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Joe DiMaggio


A TRIBUTE TO

Shari Lewis

BORN
17 January 1934

DIED
2 August 1998


Puppeteer Shari Lewis dies at 65
After Giving Generations of Joy
 
Ventriloquist
entertained children
worldwide and
left her mark
with a little
puppet named Lamb Chop
  Image: Lamb Chop and Lewis
Puppeteer Shari Lewis and her character Lamb Chop, in Branson, Mo., July 22, 1996.
Shari Lewis, ventriloquist, puppeteer, musician and actress, children’s entertainer, who charmed youngsters for some 45 years with her characters Lamb Chop and siblings, the southern-accented Hush Puppy and inveterate kidder Charley Horse, died of cancer on Sunday, 2 August 1998. She was 65. Those who grew up with her in the ’50s and ’60s also had the joy of rediscovering her humor all over again in the 1990s, as another generation of children came to know and love Lamb Chop and friends. I had many fond memories of her from childhood, and was glad when my children and grandchildren watched her.

The ventriloquist, puppeteer, musician and actress and entertainer, who died of cancer Sunday at 65, lived almost every day of the last 45 years with Lamb Chop.        THAT LAMB CHOP, she could drive you crazy. Sweet and fluffy like all such critters but with a subversive charm that would make Mary’s little lamb blush.
       The Lamb Chop stunt that’s driven me most nuts over the years is when she starts singing a song, in that mocking, nasal tone she adopts when she wants to really annoy you. And she doesn’t stop. The song is called “The Song That Doesn’t End.” And it doesn’t. It just goes on and on, my friend, the same few words, the same manic melody.
        After a few minutes you feel that there’s a Mister Softee truck playing its irritating siren song inside your head, you’re riding on a carousel that’s going faster and faster and will not stop, and you just want to scream.
       Imagine how Shari Lewis felt. The ventriloquist, puppeteer, musician and actress and entertainer, who died of uterine cancer Sunday in Los Angeles at 65 (going on 5 or 6), has lived almost every day of the last 45 or so years with Lamb Chop and siblings, the southern-accented Hush Puppy and inveterate kidder Charley Horse.
       
NONSTOP KIDDING
       More than 40 years of pathetic puns! Ridiculous riddles! Nutty knock-knock jokes!
       Q: What’s dark brown, sweet and dangerous?
       A: Shark-infested chocolate pudding.
        Lewis’ superb comic timing was always at its sharpest with Lamb Chop. Their repartee was sometimes so natural that they seemed like longtime vaudeville partners, rather than simply a performer and what was originally a crude sock puppet.
       Check out their brisk give-and-take on “Lamb Chop’s Play Along!” (A&M Home Video, 1992), which was also the title of the PBS TV show that brought her back to American TV that year after a long hiatus.
       Shari and Lamb Chop each have a joke to tell. Shari goes first.
       “How do you get nuts from a squirrel?”
       “I don’t know,” says Lamb Chop. “How do you get nuts from a squirrel?”
       Shari: “You say, ‘stick ‘em up!’ ”
       Lamb Chop makes no reaction. The joke just isn’t funny to the puppet, though Shari is roaring with laughter.
       “You’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes,” Lamb Chop says, in a tone of mild reprimand.
       Shari shrugs. “I thought it was hilarious. Your turn.”
       Lamb Chop asks: “What animal can jump higher than a tree?”
       “I don’t know,” Shari replies. “What animal can jump higher than a tree?”
       “Any animal,” Lamb Chop answers. “Trees can’t jump.”
       This time it’s Lamp Chop howling, while Lewis sits stone-faced. “I thought you weren’t supposed to laugh at your own jokes,” Shari says, feeling she’s one-upped Lamb Chop.
       “You set me a bad example,” Lamb Chop says, adorably batting her eyelashes.
       At this point, Lewis cracks up, as if she’s been caught off-guard by Lamb Chop’s witty retort. Clearly, she has crossed a line with this character, as if the ventriloquist has been feeding lines to the puppet for so long that even she doesn’t know what’s going to come next out of Lamb Chop’s furry little mouth.
       
SURPRISE AND DELIGHT
       Shari Lewis always had that sense of surprise and delight. With a bright red pony tail, barely 21 years old, she made her first TV appearance with Lamb Chop on the “Captain Kangaroo Show” in 1957. (She was already a veteran of the young medium, having won an Arthur Godfrey Talent Show in 1952). After that single “Captain Kangaroo” guest spot, Lewis was given her own program.
       “The Shari Lewis Show” ran weekly on NBC until 1963, when the networks decided it was cheaper to feed kids cartoons on Saturday morning rather than live variety shows.
       Lewis responded to the cancellation of “The Shari Lewis Show” with the high-spirited resilience that characterized her productive creative life. She performed in Las Vegas, then on celebrity game shows in the ’60s. When that phase went out of fashion, the classically trained musician dusted off her baton and conducted symphony orchestras.
       She had a weekly Sunday night show on the BBC from 1968 to 1976. She appeared in Australia and Canada, did summer stock theater, and wrote more than 60 children’s books, among which the most notable may be “One-Minute Bedtime Stories” and “One-Minute Bible Stories.”
       In 1992, baby boomers with young children blinked twice when “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along” made its debut on PBS. One of our best TV friends and confidantes from our own childhood still looked like a kid, and Lamb Chop, Charley Horse and Hush Puppy seemed to have hardly aged at all. Lewis and the show won five consecutive Emmy awards.
       
