Radio: World’s Greatest Audience

“Personally,” said Edgar Bergen, “I never thought entertainment so damn important, but I changed my mind after we toured the Army posts in Alaska.” Like Al Jolson before him, he declared the boys up there had taken the zest out of him for entertaining civilians. Last week they were backed up by Bob Hope, the hardest-traveling Army-camp trooper of them all. The Aleutian circuit, he declared, comprised the greatest audience in the world. Back home, both Bergen and Hope were geysers of zestful anecdote in proof of their claim.

Booked for a six-day tour and 25-minute shows, Bergen & friends Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd stayed twelve days, did 51 shows of 45 minutes each. At Dutch Harbor, where Charlie got the biggest laugh, he gave 13 straight shows. “Hello, stinky,” Charlie would chirp from inside his floppy sheeplined coat & hat, and Bergen would reprimand him for his discourtesy to men in uniform. Thereupon Charlie would crack: “Don’t give me that lieutenant routine.” That was enough to split the sides of the soldiers. But what really spilled them into the aisles was Charlie’s comment as an unidentified plane zoomed overhead: “Here they come, fellows,” cracked Charlie, “those yellow-belly bastards. I’ll mow ’em down!” Posing behind an advanced gun emplacement, Charlie observed: “I can’t see any Japs, but I can smell ’em!”

Bob Hope, who flew 16,000 miles on his Alaska junket, took along Jerry (“Mustache”) Colonna and Singer Frances Langford. “They never went rough on Frances,” he said. “But a few of them took a look at her and wept in their hands.” He added: “I guess you can take care of sex with saltpeter. But you can’t keep a man from reading his mother into any girl who shows up in a spot like that.”

The only thing bigger than the troops’ appreciation of entertainment, says Bob, was their morale. He illustrated with the case of an Alaska private he had known in Los Angeles. The general arranged for them to meet in his office. “My friend walked into the general’s headquarters,” said Bob, “and before he even saluted he stooped down and felt one of the few rugs in Alaska, and said: ‘Gee! a rug.’ Then he straightened up and said, ‘Hello, General.’ ” In Alaska, declared Hope, superbly disciplined privates and respected generals “all live the same life, and no one is sirred or saluted to death.”

“And, boy,” reminisced Hope, “are they quick on the trigger.” Once, toward the end of an all-night show, he propagandized his soldier audience: “The United States needs you.” Quick as a wink, a voice shot back: “We need the United States.” Hope had no comeback to that one.