Left To Remember

Among my many ( 27 and counting) rituals and daily habits is a nightly half-hour listening to "The Great Gildersleeve" as I perform my nightly ablutions and prepare for another night of golden slumber.

It's an old radio comedy from the 40s and 50s, centered on the antics of a smalltown bachelor water commissioner, his niece and nephew whom he's raising, his cook and housekeeper, his coterie of lady friends, and the members of his social club: the police chief, the town judge, the barber, and the druggist. 

Try it, you might like it. I never try to talk people into hearing it, because it is most definitely not modern or classically witty or cool at all, but I love it because I am none of those myself.

For those who like American History (✋) it's interesting to look at America during the war years. They mention rationing of food and gasoline because they were facts of everyday life. A lot of the shows feature ads for margarine and Velveeta, two food products that came off the bench during the war to fill in for butter and cheese, which were in short supply. The alternative to gasoline, also scarce, was walking to work. Different world.

But while I say it was a different world, and so long ago, I got to thinking about one episode in particular. The show was broadcast live on NBC radio with a studio audience, and if the jokes weren't getting laughs, there was no one to sweeten the sound with more ha ha ha. What was said, and the live audience reaction, was what went over the air.

In the episode I heard the other night, from 1947, there was a man in the audience with one of the most unusual laughs I ever heard...kind of a blend of a bray and a guffaw, like when George W. Bush would chortle, only louder. And what made this man's laugh so noticeable was that many times he was the only person laughing, so you'd hear this "Haw Haw" randomly throughout the show. There was nothing offensive about it, he didn't seem to have ill intent, he just had a nutty laugh, captured on the primitive audio tape of the day.

And I would have to assume that the cracked-up cachinnator has gone to his reward by now, but how interesting that his unique laugh still lives. I tell you, whoever he was, he left his mark in the most natural of ways: just by being himself.