An old fashioned telephone emits several long and short strident rings.
LUM: By grannies, Abner, I believe that’s our ring.
ABNER: I doggies, Lum I believe you’re right.
LUM: I’ll see. Hello, Jot’em Down Store. . . . This is Lum and Abner!
Music theme swells—"Evalena."

Thus began each episode of the humorous radio show that broadcast for twenty-four years (1931–1955) and ranks second in longevity only to Amos and Andy. The show was, of course, Lum and Abner. It featured the humorous, trivial daily events in the lives of Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody, co-proprietors of the Jot’em Down Store and Library in the mythical village of Pine Ridge, Arkansas. Many a chuckle was provided by the inane activities of the gullible old timers—Abner with his whining voice and shortage of gumption that led to one misunderstanding after another, Lum with his steadier, "Edderds sayin’" approach to every problem (but just as vulnerable in his own way). Along with other characters such as Grandpappy Spears, Cedric Wehunt, Squire Skimp, and Mousy Gray, Lum and Abner became regular fixtures in the imaginary depiction of small town American life.

Lum and Abner and other reruns of old radio humor are currently quite popular, some radio stations devoting portions of nightly programming to these shows. Besides being entertained anew by radio comedy, we are reminded of the importance of this form of humor to America during roughly the second quarter of the twentieth century. Recent books such as John Dunning’s Tune in Yesterday, J. Fred MacDonald’s Don’t Touch That Dial, and Arthur Frank Wertheim’s Radio Comedy¹ have all caught the spirit of that contribution and studied the phenomenon of radio humor from popular and scholarly standpoints.

Much of the old radio humor seems to be a direct descendent of the literary and platform humor of the nineteenth century: the witty, cracker-barrel aphorisms of Josh Billings and Mark Twain survive in Will Rogers and Scattergood Baines; the verbal nonsense of Bill Nye in Vic and Sade in the inflated rhetoric of Fibber McGee; the dialect humor of James Russell Lowell, Seba Smith, and count-

less others in Amos and Andy and Lum and Abner; the comically confused happenings of Downingsville in Pine Ridge; the brag of Old Southwest and frontier humor in Fibber, the Old Timer, and Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve; the droll, deadpan technique of Mark Twain and Bill Nye in Jack Benny and George Bums. On and on one could go without stretching the point too far. Obviously, with the harnessing of the air waves, much of the stock humor of old simply changed forms.

It was my distinct pleasure in November 1979 to interview one of the giants of old radio humor—Mr. Chester (Chet) Lauck, of Lum and Abner fame. When I called on Lauck in Hot Springs, Arkansas, I found that the Jot’em Down Store had moved to a modem office building and operated under the name "Lauck Enterprises." Lum’s office was shockingly modern: tape recorders and a gleaming Sony sat on his desk and shelves, replacing the pickle jars and cracker barrels of old. As it turned out, my encounter with Lauck was fortuitous, for he died February 20, 1980, at seventy-eight, mine being possibly the last recorded interview with him.

I found Lauck to be a kindly, soft-spoken, quick-witted individual—very relaxed and congenial. He impressed me as a genuine, natural humorist rather than an actor who had merely learned to play a comic role for a livelihood. His speech was alive with drollery and with an unguarded presence of understatement and anti-climax. An innate sense of comic timing and humorous verbal emphasis was evident even in his ordinary conversation. He had a Twainian mastery of the pause. Though he was obviously Chester Lauck and not Lum Edwards, there was a definite resemblance in voice inflections, and occasionally he purposely lapsed into the voice of Lum to emphasize a point—for example, when explaining how the last name Edwards becomes Edderds in Arkansas dialect. Throughout the interview, in fact, I was constantly aware of the relationship of humorist to humorous persona; in his own way Lauck was uncannily remindful of Samuel Clemens-Mark Twain, of Charles Farrar Browne-Artemus Ward, of Henry Wheeler Shaw-Josh Billings. I have heard one recorded speech of Lauck’s before the Arkansas legislature in which he slips in and out of the role of Lum so much that the listener can hardly discern which personality is the primary speaker.

The desk, shelves, and walls in Lauck’s office reflected the tools of his trade. He had a humor magazine in front of him, a typescript of witty sayings to one side; somewhere, though he was

unsuccessful in finding it, he had a book of his favorite American humor to show me. (I was reminded by his interest in literary humor that he had edited a humor magazine, White Mule, while a student at the University of Arkansas.) Across from his desk hung a group picture of three famous comedy teams: Lauck and Norris Goff (Abner), Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (Amos and Andy), and Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy; it was the last time all six were together (and now only Gosden is living). Tapes of Lum and Abner shows and other humorous routines were scattered about the office. While I was there, Lauck played a rerun of a Lum and Abner show on which his good friend Jack Benny was guest and also let me hear a tape he was planning to market—Chic Sales’ "The Specialist," about a champion privy builder—a piece he had recorded in the voice of Lum. He seemed to enjoy listening to these tapes as much as I did, though there was nothing boastful or immodest about him.

