This week in TV Guide: November 6, 1953

For one of the first times in its short history, TV Guide has the chance to cover a real, live breaking news story, one of the biggest TV has yet seen: Arthur Godfrey's dismissal of Julius La Rosa on live television.

For the uninitiated, Julius La Rosa was a singer and a popular regular on Arthur Godfrey's show. On October 19, following a song by La Rosa, Godfrey announced—on the air—that "This was Julie’s swan song with us. Julius has asked for his release, and I will never stand in the way of anybody trying to improve himself. We wish him Godspeed." La Rosa, in fact, had no contract with Godfrey, and was given no warning that he was about to be sacked, let alone that it was going to happen on a live broadcast. Two days later, at a press conference, Godfrey confirmed that he had fired La Rosa. He said that La Rosa had "lost his humility," had refused to go to ballet class (required for all the regulars, so that they might appear more graceful on-air), and that morale among the cast was a problem. 

How big a story is this? Well, the New York Teletype, ordinarily one page, is two pages this week, both devoted one hundred percent to the Godfrey-La Rosa story.* More than this, however, the report is the kickoff to a flood of stories, almost all negative, that TV Guide runs on Godfrey over the next few months. 

*Lost in the hubbub was that Godfrey had also fired his longtime orchestra leader, Archie Bleyer, for having done some recording work with Don McNeill, star of ABC's Breakfast Club, on the air directly opposite Godfrey's morning show. The fact that Bleyer also owned the label for which La Rosa recorded was said to be a coincidence, not connected to Godfrey's move. Bleyer goes on to work with the Everly Brothers, Andy Williams, and others.

This isn't to say that TV Guide is singling out Godfrey for particular scorn; indeed, Godfrey had frequently featured in the magazine throughout the months since the national version had started. And the press which Godfrey received in the wake of the La Rosa firing was almost universally negative, if not outright hostile. Godfrey had never been particularly easy to work with, and there were plenty of negative stories out there about him, but given his popularity with the public, most of those stories were either spiked or ignored by a press that sought to cultivate favor with the Old Redhead. Now, however, the gloves are coming off, and, given all that hostile press, it could be said that TV Guide is merely reporting what's going on; if their coverage appears to be against Godfrey, it could simply be a reflection of the coverage at large.

This week's Letters section bears out how the public has been galvanized by the controversy. "A Disgusted Reader" in Streator, Illinois stands up for Godfrey; "It burns me up the way some people are always telling things they don't like about Arthur Godfrey. Why don’t they keep it to themselves or turn the dial? I wonder if they are not jealous. For as long as we can remember, Godfrey he has been a very big favorite of ours." On the other hand, "Teen-Agers" from Leland, Illinois provide the kind of negativity that Disgusted Reader is apparently talking about: "What is the matter with that dumb Arthur Godfrey? We teen-agers have always watched his shows but not any more if Julius La Rosa isn’t around. Why didn’t he fire Frank Parker—one of the worst singers there is? When Arthur was in the hospital, Robert Q. Lewis did a better job as a substitute." Robert Q. Lewis! Ouch!

La Rosa and Godfrey in happier times

The story continues to percolate over the years; Godfrey would later claim that one of the reasons he sacked La Rosa was that the young singer was engaged in an affair with one of the McGuire Sisters who happened to be married at the time; Godfrey not only disapproved of it personally, he also felt it would reflect poorly on his family show. Others felt Godfrey was jealous of the attention La Rosa got; it was said that his fan mail had begun to exceed Godfrey's. La Rosa rarely rose to the bait when the subject came up; he acknowledged that Godfrey "wasn't a very nice man" to him, but always gave him credit for having made his career. La Rosa would go on to make thirteen appearances on Ed Sullivan's show, sparking a feud between Godfrey and Sullivan.

