The Pittsburgh Press (November 6, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, it may have escaped you frivolous people who just read the funnies, but recently I noticed an item that seemed to rank historically along with the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party and the time Molly broke her pitcher. A solemn British judge admitted in court that the word “oomph” had become part of the English language.
The poor English managed to stave off the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler, but they’ve been helpless before the Americanized slang that parachutes into England every day. Instead of “very good, M’Lud,” English butlers are saying “O.K., Mac,” and English people, instead of “having a spot at tea,” are “getting their noses wet.” Taxi drivers who used to have “a bit of a tiff” are telling each other to “pull in their ears.”
I guess the only thing needed to complete the Americanization of Britain is to have Queen Mary turn up at Buckingham Palace with an armload of Sinatra records.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 7, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, there’s a movement afoot among the United Nations to scrap atomic bombs and a lot of other things that cause misunderstandings. I certainly hope they make room on the scrap pile for pessimistic government officials who already are mumbling about a depression.
Things are sufficiently bad right now when we have too many customers and not enough bacon without Gloomy Gus moaning about how much worse they’ll be in the future when we have too much bacon and not enough customers.
For goodness sake, if we’re going to have a depression, never mind the build-up, surprise me!
If we’re not careful, our national emblem, the American Eagle, will be replaced by the sour puss. We used to cross the Rockies with a banjo on our knee, but we’re becoming a nation of mopers who are afraid to spend a dollar without an economic expert riding on our back.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 8, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I see that a Los Angeles couple have refused to give their new baby boy a name because they think he should have the right to choose his own when he gets big enough.
True, I’ve seen too many basically peaceful young men taking pokes at perfect strangers just to prove they didn’t deserve to be baptized Percival. And I’ve seen lots of nice plain girls who wear themselves to a frazzle trying to live up to names like Lorelei. Not forgetting those poor kids who are given names like Ezra and Abigail after rich uncles and aunts who later decide to leave all their money to a home for dogs!
However, letting children name themselves may have drawbacks, too. A few years hence it would be pretty confusing for school teachers to conduct classes in which all the girls were named Lana Turner and all the boys were named Douglas MacArthur or Joe DiMaggio.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 11, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I see that a new desk has been designed so that the busy businessman can be busier than ever. It’s all filled with built-in gadgets, including a built-in electric razor (and I suppose a built-in manicurist).
Also, it has a built-in radio and a built-in dictation machine. Thus the executives can shave themselves while listening to the stock market quotations.
Personally, I think they could have gone a little further and equipped that desk with a hot plate and a day bed. Then the executive could build himself into it as a permanent fixture, and the housing situation would be that much better off. And so, I think, would his wife.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 12, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I guess Paul Revere can start getting his horse and saddle ready, because those persistent old British are up to things again. Only this time they just want Hollywood’s scalp.
From what I’ve read, everyone in England is going into the movie business. English sheep dogs are running up and down the moors making like Lassie. Scotland Yard detectives are practicing that Humphrey Bogart leer; and children who show an early tendency to act like Mickey Rooney actually are encouraged.
Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah already is in the movies and there are rumors that Winnie himself wouldn’t turn down a good Judge Hardy part.
However Hollywood should win the fight because its climate is better for making movies. England is foggy all over, while we only have producers who are in a fog.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 13, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I see this is National Flower Week and I wonder if it’s just plain coincidence that it follows national election week. Anyway, our noses should certainly welcome the change after all the mud-slinging and name-calling that went on during the election campaign.
Not only that, but it seems it works out perfectly for the politicians too. The losers can make a gesture of good sportsmanship and sent the winners flowers which they secretly hope will give them hay fever.
Of course, if I know anything about politicians, the losing Democrats will send the Republicans gifts of potted flowers hoping that they will still be in bloom when they are back in office. I don’t want to discourage them, but if the Republicans stay in office as long as the Democrats did, they’d better send century plants.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 14, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Hold it, girls, don’t buy any more of those amazing new gadgets just yet. They’ve just held a contest between an American operating our most modern calculating machine, and a Japanese clerk operating an abacus, an ancient contraption of wires and beads. And the abacus easily defeated our wonderful machine in tests of addition, subtraction and division.
Kinda makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? We’ve been knocking ourselves out for hundreds of years, getting smarter and smarter and smarter, until we finally come up against an invention that isn’t as good as one they had hundreds of years ago.