When I asked Lauck about his interest and reading in classic American humor, he immediately mentioned his favorites: Mark Twain, George Ade, and Bill Nye. In the case of Mark Twain he said he particularly liked the humorous situations in his fiction, an observation certainly consistent with the predominance of situational humor in Lum and Abner. In fact, when I asked him how he and Goff typed themselves as humorists, he answered, "Well, maybe humor is the right word, but certainly not comedians. It was situation comedy. And that’s the reason these old shows are playing so well today, because they’re not jokes—they’re just situations that will always be funny and timeless."

I soon learned that Lauck also had a ready and selfless appreciation of other humorists contemporary with himself. He praised partner Norris Goff as being the better half of their team: "I’ll say one thing: Tuffy (I always called him Tuffy) was the best at comic timing I’ve ever heard." Goff, he felt, played the most effective character on the show, Squire Skimp: "I think Tuffy did such a great job with him. He was the heavy." He also spoke fondly and praisefully of Fred Allen, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (whom he knew very well), Red Skelton, and especially Jack Benny and George Gobel. Of Benny he reminisced, "I just loved that guy. He was a guest on our show, and then we did a spot on his show. We traded out with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Jack Benny. I’ve got real funny ones here on tape with Jack Benny and Bing Crosby."

Of George Gobel, he told a whole episode of emceeing a horse-

show banquet in Houston, spotting Gobel in the audience, and inviting him up on stage. Gobel then told about his personal association with horses in a ludicrous story that sounded, as Lauck related it, remarkably close to Mark Twain’s hilarious account in Roughing It of trying to ride the "Genuine Mexican Plug." (Lauck told the episode so well that I asked him if he knew Twain’s account, but he said he did not.) The climax of the Gobel horse-story, remindful of the Twain fiasco, comes when the tenderfoot Gobel is conned by a stable owner into mounting a horse never before ridden. To quote Lauck paraphrasing Gobel:

    "He boosted me up on the horse, and that horse came undone. He did everything in the catalogue—he bucked and rared and did handsprings and flipflops and somersaults. Finally he got one of his left feet caught in the stirrup, and I bailed out. I said, ‘Look, fella, if you’re gonna get on, I’m gonna’ get off!’"

Our discussion of twentieth-century humorists concluded with his comments on the Rogers family. He knew Will and was close friends with Will Rogers, Jr., and Jimmy Rogers.

Like Seba Smith peopling Downingsville or James Russell Lowell adding a Birdofredom Sawin and Homer Wilbur to Hosea Biglow’s circle of acquaintances, Lauck and Goff invented a knot of caricatures to complement the two store keepers. Mousy Gray, Squire Skimp, Cedric Wehunt, Snake Hogan, Dick Huddleston, and Grandpappy Spears—all played by Lauck and Goff themselves²—were vivid creations of comic and straight characters (and were all products of Lauck’s and Goffs creative imaginations). The small town Arkansas dialect they spoke was so universally rural in flavor that the characters were variously identified by listeners as Midwesterners, Carolinians, New Yorkers, and even Green Mountaineers of Vermont,³ reminiscent, perhaps, of the universality of Mark Twain s Pike County speech.

To keep a true ring to their character creations, as well as a sense of spontaneity to the whole show, Lauck and Goff wrote all the scripts themselves for some fifteen years, usually the morning before the show was aired in the afternoon. Lauck admitted that he and Goff made the script "about three or four minutes short so we could embellish it." And since the shows were live and were broadcast to different time zones over the country, they had to be repeated. "When we were working Chicago and New York, we had to do one show for the West Coast and one for that area. And when we were in Hollywood we would do an earlier show for the East and, about an hour to two hours later, do the same show live

again—but it was always a little bit different," Lauck said with a knowing grin. When the team began making motion pictures, they were forced to employ writers. "There just weren’t enough hours in the day." Afterward, the luxury was too pleasant to abandon; thus, "we kept them on and continued to work with them. We had script sessions to decide what we were going to do. They put it down on paper. Thus, Lauck and Goff always retained proprietary control of the circle of folk in Pine Ridge.

We are, of course, familiar with such nineteenth-century comic platform combinations as Twain and George Washington Cable, Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, and the stories of their friendships and professional associations are fairly well known. Lauck’s account of the origin of his and Norris Goff’s personal and professional relationship is intriguing. As boys, they both lived in Mena, Arkansas, and met at a birthday party when Lauck was nine and Goff five. Said Lauck of his future partner, "He was just a little punk kid there at the party." Further along in school they discovered their talent as a comic twosome and by high school days were performing skits—usually blackface routines—at hometown productions. "Chet and Tuffy," as they were called, were always in demand. Their reputation soon grew beyond Mena:

    "Finally the radio station over at Hot Springs heard about us and asked us if we would come over and put on our skit on their radio station. Well, we thought that would be a lot of fun because we had never seen a radio station. So we came over, and on our way over we decided we’d better not do blackface because Amos and Andy had just started and the Two Black Crows were tremendously popular. . . . So we decided to do a couple of rural characters. We had messed around with them a little bit just for our own amusement. So we went on the air not knowing what we were going to talk about: we adlibbed it. So we just kept those characters. Just before we went on the air he [the announcer] said, ‘By the way, what’s the name of your act?’ We hadn’t even thought about a name—we hadn’t been calling each other by name. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be Lum Edwards,’ and Tuffy said, ‘I’ll be Abner Peabody.’ The following week we had got real professional; we changed it to ‘Lum and Abner.’ So we just used that for the name of the show."

