2
Just before I started ninth grade, my father was transferred to Indiana and we spent a year in Crawfordsville. We took an apartment there. I came into my own. It was not a personality change as much as it was the realization that I had a personality. I also found out that I could run and jump pretty well, and I got on the freshman track team. Success on the track added to my self-confidence, including one particular day that still stands out as the most exciting of my life.
We lived across the street from Wabash College, a beautiful little school that gave the town a youthful feel. On Saturdays they hosted collegiate track meets, which our high-school coach helped officiate. I watched all the competitions. This one particular day, Wabash was running against Purdue University and I was in the stands when my coach came up to me and said that the anchorman on the Wabash team had turned his ankle and was unable to run in the race.
“Do you want to run anchor?” he said.
“Are you kidding?” I replied.
“They need a man,” he said.
What an offer! I was only fifteen years old, but heck, the chance to compete against college boys was one I did not want to pass up. Even though I didn’t have track shoes, which were considered essential to running a good race, since in those days the tracks were layered with cinders, I jumped to my feet. Yes, I told my coach, I was ready to fill in for the Wabash team—and as anchor no less.
When I took the baton, Purdue’s anchor was slightly ahead of me. I was not intimidated. We had one hundred yards ahead of us and he did not look that fast to me. I ran hard, gained ground every few steps, and passed him on the outside, with about twenty yards to go.
I heard the crowd roar and held on to the lead, crossing the tape before all the other college boys.
I won.
A high-school freshman.
Amazing.
They gave me a blue ribbon, which I took home and showed my father. He didn’t believe me when I said I beat a college boy from Purdue. He thought I was lying. It was, I agreed, pretty far-fetched. The kid I beat was older and could really run. But I was faster—at least that day.
I was voted the most popular boy in the freshman class, but we ended up leaving Crawfordsville and returning to Danville. I envisioned myself starting my sophomore year there as a track star. At my physical, though, the doctor informed me that I had a heart murmur and prohibited me from running, thus ending my high-school athletic career.
I took the news hard, but after a brief funk, I decided the change of course was a sign that I should get serious about my life, and one night at the dinner table I announced that I wanted to become a minister. I knew that would please my mother and her very religious side of the family. The subject also intrigued me intellectually. But pretty soon I lost the fervor that inspired me to carry around a Bible and think deep thoughts. I joined the drama club instead—and found my true calling.
In those days, plays were written especially for high-school students, and with the war going on, they were mostly all propaganda. I wasn’t against being patriotic, but what about a few catchy songs and good jokes? Each one of the musicals, operettas, and comedies we performed was more boring than the one before. I still had fun, but that was really due to discovering the pure enjoyment of being in front of an audience.
I was not alone in that respect. My talented classmates included Donald O’Connor and Bobby Short, both of whom went on to become celebrated performers in their own right, Donald in movies and Bobby as one of the all-time great nightclub entertainers. Bobby could not read a note of music, but he could play anything. He was a human jukebox. We all would entertain one another with songs and make up dance moves.
My closest friends—Bob Walker, Jerry C. Wright, Harold Brown, and Bob Hackman—were also a bunch of talented cutups. We called ourselves the Burfords—Reverend Burford, Grandfather Burford, Cousin Burford, and so on. We got together and harmonized, told jokes, and invented tall tales that kept us amused. We spent hours exercising our imaginations and entertaining ourselves in those days before television and long before the Internet.
Grandfather Burford, aka Bob Hackman, was my best pal. His younger cousin Gene constantly tried to tag along with us and we would let him up to a point. Then Bob would get annoyed and tell him to scram.
Well, Gene grew up and became one of our great actors, winning two Academy Awards and receiving three other nominations. Years later, we ran into each other at a Hollywood event, and as we reminisced about our Danville childhoods, I said that I would have let him hang around if I had known he was going to become a movie star.
By my junior year, I was a big man on campus. The confidence I had gained as a young athlete affected other areas. I was elected class president and starred in school performances. I had an affable, easy sense of humor that I put to use onstage and in small groups. I enjoyed entertaining people, especially making them laugh, and to that end I cultivated an arsenal of tricks, whether it was a funny face, a pratfall, a joke, or all of the above.
I learned from the best. As a kid, I spent Saturdays in the movie theater. I sat there from eleven in the morning until nine or ten at night, till whenever my mother or father came in and dragged me out. My favorites were the comedians—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. I was particularly taken with Stan Laurel.
From an early age, Stan was my idol. I delighted my parents and friends endlessly with my impersonations of him. I turned into Stan at any and every occasion. No one paid much attention, though. As I explained years later at Stan’s funeral, that was because every other kid in the neighborhood was doing his own impression of Stan Laurel.
I also loved to sing, though I was not among the singing teacher’s favorites. I tried out for the school’s a cappella group every time there was an audition, and every time the teacher turned me down. She only let me in, finally, when they ran out of basses.
