They Ushered In a Hollywood Era

More than 40 years had passed in the blink of an eye. The CBS eye. The boys in blue--CBS ushers in the early ‘50s--felt a reunion was in order.

They came to swap stories from their youth, when Jack Benny was king of radio, “My Friend Irma” meant dumb blond and the best-known of the Bergens was Edgar.

It was show and tell at the Smoke House in Burbank. Everyone had a story. “No reruns!” someone heckled as one storyteller took two turns. Once in show biz, always in show biz. Indeed, most of the ushers went on to careers in the industry, though not on-camera.

The boys, now in their 60s, drank to good times--to $7-a-week apartments, yellow convertibles and girls with names like Tootsie.

“God, we had a lot of fun,” said Willie Dahl. Pay was $15 a week, plus $1 for every show worked, but it was a foot in the door. And through that door passed some of Hollywood’s most famous names. Crosby and Hope. Burns and Allen. Lucy and Desi. Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Steve Allen, Eve Arden.

There was a waiting list of usher hopefuls. The job: controlling crowds, giving directions to the restrooms, escorting VIPs, rounding up props. And rounding up audiences.

Some shows were such dogs that they couldn’t give away tickets, recalled Dave Powers. Ushers would be dispatched to NBC studios two blocks away to raid waiting lines. “We’d say, ‘You folks here to see a radio show? Well, follow us.’ Then we’d march them to one of our shows. They’d do the same thing to us.” (A young Johnny Carson’s “Carson’s Cellar” was one radio show that didn’t fill the CBS house.)

Powers went on to be a TV director (“The Carol Burnett Show,” “Three’s Company”), but he had a shaky start. Dutifully following orders to ushers to bar anyone without a proper pass from the clients’ box at the Benny show, he turned back William Paley, then the chairman of CBS.

Answering the phone one day on the set of Art Linkletter’s “House Party,” Powers asked, “Who’s calling?” “The vice president,” came the voice on the other end. “The vice president of what?” Powers asked. “The United States,” replied Richard Nixon.

A mere mention of rival NBC still elicits a hiss from this true blue crew. “We had class,” said Milan Radovich. The CBS ushers almost took pride in their ill-fitting blue uniforms with shiny pants, dismissing their NBC counterparts, with their epaulets and braid, as “the admirals.”

Mike Hamilburg, a literary agent, still remembers his horror when his mother cornered Jack Van Volkenburg, president of CBS’s new TV division, at a party: “My son is an usher at CBS. I have one complaint. . . .” It was about his tattered uniform.

Before there was CBS Television City, which opened in 1952 across from Farmer’s Market, there was CBS radio at Columbia Square, Sunset and Gower. Some CBS shows were broadcast from nearby theaters. Don Joannes remembered picking up doughnuts at 5 a.m. at the Hollywood Ranch Market and taking them to the Earl Carroll Theater for a morning ladies’ show.

Fred Beaton never forgot Benny handing him the key to his dressing room: “Pick up my Stradivarius and bring it up to me.” And how Mario Lanza, forbidden to keep booze, sent him to the drugstore for cough syrup. “Before I left his dressing room, he’d downed half the bottle.”

Benny and his writers used to huddle in the back of the theater before a show. One day Bob Cole was lucky enough to catch the comedian cracking up as he read Jack Shelton’s classic radio bit in which Benny was accosted by a robber: “Your money or your life!” Long pause, and then Benny said he was thinking it over.

As a shy 19-year-old, Bill Reitz was told to get a gaucho outfit at Western Costume and be a “guest” at a publicity-driven first anniversary “party” for “My Friend Irma.” To his horror, he landed first in line at a kissing booth where the buxom Marie Wilson waited. Reitz lost his cool, blushing and stammering. “By the time I got back, it was all over the building. I couldn’t take it so I quit my job.” (He was rehired.)

“Jack Benny kept us alive,” said Cole, with $10 at Christmas. Others were less generous. Crosby, it’s told, gave cigarettes--Chesterfields. His sponsor.

When TV was in its infancy, Barney McNulty’s stint flipping idiot cards served him well. “I used to dive into the pit, slide under the piano and get Alan Young’s dialogue ready, then dash onstage and pull the closing credits.” Today, McNulty is a freelance cue-card man, often off-camera at major telecasts holding up dialogue or stage directions, perhaps “incognito at a table full of people in tuxedos.”

Sonny Vosberg, who later became Bergen’s assistant, was working a live Thanksgiving TV broadcast of Ralph Edwards’ “Truth or Consequences.” “They thought it would really be cute to have all these turkeys fly into the scene. I said, ‘Look, I’m a farm boy. Turkeys don’t fly.’ ” Nonsense, they said, and had him climb up to a light grid and drop the birds. “Three of them died on the spot and the rest were wounded.”

Working “I Love Lucy” was “the deal of all time” to Peter Fleming. “The two or three guys who had good suits got the job” because VIPs were always visiting. “It was as much fun as there was. Lucy and Desi were wonderful.”

Today, CBS also has female ushers, but in the ‘50s, Hamilburg said, “It was definitely an all-male club.” Two special women were invited to the reunion: Pat Sheets, whose late husband, Barr, hired them all, and Marilyn “Budgie” Howard, the receptionist who followed Pat.

No one could have dreamed then that radio as they knew it was dying. Gone, too, are the ushers’ old hangouts--Nickodell, Naples, the Red Log.

And gone are those shabby blue suits. Today, CBS ushers wear snappy red blazers. Jack Carnegie of the blue crew arranged for a symbolic red blazer to be given to the boys-in-perpetuity crew. When he went to pick it up, he mentioned, the youngsters at CBS “looked at me like I was a dinosaur.”

Believing and Understanding

“There’s a common assumption,” said William Pannell of Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary, “that the average member of a congregation understands the faith to which he’s committed.”

Wrong, said Pannell, who believes failure to explain it all is the “soft underbelly” of most Christian denominations, a primary reason faithful leave the flock.

Pannell was among those gathered at Bethel A.M.E. Church on South Western Avenue to honor the pastor, the Rev. Chevienne Jones, on publication of “The Ark of the Covenant” (Clarion). His book, Jones says, is “for people who want to know what they believe.”

As for all the nice things being said about him, Jones just wanted to thank God for allowing him “to be the secretary while he was conversing with me” during four years of research and writing.

Jones studied the Old and New Testaments in the original languages, intent on correcting what he sees as translators’ “theological gymnastics.” Among these: “a strange three-in-one concept of God” rather than of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as separate entities, and the idea that Eve was created in the image of God.

Jones, a people’s pastor who belts out songs for the lord at his church’s annual fund-raising concert, was writing a sermon one day when he thought, “If this is all there is, I don’t want to do it.” The book was born.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.