As for Godfrey himself, he never recovers from the incident. The phrase "no humility" becomes a punchline for stand-up comedians, and Godfrey's relationship with the press deteriorates completely, with articles appearing linking Godfrey to affairs of his own with several female cast members. He fires more than twenty cast and crew members over the next couple of years, and in a bizarre incident his pilot's license is suspended for six months after he buzzes the control tower of Teterboro Airport in his DC-3. Most painful of all for Godfrey is the backlash from his formerly loyal fans. Having at one time hosted his morning show on both CBS TV and radio five days a week, with two additional prime-time programs on TV and another two on radio, by the late 1950s, he is reduced to his daily radio program, plus appearing on occasional TV specials. He is teamed up with Alan Funt as host of Candid Camera, but the coupling fares poorly and Godfrey is replaced after a single season. 

He remains a giant in the history of radio and television, a fascinating and contradictory man with many interesting viewpoints. He also remains an abject lesson in how quickly the mighty can fall—and how far. 

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On the cover this week is Warren Hull, emcee of the quiz show Strike It Rich, one of the most popular—and most controversial—shows on the air. As it happens, I wrote a piece about this show many years ago, in the early years of this blog, as an example of how television exploits people in order to provide entertainment for the masses: 

On this show, the halt, the blind and the needy catalogue their woes before 25,000,000 viewers and then, by answering routine quiz questions, tap the sponsor for money. And, if they’re lucky, some viewer's heart may be touched to the extent that he calls the show on the "Heart Line" and contributes more cash or gifts.

Henry McCarthy, New York's Commissioner of Welfare, has been a harsh critic of shows such as Strike It Rich. In particular, he's concerned about the children of families who benefit from appearing on the show; he fears they'll be harmed by "exposing their families to public gaze as objects of beggarly solicitation. It’s a miserable thing to do to children and may scar them for life." Other critics of the program—and there are many—say that the contestants could easily be given what they need without having to "debase" themselves in public, and that those involved with the show don't deserve the praise they receive, given that "they make a good living out of it." 

Of course, not everyone agrees with this assessment, especially the emcee. 

"We don’t force people to appear on our show or to say anything they don’t want to say," Hull says in answer to criticism that the "poor unfortunates" appearing on the show are forced to bare their souls to the public. "Let the people who have been criticizing us read some of the mail from people whose lives have been saved by us." Adds Walt Framer, producer and originator of the program, "We've been on the air over five years and in that time we’ve given a new start in life to over 1000 people." He also thinks that seeing stories of people in truly dire circumstances gives viewers a different perspective on their own problems—"First World problems," we'd call them today.

Since Strike It Rich started, it's given away more than a million dollars in cash, which Framer says is a "drop in the bucket" compared to contributions received by viewers. As for the accusation that he's profiting from the misery of others, "I could make just as good a living producing dramatic or musical shows. Of course, I make a good living from this show, but I don’t make nearly as much as I could." But Commissioner McCarthy points out that the show presents “no opportunity to make painstaking plans that will really rehabilitate."

There are many different angles to a story like this: the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish" canard; the question of whether refusing charity is an indication of excessive pride; and the oldest one of all, whether or not the end justifies the means. The article ends with the note that, "The final arbiter will, of course, be the viewer." In that case, Strike It Rich is the winner; it began on radio in 1947, and its run on television lasted until 1958. But then, we still enjoy watching people bare it all for our entertainment today, so why should we be surprised?

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Academy Award winner Loretta Young is one of several Hollywood stars making the jump to TV this season, and she's done so with an NBC anthology series which she both introduces and stars in: Letter to Loretta. The title alludes to the show's unique format, in which the stories are based "on the fan mail which Miss Young receives from people seeking her advice on their personal matters." I'm cynic enough to take that explanation with a grain of salt, and in fact midway through the first season the title is changed to The Loretta Young Show, which makes a lot more sense. 