The Hot Springs audition went so well, mail response being heavy and favorable, that Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody were invited back for five consecutive Sundays. Quipped Lauck, "People wrote a lot of fan mail—I think just to let you know they had a radio."

The station manager at Hot Springs was so enthusiastic about the

program that he arranged an audition for the two with NBC in Chicago. The Quaker Oats Company offered to sponsor them, forcing Lauck and Goff, who were quite satisfied with their lives in Mena, to return home and take leaves of absence from their jobs.⁴ "We were more surprised than anybody else when it [the show] went on for twenty-four and a half years." When I remarked at the long leave of absence, Lauck chortled, "Yes, I don’t know whether that job is still open or not!"

After the show caught on, a sense of locale was needed as fictional setting, and Lauck and Goff founded the village of Pine Ridge.⁵ The name of their establishment, Jot’em Down Store, originated from a contest held while the show was being broadcast from Cleveland. Lauck explained,

    "We offered a $500 prize for the best name. Oh, they had a good response to it. The name we really wanted out of the bunch was Jot It Down Store, the reason being we had a pad hanging by the front door where people could come in and help themselves and just write down what they bought and sign their name to it—an honor system. But there were about four or five of those, and we didn’t want to put out that much money. There was one that was Jot’em Down—so we selected Jot’em Down. If there hadn’t been so many, we would have called it the Jot It Down Store.

Lauck and Goff then took the liberty of adding Library to the name.

In many ways the humor of Lum and Abner is preposterous and antiquated. Just as we look back on the antics of Simon Suggs, the slightly worn aphorisms of Sam Slick, the discursive monologues of the Widow Bedott, and the verbal contortions of Sut Lovingood with amusement but also a certain historical condescension, so we view the humor of Lum and Abner as a bit old fashioned. Nevertheless, just as these nineteenth-century comic creations still please and have relevance, so do the characters and happenings of Pine Ridge.

Part of the appeal is that while the title characters are not disreputable in any way, or stupid (though their literacy is suspect), they are terribly gullible; and at that trait listeners could laugh smugly, while yet perhaps realizing that gullibility is a universal human condition, as Mark Twain demonstrates so clearly in Huckleberry Finn and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. The show is also appealing in that it presents life in very simple, homey terms: nothing of an earthshaking nature occurs in Pine Ridge, and the little community remains insulated from the world around it—a kind of self-contained, low-keyed environment that appeals to a certain longing

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in most of us. Lauck himself, during the interview, commented on the humorous situations of the show being timeless and remarked at their appeal to young people today.⁶ As he said in a speech before the Arkansas legislature:

    "For twenty years we’ve tried to depict good, clean, down-to-earth, wholesome American life as we know it . . . through these characters of Lum and Abner. We hope that to those in the small towns, it is like a visit with old friends . . . to those in the city, a pleasant departure like going home again. We hope that it’s the kind of life that those who know, don’t want to forget; and those who don’t, would like to know."⁷

This, then, was my experience of meeting a remarkable gentleman who was a gifted humorist. In his appreciation of literary and stage humor of both this and the last centuries, in his ability to create humorous characters and events out of his imagination, in his patterns of thought and speech that naturally took a humorous bent, and in his perceptive insights into the human condition, he seemed to me a genuinely human individual and a keen, humorous commentator on human life. An old "Edderds sayin’ "from one of the Lum and Abner broadcasts is, "Ever cloud has its silver fillin’." I think that probably expressed Chester Lauck’s philosophy of life too. And as warmed-over axiom, it just might give Josh Billings a run for his money.

NORTH TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Respectively (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979), and (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). See also "Sounds of Success," Newsweek, 3 Dec. 1979, pp. 132–34.
   ²Eventually Lauck and Goff felt they had "run out of voices" and were "sacrificing a little quality . . . trying to use our own." At that point they employed other actors such as Andy Devine, Clarence Hartzell, and Zazu Pitts.
   ³These regional identifications were mentioned by several of my colleagues who grew up in various parts of the United States. They each felt the Lum and Abner dialects belonged to their own locales.
   ⁴In Mena, Lauck was manager of an automobile finance company; Goff was in the wholesale grocery business.
   ⁵In the middle 1930s, the little town of waters, Arkansas, about halfway between Hot Springs and Mena, changed its name to Pine Ridge to capitalize on the renown of the radio village. There is a Lum and Abner museum there now.
   ⁶Indeed, one of the major Lam and Abner collectors and devotees is a Tulsa, Oklahoma, youth who has been recording the programs for years. See Larry Price,"‘Lum & Abner’: Something for Everyone," Mena Evening Star, 27 Feb. 1980, p. 1.
   ⁷"Lum Edwards Speaks To The Arkansas Legislature" (Little Rock: Cactus Vick Enterprises, n. d. [c. 1951]). (Cassette recording.)

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