School was a playground for me. In and out of the classroom, I had a great time. It did my poor brother no good. As he came along, all he heard was “Your brother Dick did this” and “Dick did that,” and it pissed him off. He became well-known as a troublemaker. After I graduated, he was called to the dean’s office one day for some infraction, and instead of listening to a long reprimand he hit the dean in the jaw and knocked him down. Needless to say, that stunt got Jerry kicked out of school, and he had to drive twenty miles every day to the next closest high school in order to get his diploma.
Shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I spotted an ad in the local newspaper for a job as a part-time announcer at the local CBS radio outlet, WDAN. I had been searching for jobs. Friends of mine working at the market were making eleven bucks a week. The radio station, which had lost a few announcers to the draft, was paying only eight dollars a week. But it was radio, so who cared?
I auditioned and got the job. I worked after school and on weekends, from ten P.M. to midnight. I referred to my show as The Yawn Patrol, but that was hardly true. It was a dream job. In this little station, I did everything: I played records, read the news, gave the weather report, wrote my own commercials, and even sold my own advertising. If a breaking story came in from New York, I patched it in myself.
Even if nothing big happened, each night was a thrilling adventure, an experience that made life seem large and important. I felt like I was at the center of the world, and in a town as small as Danville, I was. People tuned in for information, and I was the one giving it to them. I almost lost the job a few times, though. There were several Saturday nights when friends of mine came down to the station and danced in the lobby, and we got caught having a party. That was a no-no.
But it was hard to resist such temptation. As jobs went, I had the coolest one in town, especially among my age group. I tried to look the part by getting myself a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses like Dave Garroway, a popular radio personality long before he became the first host of NBC’s Today show. Through Dave and other shows like his, I discovered Sarah Vaughan, jazz, and the pop music of the day.
Every once in a while I tried to air some of the hotter stuff I liked, such as Stan Kenton or a short-lived group called Sauter Finnegan that played chords like nobody was playing in those days. But whenever I snuck something progressive into the playlist, I was called on the carpet. My bosses wanted Glenn Miller and nothing too far to the left or right of him.
Occasionally I made a mistake. I had these sixteen-inch disks with a number of cuts on them that provided an intro to the news, or in the case of the weather, a bouncy little ditty that went, “Oh Mister Weatherman, what’s the weather today …” Then I came in and read the forecast. Well, one night I put on the wrong cut, and without immediately realizing it I played a tornado warning.
It sounded like an emergency broadcast. Attention, attention, everyone. A tornado is heading for the city. Stay near your homes, make sure you’re near shelter, and stay tuned to this station.
Once I heard what had happened, I tried, without sounding alarmed, to correct it. There was no tornado! There was no storm! But it was too late. Every single one of the station’s phone lines lit up. The switchboard looked like a Fourth of July fireworks display. Blinking lights everywhere. People wanted to know where the storm was coming from, when it was going to hit, and how strong it was.
Fortunately, I managed to straighten things out over the air before anyone panicked or complained. Thankfully, I didn’t get fired. But I didn’t last much longer, either.
In March 1942, I signed up for the Air Force. The thought of getting drafted, put in the infantry, and charging through the front lines filled me with dread. “Anything but that,” I told myself. And anyone else who asked why I had signed up when they found out it meant I would not finish high school and get my diploma.
But there was a glitch. I went to the nearest Air Force base and spent all day taking IQ and psychological tests. I returned the next day for my physical, which I passed. No heart murmur whatsoever. Not even a whisper. I was in great shape, with one exception. I didn’t weigh enough.
I was too skinny! I tipped the scale at 135 pounds, and at my height I had to weigh 141.
I took the test three times and didn’t make it. I weighed even less the second and third times from sweating nervously at the thought of being sent to the front lines. I had one more chance. I went to Chicago and stayed in a motel overnight. In the morning before my weigh-in I ate half a dozen bananas, and then just before I got on the scale I darted into the men’s room and drank as much water as I could.
I barely made it, but that was all that mattered. I was in.
I did my basic training in Wichita Falls, Texas, and then entered pilot’s training in Toledo, Ohio. I envisioned myself as a fighter pilot, which did not make sense given my severe allergy to combat. It turned out to be a moot point. The closest I got to my pilot’s wings was when the other trainees and I serviced the planes.
Most of the work I did was classwork. I took physics, math, and aeronautics at the College Training Detachment. I enjoyed learning and did well. But I failed every military-related exam I took. The captain called me into his office one day and showed me the tests arrayed on his desk.
“They are all failing grades,” he said. “You tested out with an IQ of a hundred and fifty. I don’t get it.”
“Sir, I’m not much of a soldier,” I said.
But I looked good in the uniform. I was one of about fifty military guys in town, and so the girls were all over the place. Finally our commanding officer called all of us in one day, had us stand at attention in the classroom, and informed us that the Air Force was about to join in a major push against Japan.
“Some of you will be sent overseas as tail gunners,” he said. “Others of you will be assigned according to your abilities.”
I started singing and dancing right there and was subsequently assigned to special services.