The show's trademark throughout its run, although it goes unmentioned in this week's review, is Young's entrance onto the set (said to be a recreation of her own living room), showing off her gown with a twirl as she comes through the front door of the room. It was, as the always-reliable Wikipedia points out, a gesture which was much parodied at the time, including by Ernie Kovacs; Young herself said that it allowed her a moment in each episode where she could be glamorous, after which she could play any character in the subsequent episode without fans wondering about her appearance. 

But enough about all that. Our question is this: is the show any good? Well, the critic seems somewhat surprised to report, it is. Based on the "weepy-eyed characters" Young has played throughout her movie career, one might have expected this to be a "glorified soap opera," but instead, the weekly stories are "full of charm and good humor." Young herself is more poised and confident than virtually any movie star who's ever made a similar transition to TV, utterly believable whether playing a department store clerk, a young mother, or a sophisticated wife. Her supporting casts are equally good, and the productions are of a uniformly high quality. It may not be the greatest drama ever seen on television, the review concludes, but it should provide the viewer with "many a pleasant half hour," as indeed it will for eight seasons and 165 episodes.

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Topper is another program getting the review treatment this week. Based on the 1937 movie starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as married ghosts and Roland Young as the man who purchased their old home, and whose life they haunt, this version made its debut this season, and already it's considered "one of the better new telefilm comedy programs of the season." 

Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys, real-life marrieds, are George and Marion Kerby, the fun-loving specters who died while skiing (along with their St. Bernard, Neil) while Leo G. Carroll plays Cosmo Topper, the "harried and henpecked bumbler" and subject of a reclamation project by the Kerbys, who decide they simply have to inject some fun into Topper's life. As is par for the course with these kind of characters (e.g. Mr. Ed, Mr. Snuffleupagus), only Cosmo can see the Kerbys and Neil, which is inconvenient for him but most convenient for us viewers. 

Topper is a fine adaptation not just of the movie, but of the bestselling novels by Thorne Smith that spurred the big screen comedy in the first place. The humor is sophisticated, sharp and witty—a family comedy, such as Father Knows Best, it is not—and contains fine doses of the satire which permeates Smith's novels. Sterling and Jeffreys are "probably the most charming pair of apparitions to have assumed bodily form on TV in years," and Carroll is the perfect foil for their shenanigans. The special effects, particularly the materialization and dematerialization of the Kerbys and scenes of objects floating through the air, are excellent. The only concern is whether or not the writers can keep things from wearing thin, and they're able to succeed for two seasons and 78 episodes.

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Friday night's Topper episode (7:30 p.m., CBS) involves Marion developing a crush on Cosmo Topper's new personal trainer; it's the fifth episode of the series, and it seems as good a place as any to start our look at the week's highlights. Meanwhile, on Person to Person (9:30 p.m., CBS), Ed Murrow's guest is composer Richard Rodgers.

An increasingly popular feature in today's saturated world of sports is the "whiparound," in which the studio host (or hosts) switches viewers back and forth between a number of different games depending on where the most excitement is at the moment. It may seem like something made for today's short-attention span fans, but it really isn't all that new; NBC is doing that very thing in 1953 with college football; they call it "Panorama Coverage," for weeks when the network is airing multiple regional games rather than one national broadcast. This Saturday is the second Panorama week of the season, with the network covering Florida vs. Georgia, South Carolina vs. North Carolina, Northwestern vs. Wisconsin, and Kansas vs. Kansas State. (1:45 p.m.) It's duly noted that the time blocked out for college games back in 1953 is two hours and 40 minutes; today's games run at least an hour longer than that. I suppose as long as it makes for more commercials, it's progress.

