Daly, who rose to greet them.  Contestants who could stump the panel for 10 questions could win a whopping $50 and a slice of immortality.  A panelist could ask a question until he or she got a “no” for an answer, causing Daly to flip over a low tech card on his desk and move to the next panelist.  Essentially it was just a version of the old parlor game 20 questions.  The entertainment came from repartee between the panel and Daly, Daly’s sometimes convoluted attempts to clarify a contestant’s answer, and the occasional accidental double entendres of the panelists guesses.

The most popular feature was the Celebrity Guest.  With the panel blindfolded—the women’s masks often adorned in rhinestones—the famous personage would sign in to inevitable cheers from the studio audience.  The panel followed the same procedures to guess his or her identity.  Well known stars often tried to disguise their famous voices. Almost all major Hollywood and Broadway stars, as well as recording artists appeared at one time or another.  But Celebrity Guests also included the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Salvador Dali.

In 1967 CBS announced it was cancelling all of their long running night time game shows in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience.  On the final show old clips were shown and former panelists brought back for a visit.  The last mystery guest was….John Charles Daly.

Goodson and Todman revived the show for daily syndication in 1968 and it ran successfully until 1975 hosted first by Wally Bruner and then by Larry Blyden.  It frequently ran in the half hour between the network news casts and prime time programming.  Despite its success, the syndicated version is barely remembered today.

But the original show continued to attract audiences on the Game Show Network (GMS). For a while I frequently find myself chuckling along with John Daly and Bennett Cerf in the wee small hours of the morning when I surely should be asleep.  Many clips are also available on Youtube.

It’s Official Labor Day—We’ll Take it but Our Heart Lies With Another

It officially Labor Day in the United States, a Federal Holiday celebrated on the first Monday of September since 1894.  For most people it is just the last hurrah of summer, an occasion for one last cookout and the gate way to fall and football season.  In most cities and towns the labor movement is not even perfunctorily acknowledge.  The press uses the occasion to annually either write the obituary of unions or to denounce them as powerful and greedy bullies, depending on the political inclination of the outlet.

While most of us working schlumps are grateful for the day off (if we get one), I for one, wish I could officially celebrate Labor Day with virtually the whole rest of the world on May 1.  International Labor Day was proclaimed by the Second International in honor of the memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs at the suggestion of none other than American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers himself and quickly spread around the world.  American unions celebrated it too.

But within just a few years Gompers was at the heart of a deal that substituted the September observance for May Day, a few crumbs from the Boss’s table, and a pat on the head by the Civic Federation in exchange for a promise to oppose labor radicalism and the growth of industrial style unionism in rapidly expanding basic heavy industry and the extractive industries—mining, forestry, agriculture, etc.

It is true that a September Labor Day observance pre-dated the 1886 Haymarket Affair.  In 1882 the New York Central Labor Union, made up of skilled craft unions belonging to a prototype of the AFL and lodges of the rival Knights of Labor cooperated in a call for a giant parade followed by picnics, games and amusements, and educational talks.  It was designed to show case the pride and power of the labor movement and also to press for the chief demand of labor reformers—the Eight Hour Day—the same cause that would be marked by an attempted nationwide General Strike on May 1, 1886, an event that led up the attack by police on a worker’s rally in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4 and the bomb blast blamed on the mostly German and anarchist leaders of the local labor movement.

New York City officials, eager to appease workers after a number of local strikes were suppressed with violence, gave their official approval to the parade.  On September 5, 1882 an estimated 30,000 workers marched in military order behind elaborate banners representing local unions of all of the trades, job shops, and Knights of Labor lodges.  It was an impressive display, but despite later claims by the AFL that observance of Labor Day spread quickly, only a few other cities, mostly in New York, began holding September celebrations.  

In the meantime huge May Day parades and rallies spread across the country.  But the late 1880s and early 1890s  were the beginning of a nearly 40 year period of virtual open class warfare with worker’s strikes being violently suppressed by local, state, and federal authorities and armies of private goons and strikebreakers.  And workers often fought back with equal violence.  Episodes like the Homestead Steel Strike with its running gun battles between Pinkertons and workers, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1882, and virtually continuous battles in the coal fields and hard rock mines nationwide, made many fear for revolution or civil war.

Democratic President Grover Cleveland, who ordered out the Army to crush the Pullman Strike, wanted a symbolic peace offering to Labor without actually granting the movement any of its demands. 