Maybe this whole machine age is over-rated. Maybe we should turn backward in our search for the better things. Cleopatra didn’t have an electric washer, but she certainly put Caesar through the wringer. And Josephine burned Napoleon to a crisp without an automatic toaster.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 15, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, it’s been a very nice week for general peace of mind and disarmament, for a change.
The Russians say they want to disarm; the Republicans and President Truman have announced they’re going to get along together, and that woman across the street has stopped wearing a hat just like mine.
The butchers are giving customers less of their lip and more of their pot roast. Landlords and tenants are actually passing one another in hallways without swinging. And I managed to buy a pair of nylons the other day without doing the second act from “Way Down East” in the middle of the hosiery section.
Goodness, the dove of peace may need a little eye make-up, and to have his pinfeathers brushed up a bit, but it looks as though he may outlast the Thanksgiving turkey after all.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 18, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD– Well, I guess they can take Mark Twain’s joke, “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” and put it out to pasture after a long, useful life. It seems that scientists of a big electrical company actually created a snowfall by bombarding a cloud with dry-ice pellets from an airplane, and also made rain clouds in their laboratories.
All I hope is that this new man-made weather doesn’t get commercialized like everything else. I’ve enjoyed weather just as it is for years without suddenly hearing things like “this drizzle is coming to you through the courtesy of the No-Drip Raincoat Co.” or “this hurricane is blasting you through the walls as a service of Zippy Catsup, Inc.”
But just think, someday every housewife in America could have a shelf full of “genuine canned California Sunshine.” She’d have to be careful, though, not to spill any of it on the carpet.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 19, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
A few days ago I wrote a piece about how much a farmer needed a wife, and now comes a lady editor of a farm paper who says that a wife is worth exactly $69,000 to a farmer. How she figures his out, I don’t know and it makes me curious as to how much the wives of non-farmers are worth.
I asked George how much he thought I was worth to him, and he said I was a pearl beyond price, minus deductions for hat bills.
He doubted, though, if I’d be worth even $69,000 to a farmer, and brought up the subject of my victory garden, which I thought was rather mean.
However, that farm-wife valuation ought to make every married farmer sit pretty good financially, George said. Even if all the crops fail he’s still got assets of $69,000 if he keeps his wife in good condition.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 20, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Psychology is rampant these days. The people who run big food markets recently met in Chicago and a psychologist told them why the American housewife buys the things she does. According to his figures, 38.2 percent of her purchases are made on impulse and 48.2 percent are planned ahead of time.
Well, I hope he’s better at psychology than he is at arithmetic, because even a finger-counter such as myself can add those figures and see that 13.6 percent is left unaccounted for. I guess the 13.6 figure represented the stuff the markets are always out of.
The psychologist said the 38.2 group is taken on impulse largely because the items have pretty labels and nicely shaped packages and look good from the outside. He seemed to think this made women a little silly, but how about men? Don’t 99.9 percent of them pick their wives for the same reason?
The Pittsburgh Press (November 21, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – I see that a lady fashion expert says the divorce rate is going up because women aren’t exerting themselves to appeal to men any more. She says it’s an insult to the men for girls not to make themselves more attractive.
Well, if that’s the case, I’m going right out tomorrow and stock up on new gowns, hats, shoes and perfume so that I won’t offend George by lacking in attraction.
Come to think of it, the sloppy old slacks and beaten-up sports jacket that George refuses to give to the Salvation Army don’t make him very attractive either, but if he bought new ones, it would increase his clothing budget and decrease mine.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 22, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, girls, Professor Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, is back, this time telling us the kind of man we should marry. He’s be more helpful if he told us where to find this man, but you know how professors are. I noticed in school that they expected me to work problems out for myself, which was a great disappointment to all of us.
Anyhow, Professor Hooton divides men into three types: The he-man, the skinny man or stringbean, and the fat man or butterball. He says the butterballs make the best husbands, because they are fond of people, while the he-men are noisy around the house, and the stringbeans are always tired.
George has enough tummy for a butterball, but when I suggest going out in the evening he screams his head off. What do you do, Professor, when you are married to a butterball who is noisy around the house and always tired?
The Pittsburgh Press (November 25, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, the Duke of Windsor, the world’s most famous unemployed man, has been offered jobs that range from third base on the Brooklyn Dodgers to modelling Klassy Kut Klothes, but it now seems he’s coming to Hollywood to be a movie producer.
