Hello Plummer –
I was initially struck by your note about other writers claiming to have written the sketch. I knew most of the comedy writers of that period – from Woody Allen and Mel Brooks to Neil (Doc) Simon and Sid Zelinka (A to Z, I guess) and none of them ever claimed to have written it. Professional writers didn’t boast about their work and never claimed someone else’s work.
I wonder if you could tell me the source for the statement or who actually made the claim. It’s pretty brazen.
I learned a lot about show business history from the Wikipedia article and from your additions – particularly the role of John Grant.
My father’s career began about 1932 – as Billy K. Wells’s secretary [1] Wells had an alcohol problem at this point and my father, over time, had to help to finish sketches to get the work done. He moved on to WPA radio projects, and then to The Shadow and many other shows of that decade. In 1938 he was working for Kate Smith.
Later he went on to work on Fibber McGee and Molly, The Camel Caravan with Vaughn Monroe, with Durante, Clayton and Moore, and, eventually, his first love, Broadway. [2]
He made the transition to television in the 1950s, working on The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Red Buttons Show, The Jackie Gleason Show (he did similar work for Gleason’s Honeymooners as he did for Abbot and Costello). He retired in 1964 after a heart attack. He wrote for a vast range of entertainers and comics – from Perry Como and Bing Crosby to Martin and Lewis, Jimmy Dean and Garry Moore. He never worked in Hollywood, only New York.
One of his particular talents was working with young comics, writing material for them that used their basic “schitcks” - amplifying, deepening and broadening them so they became durable, long lasting and elastic performers. Often the material he wrote entailed word-play and repartee/patter.
The four best known examples that I can think of off hand are Abbott and Costello, Minnie Pearl (Grand Old Opry), Jackie Gleason and Jim Henson’s Muppets.
My father adored baseball – particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers. He knew a vast amount about the game, and because he traveled across the country with shows like Kate Smith’s and The Camel Caravan he got to see a lot of games. In recognition of the depth of his adoration for the game, combined with his role in writing Who’s on First, friends, in 1954, got him an actual contract to play for the Dodgers, signed by Walter F. O’Malley and Buzzy Bavasi. The “salary” was $13.98. It was real – 4 pages, numbered and signed, with a check. He had it framed and it hung on a wall near his typewriter until his death.
This is all by way of background for his part in Who’s on First.
I was initially unfamiliar with John Grant’s name, but I looked him up on the net and learned about him. I gather that he was writing for Abbott and Costello in the mid-1930s and went with them to The Kate Smith Show in 1938. Abbott and Costello had been performing The Baseball Routine for some time before this. The show’s producer was not terribly impressed with the routine but Grant knew it had potential and asked my father to work on the routine because he, among the staff writers, knew baseball best and could handle the repartee easily. The key for me was that it makes sense that Grant would hand this job over to a younger man (by 20 years) who knew the subject matter intimately, could extend the contemporaneous references and was good at repartee and patter.
My father kept no records and very little of his work. But he did have his copy of Who’s On First. I read it many times as a child (i.e. 1950-55. I’m 64 now). I am always surprised that written transcripts of it leave out, by way of not recognizing, the large number of baseball player names from the period that are included in the sketch. Some day I plan to work on a transcript using the several recorded versions I have and player rosters from the period.
As a final footnote on the provenance of the sketch – after World War II my father bought my mother a pair of diamond earrings. He was now a successful comedy writer. She immediately called one Abbott and the other Costello. It was not that he made a lot of money from the sketch – he was on a weekly salary and didn’t control the copyright – but my mother knew that it made my father’s career, as well as Abbott and Costello’s.
I hope this gives you some information about my father and his role in writing Who’s on First.
I’m really pleased that you were able to get in touch with me and I’d be glad to discuss this further with you in any aspect. Could you tell me the name of your Abbot and Costello biography?
Yours,
Arthur
P.S. Unfortunately his copy of Who’s on First was given by my mother to an older cousin who claims to have lost it. I doubt this and expect to see it surface some day at an auction.
He never received any awards in his lifetime, but after he died an award was set up in his honor in San Francisco, CA. [http://www.theatrebayarea.org/mag/article.jsp;jsessionid=47C8B3B8E7E0824943FCE14279121F8C?thispage=archives.jsp&id=165&hi=1 ]