Republican king pin Ohio Senator Marc Hanna, soon to anoint William McKinley the next President, was even more ambitious—he proposed a pact of cooperation between capital and “responsible labor.”  He offered Gompers, the Cigar Roller’s Union  chief who headed the AFL, a seat in his new Civic Federation alongside the robber barons and captains of industry.  Hanna did not make the same offer to Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly of the Knights of Labor, who personally opposed strikes and advocated arbitration of disputes, because the members of Knights lodges included unskilled workers clamoring for recognition in heavy industry.  Gompers AFL would be allowed to pursue organizing skilled workers strictly by trade but not organize the great mass of unskilled, largely immigrant workers.  Gompers would also be called on to use his unions to oppose labor radicalism, and even to break strikes led by unions outside the grand agreement.

With Gompers in his pocket, Hanna engineered enough Republican support in Congress to get Cleveland’s official Labor Day proposal passed.  Cleveland signed it in to law just six days after Eugene V. Debs’s industrial union of railroad workers was smashed in the end of the Pullman Strike. 

Within a few years all states either aligned their existing Labor celebrations with the Federal holiday or enacted state proclamations echoing the U.S. call. 

Meanwhile authorities everywhere tried to suppress May Day observances, which continued to be supported by militant unionists and radicals of every sort—social democrats, anarchists, and left wing Marxists.  The Knights of Labor withered away, but aggressive industrial unions, especially in the mining industry, continued to fight both the bosses and the AFL’s attempt to divide the aristocracy of labor from the mass rank and file.  In little more than a decade the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would be formed to intensify that battle.

During the Depression and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of labor.   Labor Day became the official kick-off of Democratic election campaigns. Labor Day parades and rallies often seemed more of platform to launch candidacies than a labor union celebration.

Even that has faded as the percentage of Americans in unions continued to shrink year after year after a high tide in the early ‘60’s.  By the Clinton era, Democrats continued to get support from labor, but seemed to try to disassociate themselves from it, shunning identification as the party for of labor in favor of being seen as the champion of the Middle Class.

As half-assed a holiday as Labor is, I hope we all will take a moment to thank the American Labor movement for largely creating that Middle Class.

The Best Wedding Ever…and a Poem

Everyone knew it would be epic.  The union of Ira S. Murfin a/k/a The Last Bohemian, writer, performance art personage, and raconteur extraordinary and the estimable Emmy Bean, the elfin actress/singer/puppeteer/Jill-of-all performance could be nothing less.  Produced as a cooperative venture by the supremely energetic Arlene Brennan, mother of the Groom and her husband Michael; Holly and Reathal Bean, she a minister and he a working New York actor; and the couple’s legions of artist, performer, musician friends it could be nothing less.

And it exceeded every expectation.  This was like no wedding you have ever been to.  A wedding ceremony reconceived from scratch as a communal event, spiritual in a dozen different, surprising ways.

To begin with the location—The Bridgeport Arts Center located in a hulking relic of America’s Industrial Age that by turns was a coffin factory and the Spiegel Catalog warehouse.  Arriving guests were herded into a freight elevator large to commodiously accommodate three 1960 Lincoln Continental laid end to end.  It ground its way to the fourth floor where we spilled into an enormous space with exposed rafters, a saw-tooth skylight, and wrap around windows exposing a wide vista of Chicago, the Loop towers in the distance and the green dome of some impressive church in the middle distance. 
 

To the left rows of folding chairs were set up facing an area under a white canopy which hung like an inverted dome and was created and constructed by Collective Magpie, artists Melinda Barnadas and Tae Hwang.

When the two hundred or so guests were finally assembled, the wedding party made their gay entrance, the bride in a gown with a white top and short pale green skirt, the groom in a sort of copper brown suit and green tie. Six members of the wedding party occupied an arc of chairs to the front as John Szymanski sang and played guitar.  Ira and Emmy briefly disappeared and returned caring between them a large wooden table laden with mysterious objects including a pitcher, bottle, bowl, and a blue glass jar. 

Emmy seated herself at the table to the left facing Ira.  Between them a third chair was soon occupied by Chloe Johnson who welcomed us and explained the ceremony’s unique spontaneous and communal nature, explained in the wedding program thusly:

We will be using a chance procedure to determine the order of the ceremony.  When a name is pulled from the blue glass jar during the ceremony, that person will come sit in the empty chair at the table, perform a task or a reading, and then pull the next name.  At the end, you, our guests will be called to read the text on the reverse side of this page out loud to us, Emmy and Ira.  You will marry us.

