Fred Allen was one of the early radio comedians and wrote great material. He once made reference to his agent by saying if the man's heart was crammed into the navel of a mosquito, it would rattle around like a bee-bee in a box car.
I quoted Sam Levenson once in a letter to a friend when my four children were young inmates in our home: Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.
My sister Mary had some major surgery recently and in the recovery room as she began to come around the lead nurse leaned in close to her face and said, "Say your name." Mary said, "Your name."
It runs in the family.
I had the good fortune to have my life overlap with that of Dorothy Parker. This is my favorite of her many contributions:
I only drink one martini,
I sometimes have two at the most;
Three I'm under the table,
Four I'm under the host.
My father, John Earl, was a funny man. He was also a warrior who ran away from home at 17 to join the army and his mother was so happy to see him gone she signed the papers to facilitate his underage enlistment (she came to live with us when I was growing up but that's another 103 blogs). In 1902 he found himself in the Philippine Islands fighting the fierce Moro natives and then, later, his unit was sent to China to take part in the Boxer Rebellion. He fought alongside Black Jack Pershing chasing Pancho Villa around northern Mexico and that army formed the core of the AEF that went to France in World War I. In all those adventures he took a liking to adult beverages and he claimed drinking caused him to fall victim to Syncopation which he defined as irregular movement from bar to bar. A friend of his told me he once ran into my father at one of their hang-outs in Grants Pass called the Wonder Bur and said to him, "Hi, John, how's it going?" My father replied, "I've been having a little trouble with yers." His friend said, "What's yers?" My father said,"Oh, thanks, I'll have another Budweiser."
My friend, Bill Bowerman, the legendary coach of Track and Field at the University of Oregon and co-founder of Nike, was born funny and never got over it. The steeplechase race in track involves running and hurdling and at one of the hurdles there is a water pit that must be cleared by the runners. One spring day Bill's attention was drawn to the pit where the water was covered by a floating mass of larva. "Get me a jar from the grounds shed," Bill instructed one of his runners. He then scooped the larva into the jar.
Bill had an army of track volunteers who acted as officials for putting on the meets and these fan-volunteers included doctors, lawyers and other professionals from the business community. Many of them had offices downtown in a building with a large atrium that featured a rock-surrounded pond and it was there that Bill gave his captive larva their new home. He was delighted to learn some days later that chaos ensued with screaming secretaries running about when the hatch became multi-winged frying creatures filling the air.
Let's see, there's more. Do you have another 14 hours?
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