My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [14]
5
LIVE ON THE AIR
In 1949, Phil and I got a job in Atlanta at the Henry Grady Hotel, an excellent establishment with a large ballroom. We performed two shows a day, one in the afternoon for kids and another at night for a more mature crowd. Children’s favorites and slapstick were de rigueur for the early show, and then we spiced up the nighttime routine with Spike Jones, Bing Crosby, and popular songs on the radio, as well as more mature jokes.
With Phil as the straight man, more or less, and me in the role of rubber-limbed comedian, tirelessly mugging, miming, dancing, and inventing antics on the spot, we filled the room every show. We also did local events, radio, and even store openings. All the exposure made us quite popular around town. In turn, Phil and I fell in love with the city.
At the time, Atlanta still felt like a small city. With only about 250,000 people living there, it was quaint, comfortable, and affordable. Charmed by the surroundings and buoyed by our success, both of us decided to put stakes in the ground. We took advantage of the GI Bill and bought homes. Mine was a tiny three-bedroom with prefabricated sides that seemed to go up in days. Even as the workmen slapped it together, Margie and I beamed with the pride of new and naive homeowners.
The backyard was up against the woods, and though we had only a couple flower beds, shrubs, and several baby trees, it looked to me, with my vivid imagination, like the grounds of an estate. Wanting the front to look good, too, I carted in umpteen wheelbarrows of sod and had it looking like a magazine ad—until a hard rain washed all that greenery and hard work away.
In 1950, Margie gave birth to our son Chris, and thirteen months later we had a second baby boy, Barry. Like Phil, now that I had a family, I lost my taste for the road. I got a job as an announcer at the local CBS radio station, WAGA. Pretty soon they gave me my own slot as an early-morning disk jockey, and a little later, when there was an opening at night for a fifteen-minute record act, Phil and I took it.
You couldn’t be in Atlanta for any appreciable amount of time without hearing me, which worked in my favor when the local television station owned by the Atlanta Constitution, WCON, needed a full-time announcer. They turned to me. I got the job reading all the news, announcements, and commercials—anything that needed announcing over the course of an eight-hour day.
I proved myself adept and inexpensive, and eventually the station’s management gave me an hour-long show of my own. I was thrilled.
But let me tell you, no matter how excited and eager I was to do well—and I was—it didn’t take long before those sixty minutes felt like six hundred minutes. It ate up material. I mean it devoured material. Few things are as terrifying as standing in front of a camera by yourself and realizing you have used most of your best material and still have to fill fifty-four minutes.
On my first night, I felt like the clock had stopped. It didn’t seem like the hour would ever end. I read the newspaper, told jokes, and interviewed people—whatever I could think of. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A young performer’s dream comes true when he’s given his own hour-long television show, except when that hour never ends and the performer goes bananas.
Fortunately, I figured out the pacing and quickly got to where I was so comfortable in front of the camera that I forgot I was on the air. I never gave it a thought—until the red light on the camera went off and I began to think about the next day’s material.
I never worked as hard. At night, I sat in front of the TV with Margie and the boys, with a portable typewriter on my lap, and read through the newspaper, through joke books, and listened to the TV, all the while writing furiously.
Was it quality material?
I had no idea. But I got very good at producing a lot of it.
I pantomimed records,