If this seems anarchistic and subversive, it was.  If this seems chaotic, it was not.  One by one or in pairs the participants came up as called.  They read, they sang, told stories, explained the canopy, and performed certain rituals.  There was something that resembled a communion between the two.  Emmy’s mom, an ordained minister came up in her turn not to officiate but to participate.

I wish I could explain how movingly and articulately it all came together.  It climaxed as Ira and Emmy exchanged their personal vows sitting across the table from one another.  Each was brilliant, personal, and heartfelt.  Ira choked up.  So did Emmy.  So did we all.

They reached across the table and exchanged rings.  Then we were all called upon to read the following:

By the collective power of our presence

and the wisdom of our cumulative centuries of acquaintance

we affirm the love and joy you have found with each other

and wish to share with your many communities.

We assent to your understanding of yourselves as married

and will share in that reality

for as long as you wish it to be so.

After mutually crushing a glass underfoot in the Jewish tradition, the ceremony concluded.

But not the festivities.  To the delightful roots and folk music of Mr. Mayor and the Highlanders, guest moved to a wine, chees, bread, and pickles reception as the ceremonial space was reconfigured as a banquet hall.  There was much merriment and conviviality.

As the dinner was drawing to a close, there was the traditional round of toast, naturally all totally untraditional.  One highlight was the two elder males of the newlyweds.  Reathel Bean played and sang (some of the lyrics) of the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower in honor of Emmy’s recent appearance as Mother Maybelle Carter, while Michael Brennan tap danced.  Eventually they even called on me.  This was my contribution to the evening.

The Union of Forces of Nature

A Toast for the Wedding of Emmy and Ira

August 31, 2013

They tell me that when the placid brown of waters of the Ohio

            flow into the Mississippi, recently refreshed

            by the crystal Missouri,

            the two great rivers run side by side

            within the same banks for many miles.

You can see it from space or in a color photo

            in the National Geographic.

They even have a name for it—confluence.

Somewhere north of Memphis where mere humans

            invented the blues,

            the waters have finally mingled

            and spread wide and inexorable

            over the vast valley they have carved

            in eons of meandering passage.

Passed the bluffs at Vicksburg they proceed

            where, as Mr. Lincoln once said,

            “The Father of Waters rolls unvexed to the Sea.”

Whatever the gender it is so.

Let not the foolish old poet belabor the metaphor.

Confluences occur with more or less pageantry

            a thousand times a day

            and doddering old uncles are appointed

            certain minor roles in the rituals.

But most confluences are like the one

            where Crow Creek wanders into

            the South Platte back where I came from,

you can wade across the joined waters

            without getting your ankles wet this time of year.

But this confluence is different.

I give you Emmy and Ira—Forces of Nature

—Patrick Murfin

Guitar Masters to Play for Benefit at the Tree of Life UU Congregation’s Haystacks Coffee House

Andrew Cohen

On Saturday, September 7 at 7:00 pm blues artist Andy Cohen returns to Haystacks Coffee House at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry to present a concert to benefit the Monic Children’s Center in Jinja, Uganda. He will be joined by fellow guitarists and singers Donna Herula and Andrew Calhoun.

Cohen has won fans in McHenry County in two previous appearances at the Tree of Life.  He sings and performs songs that are at the root of modern blues and rock.  He intersperses his encyclopedic knowledge and mastery of Piedmont, Delta and country blues with stories and humor.  He was a protégé of the Rev. Gary Davis.  The Memphis based musician teaches guitar workshops, is a popular performer at blues and folk festivals, and likes to perform in intimate settings.

Donna Herula

Donna Herula is a Chicago born singer and slide guitar player who performs in country, Delta, and modern blues styles.  A soulful singer she performs on resonator steel body guitars and employs both finger style and blues style.  An award winning performer, she often works with her husband  singer/guitarist Tony Nardiello at venues like Buddy Guy’s Legends. 

Andrew Calhoun is an established presence on the Chicago folk scene influenced by writers and performers like John Prine, Leonard Cohen, and Martin Carthy.  He is noted as a singer/songwriter and recording producer for sensitive lyricism and gentle acoustic melodies.

Andrew Calhoun

The Monic Children’s Center is an orphanage and street children’s home serving the abandoned and HIV affected.  It provides urgent interim care in the hope that foster or permanent placement can be found.  Children are accepted regardless of tribal background, religion, or gender.  To support the work in Uganda, a $10 donation is requested at the door.

For more information contact Thomas Steffens at 815 404-7908, the church office at 815 322-2464, or visit http://treeoflifeuu.org.