The Ed Sullivan Show and the Colgate Comedy Hour go head-to-head this Sunday, with Ed's program coming from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. (7:00 p.m., CBS) Ed takes viewers backstage, as some of opera's greats are shown rehearsing for upcoming performances; Rise Stevens, Richard Tucker, Cesare Siepi, Hilda Gueden, Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters are among those appearing. Over on NBC, Jimmy Durante is the host of Comedy Hour, with Jimmy's old partner Eddie Jackson, Roy Bargy and his orchestra, and special guest Frank Sinatra. Even with Frank, I think I'd have to go with Sullivan on this one. And on our other reviewed show this week, Letter to Loretta, Loretta Young plays a young widow and mother being wooed by a New York magazine editor who doesn't understand her devotion to her six-year-old son. (9:00 p.m., NBC)

I think most of us know that professional wrestling was one of the TV hits of the 1950s, with many of wrestling's stars becoming larger-than-life household names. Perhaps it's because they're such cartoonish characters that the description for Monday's All-Star Wrestling (7:30 p.m., WGN) asks the question, "Are wrestlers human beings?" That might sound a little humanistic, but TV Guide promises to get to the bottom of it: "The first of our series on wrestlers, in next week's TV Guide, gives the lowdown on phony wrestlers." Phony wrestlers?? Next, they'll be telling us that Santa and the Easter Bunny aren't real. Horrors.

Tuesday we get a chance to see one of the more amusing head-to-head contests in early television: Milton Berle's Buick-Berle Show (7:00 p.m., NBC) vs. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living (7:00 p.m. DuMont). It was a friendly competition, with the two having the highest respect for each other; Sheen used to joke about being called "Uncle Fultie," and Berle kidded that the Bishop outdid him in the ratings because he had better writers. Elsewhere, Robert Preston stars in a rare straight-dramatic performance in the U.S. Steel Hour episode "Hope For a Harvest," co-starring Faye Emerson. (8:30 p.m., ABC) It's the story of a depression-era farmer saved from despair by the love of a good woman. 

Wednesday's late-night movie on the NBC affiliate WNBQ (remember, this is in the pre-Tonight era) is Hitler—Dead or Alive, starring Ward Bond as one of three former Alcatraz prisoners hired to capture Adolf Hitler in return for a one-million-dollar reward. (11:00 p.m.) I was going to scoff at this, sight unseen, but then I got to thinking: TV shows from The Dirty Dozen to Garrison's Gorillas to Jericho have used this type of premise for years. And after all, is it really that much more implausible than the U.S. government recruiting Mafiosos to assassinate Fidel Castro—if anyone knows how to carry out a hit, it should be a team of gangsters. And Quentin Tarantino did admit that the inspiration for Inglorious Basterds came from this movie. 

One of the points made in the discussion about Loretta Young's move to television centered around the number of movie stars premiering on TV this season, and I was struck by the number of them just on Thursday. There is, of course, Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life (7:00 p.m., NBC), but Groucho's been doing that gig since 1947. Better examples are Ray Milland, starring in the sitcom Meet Mr. McNutley (7:00 p.m., CBS), Charles Boyer, one of the Four Stars of the dramatic anthology Four Star Playhouse (7:30 p.m., CBS), and Ray Bolger, in the sitcom Where's Raymond? None of them were huge hits, but all three of them ran for at least two seasons, and Four Star made it to, appropriately enough, four, plus years in syndication under various titles. 

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MST3K alert: The Mad Monster (1942) Mad scientist develops a method of transplanting the blood of a wolf into a man. Johnny Downs, George Zucco, Glenn Strange. (Thursday, 11:00 p.m., WCAN in Milwaukee) OK, this is a really bad movie; it makes it to MST3K on merit. We do have the consolation of another episode of Radar Men from the Moon, however. And don't feel too sorry for Glenn Strange as Petro, the monster: he'll go on to play Sam, the bartender of the Long Branch Saloon, in 222 episodes from 1961 to 1973. That calls for a drink! TV  

Around the dial

Once again we begin the week with a shameless bit of self-promotion: my latest appearance on the Dan Schneider Video Interview. This week, Dan and I discuss television in the 1950s, in all its various ramifications. It's a far-ranging conversation that covers a lot of area, so take some time and give it a watch.