They may accuse a lot of our Hollywood producers of inexperience, but not the duke. In his younger days, he fell off more horses than Roy Rogers ever got on.
He topped anything Ronald Colman ever did on the screen when he gave up the British Empire for his lady love. His recent experience in jewel robberies are ready-made Bulldog Drummond scripts, and certain high officials in England have led him a dog’s life that would have Lassie complaining.
I can just see the head of a studio saying to himself, “A member of English royalty, huh? Just the fellow I want to produce that picture about life among the Armenian goat herders.”
The Pittsburgh Press (November 26, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, Dr. James P. Egan, a famous research physicist, says that noise has little effect on efficiency. He claims that you can sit with a triphammer near your ear and work just as well as you could in a quiet, padded cell. Of course the next day you may have to spend whatever you earned on an era trumpet.
I suppose Dr. Egan does his best work in a railroad station next to the train announcer. Another good place might be Congress, although there the presence of noise and the absence of efficiency might cancel each other out.
Personally, I can concentrate on my work no matter how loud things are around me. When I’m determined to get money for a new hat, the noise of George saying “No” the first fifteen times doesn’t disturb me in the least.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 27, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – I see there’s a lot of talk about school teachers’ strikes. Well, I don’t know anything about the merits of individual cases, but I don’t think there’s any doubt about teachers always having been underpaid in comparison with the tremendous service they perform.
And I suggest to you. Ladies and gentlemen of school boards or whoever it is that fixes teachers’ salaries, if you let these strikes go on you are going to give our school children a psychological bias in favor of strikes. Why, our own youngsters keep anxious enquiring when the teachers are going to strike at their school.
Even George reads of the strikes wistfully and wishes teachers had been organized back when he went to school. He says the only strikes his teachers took part in were those administered to him with a hickory switch.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 29, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I see that President Truman took a practice dive into the Gulf of Mexico in a captured German submarine the other day. The thought occurred to me that he might have been thinking wistfully about it as a nice place during the next two years to get away from the Republican Congress.
Of course, I don’t doubt that the Republicans would be able to locate him – with the experience they’ve had being submerged during the past few years.
But it must have seemed so quiet and friendly down there beneath the surface – far from John L. Lewis – with the sharks swimming cozily around, the oysters opening their mouths and not saying anything, and all the nonvoting flora and fauna of the deep waving friendly-like to him, the way people used to wave in Missouri.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 2, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Several thousand men’s clothiers held a convention in Chicago the other day to decide what the master sex is going to wear in 1947. For example, the big brutes will be wearing yellow and pink hats.
George has been making fun of my hats for years, and I can’t wait to catch him in one of those pink numbers.
Some new suits will have coats without collars or lapels. However, George says these are an improvement on the suit in the stores nowadays which are without coats, vests and trousers.
Another item disclosed at the convention was a belt that “breathes in and out.” Goodness, I have sat beside George in the movies when he was breathing hard – when the Indians were catching up with Gary Cooper. But if his belt joins in the breathing, I’m afraid it’s going to be a little difficult to hear the screen dialogue.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 3, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Don’t look now, Tyrone, Gregory and Clark, but something very peculiar seems to be going on in your business. I’ve just begun to be aware that animals are slowly replacing human actors in the movies.
Lassie and Flicka are, of course, already established, but now I notice that in at least a dozen new movies a young deer, brer rabbit, a baby lamb, a horse, three cats and two dogs are being built up as stars.
It’ll be a wonderful battle, but personally I’m betting on the human beings. The best trained dogs could never begin to pant like Charles Boyer, and I’ll bet even a boa constrictor could take lessons in hugging, the way Gable does it. And real life imported wolves from the north woods would look pretty pale next to our Hollywood type.
Another thing is the SPCA will probably step in if directors start making animals act like human beings.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 4, 1946)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
HOLLYWOOD – Well, I see that a medical professor says it’s easy to tell if you’re smitten by real love or just a mild case of the roving eye. Just ask yourself a series of questions and if you can answer “yes” to all of them, then Cupid has set up housekeeping in your heart.
The trouble with the professor’s list of question is that they’re too general, like “do you enjoy being with the object of your affection?” Anybody can say “yes” to that without a qualm, but suppose you break it down and try to answer such a question as “would you enjoy being with the object of your affection in a Quonset hut that leaks?”
My own opinion is if you think you’re in love you’d better not ask yourself any questions at all. When you put romance in the witness box, matrimony is likely to get overruled.