I picture Buddy in smoky clubs, playing to the night crowds. : Leave Them Laughing

Two old guys are talking. One of them says, “I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost $3,000.” The other one says, “That’s great, what kind is it?” The first guy says, “About half-past 4.”

The man telling the jokes is Buddy Mack. His real name is Peter Emerson Raymey, but he uses Buddy Mack because you don’t survive as a comic with a name like Peter Emerson Raymey.

The pseudonym came to him when he was dancing for loose change on the wood plank floors of speak-easies in Kansas City and Chicago.

“People would call, ‘Hey, buddy’ or ‘hey, mac’ when they didn’t know my name,” he remembers. “So I said to myself why not Buddy Mack?”

He is in the living room of his Reseda apartment, a hulking man in shorts and T-shirt. His wife is out of town so the apartment is not in the shape it ought to be.

“You have to take me like I am,” he says.

I am visiting Buddy Mack because I have heard he is president of the Hollywood Comedy Club, an organization of old troupers who meet once a month to entertain each other. Radio comedian Fred Allen started the club 35 years ago.

But as we begin to talk, I can see the club is not half as interesting as Buddy. At 72 he still has the kind of glow that illuminates people with show biz in their soul. When he stands in the center of the living room, spotlights click on.

Two counterfeiters make up a bunch of $18 bills and try to pass them in a hick town. They buy some jellybeans from a candy store and one of them says, “Can you change an $18 bill?” The owner says, “Sure, you want three sixes or two nines?” I ask him about a harmonica I see on a shelf.

“It’s a Marine Band harmonica,” Buddy says. “I’ve been playing since I was nine. A railroad agent gave it to me. You want to hear something?”

He goes into another room and warms up. The sound is faint, muted. Pretty soon I hear “Indian Love Call” being played and Buddy comes down the hall like he is making a grand entrance at the Palace.

The harmonica’s vibrato enribbons the room in rumpled silk. The mood is mist and tears, last kisses at a train station. I picture Buddy in smoky clubs, playing to the night crowds.

“I taught myself to play,” he says, finishing. “I spent a lot of time in institutions for homeless kids and there was nothing else to do. I had no one to visit me, so I practiced.”

Life did not begin happily for Buddy Mack.

He was abandoned in the hospital at birth. A series of foster homes and institutions followed. At 14, he ran away and has been on his own ever since, riding the rails, working when he could.

They were Depression years. Life was hard.

A mouse dies and goes to heaven and St. Peter gives him roller skates to look around. Then a cat dies and goes to heaven. St. Peter sees him later and says, “How do you like it so far?” The cat says, “I love it! And those meals on wheels, what a great idea!”

“When I was 15,” Buddy says, “I began playing the harmonica at bars. Anything to keep eating. Then I’d put a nickel in the jukebox and dance. Afterward, I’d pass the hat.”

It all began right there, Buddy says. Necessity spawns career. Futures are born in the dark times of need. From then on, there was nothing else he ever wanted to do.

He played bars and clubs and stages and burlesque houses. In between, he married four times. Wife number two was Myrna Dean, the Queen of Burlesque. His sidekicks were people like Rags Ragland and Hobo Snyder.

In the early days, Buddy sang, played the harmonica and danced, but dancing got to be too hard. He noticed that comedians never puffed, so he dropped dancing and went into comedy.

Kansas City, Chicago, Montreal, Knoxville, New York, Mobile, Delano. The Waldorf Cellars, the Winnie Winkle Club, the Fleur-de-Lis and Pop Saul’s Black and Tan Club.

Success varied. Sometimes he played for tips, sometimes for salary. What never varied was a desire to find his father. Using child welfare agencies, he finaly did find him working on the Grand Coulee Dam on Washington state’s Columbia River.

“I told him I didn’t care why he left,” Buddy says. “I just wanted to call someone Dad. He got me a job for $23 a day but then wanted $13 a day for room and board. I owed him nothing. He owed me a lot. I got up and left and never saw him again.”

They call Buddy Mr. Nostalgia now. He keeps busy playing for clubs and schools and sometimes senior citizen groups. In between, he works as a security guard.

“I’m available,” he says. “But I don’t do blue humor. No scatological jokes.”

This guy owns a Jewish deli and one day a man from the IRS comes around and says he owes $6,000 in taxes. “This is crazy,” the deli owner says, “I don’t owe you $6,000!” The IRS guy says, “What about those two trips to Israel?” “Oh , them,” the deli owner says, “I forgot to tell you. We deliver.”

Buddy plays “Indian Love Call” again. Then he tells some jokes. I sit very quietly and listen.