We're into August now, in case you hadn't noticed, which means that the Christmas in July festival at Christmas TV History has wrapped up for another year. This year's theme revolved around adaptations of A Christmas Carol, literal and figurative, and Joanna thoughtfully provides this recap where you can catch your favorites from last month.

At Cult TV Blog, John continues his look at The X-Files and its portrayal of the American Dream, this week concentrating on the episode "Fresh Bones," the military-industrial complex, immigration, slavery, and how they come together. Good stuff, as always.

David continues his odyssey through 1970s TV at Comfort TV, and his week he arrives at Thursday, 1972. That fall marked the beginning of my time in the World's Worst Town™ so I didn't see a lot of them, but it's an eventful year; while NBC still has a killer lineup, it's the year CBS introduces The Waltons.

Is The Avengers a better show with Mrs. Gale or Mrs. Peel? Interesting question; I'd guess that in the United States, where the Diana Rigg episodes were the first ones shown, the answer would be the latter, but at The View from the Junkyard, Roger uses that question as the jumping-off point for a look at the episode "What the Butler Saw." What do you think?

This week Butch Patrick turns 70. (In other news, I'm being reminded again that I'm old, and getting older.) We know him from The Munsters, of course, but there's more to his career than that, and we're reminded of that in this brief summary at Travalanche.

I'm not sure you could take a trip around the dial in the 1960s and 1970s without coming across Susan Oliver somewhere; she was always appearing as a guest star on the most popular programs of the day, and Those Were the Days takes a spin around her credits. 

One of the things you seldom see anymore is the appendage "The New" to a show's title. I suppose it's mostly because most shows aren't named after their stars anymore, but off the top of my head I can think of second shows by Bob Cummings, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Phil Silvers, and, as Television's New Frontier: the 1960s reminds us, Loretta Young. Read about her episodes from 1962.

Paul Reubens, aka Pee-Wee Herman, died this week of cancer, aged 70, and social media has been flooded with tributes from friends, colleagues, and fans alike. At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence takes a look back at the life and career of the beloved comedian.

When my fandom of classic Doctor Who began in the 1980s, I began frequenting sci-fi bookstores in earnest, and one of my most pleasing discoveries was a series of novels based on The Prisioner, a show I'd discovered a decade earlier. Martin Grams ran across them recently, and he writes about it here.

I remember The Man from Atlantis, Patrick Duffy's sci-fi series before he became a Ewing and became famous, because it was a forced watch on the one channel in the World's Worst Town™. However, Cult TV Lounge doesn't have that same baggage to deal with, so you can get a fair assessment of the TV-movie that started it all. TV  

This week in TV Guide: May 16, 1959

No, I'm not going to say anything about the fashion sense displayed on the front cover of this week's edition. It's just too easy, there's no percentage in it. Besides, it violates the number one rule around here, which is: Don't discuss things out of their cultural context. I'm sure 58 years ago people would have seen this through an entirely different lens. It is distracting, though...

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I'm in the mood for something different this week. Rather than focusing on individual nights or programs, let's just hop through the issue and see what we can find.

Here Isn't Lucy: Dwight Whitney reports that "When Lucy Ball showed up for a benefit in Oklahoma City's 12,000-seat Taft Stadium, she took one look at the sparse crowd (variously estimated at from 800 to 2400) and blew her stack. Somebody goofed, she wailed, by failing to publicize the thing. But that didn't stop Lucy from goofing herself. She refused to go on, thereby garnering some of the worst press a major TV star has yet to achieve, and leaving herself open, with good reason, to the charge that she didn't love her fans half as much as they loved Lucy."

A Song in His Heart: Ernie Kovacs returns to television in an NBC special Friday night (8:00 p.m. ET) called "Kovacs on Music." It's included in the first volume of the Ernie Kovacs Collection put out by Shout a few years ago. (And if you don't have it yet, why not?) The show is every bit as surrealistic as you'd expect from Kovacs, including an extremely abridged version of Swan Lake performed by dancers in gorilla suits, a truly weird bit about a singing commercial with Louis Jourdan as one of the singers and Andre Previn as the conductor, and a very funny skit with Edie Adams as part of an American troupe putting on a televised operetta on Italian television. But Adams, who had a beautiful voice, also sings a lovely number by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Kovacs displays his serious knowledge of classical music. It's a good thing the show's available, though; the TV Guide listing gets several descriptions wrong, including putting the Nairobi Trio in the operetta skit. Oh well.

There are eight million stories down there.

The Naked Truth: Bob Johnson's review of The Naked City calls the police drama "a disappointing piece of theater for many reasons," chief among them the show's insistence on seeing the host city as the star of the series. "Dragnet learned how to deliver sociology as interpreted by Lt. Joe Friday and nobody else. Unless Naked City abandons its premise of featuring New York City as its star, and settles down to telling every story from [star Horace] McMahon's viewpoint, the show may swallow him up as did its former star, [John] McIntire." Of course, today's television historians view that very trait - the show's use of New York City as a living, breathing character every bit as much as its actors - as one of the main reasons Naked City is considered one of the finest police dramas of its kind. And starting in season two it's Paul Burke, not Horace McMahon, as the human star of the show.

And They're Off! Sports highlight of the week is the Preakness Stakes, second jewel in horse racing's Triple Crown, telecast live from Pimlico in Baltimore. As opposed to the marathon coverage given the races this year on NBC and NBCSN, CBS's telecast is a mere half hour (5:30 p.m. ET), with Fred Capossela calling the race, Bryan Field on color, and Chris Schenkel doing interviews from the winner's circle. Tomy Lee, the Kentucky Derby winner two weeks ago, is passing up the Preakness and the final race, the Belmont Stakes (his British handlers thought the racers were run too close together), leaving Royal Orbit, a "fast-closing fourth" in the Derby, to take the run for the Black-Eyed Susans.

Who Are You Two Again? There's a game show on NBC called Laugh Line (9:00 p.m., Thursday), its primary claim to fame being that it's hosted by Dick Van Dyke. A brief description of the show: "the panelists sit around ad-libbing captions for living cartoons pantomimed by stock-company actors. Then each panel member moves the actors around into new positions to fit his own laugh line." (It sounds like something that was done much, much better by Who's Line is it, Anyway?) The show might well have amounted to more, however, had it stuck to its original plan, which was to have, as two of the regular panelists, the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. There's an article telling us a little more about the duo, who hit it big a year or so ago with their appearance on Omnibus, and they're looking forward to plying their trade on television. But by the time the programming section is printed up, the lineup has already changed; with Nichols and May signed for Broadway in the fall, the producers have decided to replace them with Roger Price and Pat Harrington, Jr. (as Guido Panzini) in order to create a permanent cast. Laugh Line isn't picked up for the fall, while in the meantime Mike Nichols and Elaine May, both together and separately, go on to legendary careers.

Allen vs. Sullivan: We even have a rare appearance this week of our Steve Allen vs. Ed Sullivan matchup. Both shows air Sunday nights; Steverino starts things off at 7:30 p.m. on NBC with his guests, comedian George Gobel, singers Diahann Carroll and Vaughn Monroe, the Pensacola Naval Air Training Center Cadet Choir, and the Nicholas Dancers. Ed counters at 8:00 p.m. on CBS with Louis Prima and Keeley Smith; comedians Shelley Berman, Jack Carter and Frank Libuse; singer Al Hibbler; dancer Conrad "Little Buck" Buckner; trick violinist Baron Bulka; and the United States Military Academy Cadet Choir. Both shows have good lineups tonight (aside from the probability that the country has now been left undefended due to the Army and Navy being on television), but in this case I think I'm going to have to give the edge to Sullivan due to Berman's comedy, and the talent of Louis Prima and his then-wife, Keely Smith. In case you haven't ever had the opportunity to see them, here's a clip - could well be from this very show.


So Who Did Discharge Bilko? Since the question's on the cover, we'd better try and provide the answer. The Phil Silvers Show, originally known as You'll Never Get Rich but known colloquially as Bilko after Silvers' character, scheming Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko, has long been regarded as one of the great sitcoms of the Golden Age, and so it may come as something of a surprise to learn that the series ran only for four seasons, and 1959 marks the end of the road. What happened? According to Silvers, who perhaps protests a bit too much, it's because Camel, his main sponsor, is so closely identified with the series, even tailoring the spots to fit the platoon, that secondary sponsors ("You can't do a weekly show like ours these days without two sponsors.") never felt they were getting as good a deal. When his most recent second sponsor, Schick, left the show, CBS wasn't able to find a new one. Of course, he adds, "I don't think CBS tried too hard to sell us. But as I said, I'm not sorry. I'm tired of the role and of the constant grind." Fortunately for the network, Westinghouse just happens to have wanted to move their show, Desilu Playhouse, to the Silvers timeslot all along. So all's well that ends well, I guess.

What Else Is Worth Watching? On Friday night, ABC's Walt Disney Presents (8:00 p.m.) features two delightful cartoons based on British author Kenneth Grahame's wonderful children's stories: "The Wind in the Willows" and "The Reluctant Dragon." Basil Rathbone is among the voices for the cartoons. The long arm of the law has yet to catch up with Charles Van Doren, so he's still one of the hosts on Today each weekday morning on NBC. Alan King, Dorothy Collins, and the Dukes of Dixieland are guests on The Garry Moore Show (CBS, Tuesday, 10:00 p.m.). Claudette Colbert hosts the premiere of Woman!, a series of occasional hour-long afternoon dramas airing on NBC. Tuesday's question: Do They Marry Too Young? A Monday spectacular airing on CBS at 8:00 p.m., "America Pauses for the Merry Month of May," is hosted by Burgess Meredith and takes viewers around the country to celebrate "Maytime," including Larry Blyden in Teaneck, New Jersey; Molly Bee in Mobile, Alabama; Art Carney in Douglaston, New York, and Marion Anderston at Yosemite National Park. Finally, on the aforementioned Desilu Playhouse (still on Mondays at this point, 10:00 p.m, CBS) the aforementioned Lucille Ball plays a dancing teacher who learns she's inherited a boxer from her late uncle. Imagine her surprise when the boxer turns out to be not a dog, but a prizefighter!

Loretta Young Without That Hat! In fairness, since we started with Miss Young, we should end with her as well. Her series, The Loretta Young Show, has just wrapped up season six, and during that time she's played no fewer than 129 different characters, from farm girls to gangster's molls. During her illustrious career, she's won an Oscar (and been nominated another time), two Emmys (plus four additional nominations), and 37 other awards. She's learned a lot during that time, and not just about acting, but business as well. It turns out that her company owns the films she's made for her series, and she's not about to part with them as so many other stars have. Rumor has it she's been offered $4 million for them, to no avail. "[I]f they can make money for somebody else - well, I'd figure they could do the same for me. I'd figure, why not retain ownership? I'm just supposing, remember."

She's also no-nonsense when it comes to making the show: for years she'd been bothered when shooting stopped in order to reset the lights and move the camera in for a close-up. "Get a boom," she'd tell the director, to which the answer was always the same - it's too expensive to rent. Finally, she'd had enough, and told them to buy a boom and rent it out when they weren't using it. "Let somebody pay us rent for it." It's now paid off and bringing in extra dollars. If the show's budget can't afford a particular guest star, she tells them to take the difference out of her own salary. She gets an allowance of $20 a week in cash, and that's good enough for her. Quite a gal, all in all. But maybe we could all chip in a little more to buy her a better hat? TV