KEEPING IT SIMPLE
        “I think there’s a simplicity about Lamb Chop that is an important part of her appeal,” Lewis told the Associated Press in 1996. “But I don’t really know what it is that is the continuing element.”
       Maybe, of course, it is the jokes, which remain as groaningly funny to pre-and-post kindergartners now as they were when we were kids.
       “Knock-knock”
       “Who’s there?”
       “Alex.”
       “Alex who?”
       “Al-ex-plain later.”
       No need for Shari Lewis to explain her magic. She gave us the infinite joy of the song that doesn’t end.
Wayne Robins -- columnist.
       
 
‘Shari is also survived by her beloved family of characters, Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy.’
FAMILY NEWS RELEASE
       LEWIS, diagnosed with uterine cancer in June, was undergoing chemotherapy treatments when she developed pneumonia and died Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, spokeswoman Maggie Begley said.
       After the treatments started six weeks ago, the Emmy Award-winning ventriloquist cut short production in Vancouver on her latest PBS children’s series, “The Charlie Horse Music Pizza.”
       She billed the series as an educational “Cheers” for children with a focus on music. The show premiered Jan. 5.
       Lewis won 12 Emmys, including five for her last PBS series, “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.”
       
STARTED ON ‘CAPTAIN KANGAROO’
       Lewis and Lamb Chop premiered on television’s “The Captain Kangaroo Show” in the mid 1950s, and that single appearance led to her own TV program, “The Shari Lewis Show,” which ran Saturday mornings on NBC.
       Millions of children in successive generations grew up with Lewis and her brand of playfulness and joy. She also wrote more than 60 children’s books.
       During a 1986 White House Christmas party hosted by Nancy Reagan, Lewis and her puppets entertained hundreds of youngsters from around the world.
       Lewis never spoke down to children, instead inviting them into her own creative and fun world.
       In addition to Emmys, she won a Peabody Award, the John F. Kennedy Center Award for Excellence and Creativity, seven Parents’ Choice Awards and the Action for Children’s Television Award.
       In 1997, Shari Lewis Enterprises Inc. was sold to Golden Books Family Entertainment for an undisclosed price.
       Lewis, who lived in Beverly Hills, is survived by her husband of 40 years, publisher Jeremy Tarcher, as well as a daughter and a sister.
       “Shari is also survived by her beloved family of characters, Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy,” the family said in a news release.
       The funeral will be private and a public memorial service will be announced later, Begley said.
     
Shari Lewis Homepage Shari Lewis memorial


A TRIBUTE TO

Gene Autry

BORN
29 September 1907

DIED
2 October 1998



 
Gene Autry, U.S. Cowboy Movie Hero, Dead At 91

Singing Cowboy Gene Autry Dead at Age 91
Singing Cowboy Gene Autry Dead at Age 91
Gene Autry, the original singing cowboy who transformed a film and recording career into a vast business empire, died Friday at his home after a long battle with lymphoma, a form of cancer at age 91.

He had been bedridden for a month before his death.

Autry, the son of a Texas horse trader, began his career as "Oklahoma's Yodeling Cowboy" in 1929 and went on to record some of America's most popular songs including "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Back in the Saddle Again."

"Rudolph," recorded on a whim in 1949, has sold more than 30 million copies and is the second biggest selling Christmas song behind Bing Crosby's "White Christmas." Autry also rode his horse, Champion, in about 90 movies and became one of the biggest box office draws in the 1930s and 1940s.

The profits from his ventures allowed him to buy the California Angels baseball team in 1960. Although he spent millions buying the best players, the club never fulfilled his dream of winning the World Series.

In 1996, Autry sold 25 percent of the team to the Walt Disney Co. in a deal which also gave Disney the operating rights to the franchise.

He was born Orvon Gene Autry in Tioga, Texas, on Sept. 29, 1907. After a nomadic childhood, at the age of 17 he settled with his family in Oklahoma where he learned to ride and rope. Soon afterward, he went to work as a radio telegrapher.

"When things got slow, I kept a little old guitar around that I would strum on," he once told a reporter. "One night this farmer-looking guy with glasses on the tip of his nose came into the office and gave me some pages to send. Then he spotted the guitar. 'You play that?' he asked. 'Some,' I told him. 'Like to hear you,' he said."

Autry played a couple of songs and the visitor, famed Oklahoma humorist Will Rogers, said: "Hey, you do all right. You ought to get yourself a job on the radio." Autry took his advice and made his first records in 1929.

Later he was invited to appear on the National Barn Dance, a popular country music program, and recorded a million-selling country tune called "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," written with an old friend, Jimmy Long.

On his way to Chicago in 1932 he met Long's niece, Ina Mae Spivey, a 20-year-old music student. Three months and four dates later Autry proposed, and they were married. In 1934 the Autrys moved to Hollywood. Westerns were losing popularity and the studios were looking for someone to keep the genre alive.

Autry stepped in; three years later he was the top Western star at the box office for Republic studios, a title he held for six years. "I honestly never considered myself an actor," he said later. "I was more of a personality."

Perhaps because he had little faith in his own talent, he became a shrewd businessman. He had taken a correspondence course in accounting and when he broke into show business he made it a point to check the ticket window receipts himself.

In 1940, he was the fourth biggest box-office attraction behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. In 1941 he was grossing more than $600,000 a year from records, personal appearances, endorsements and films.

But in July 1942, at the age of 34, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and his income dropped to $135 a month as a sergeant. He was allowed to wear cowboy boots with his uniform, but otherwise was treated as an ordinary G.I.

Flying cargo missions in the Far East, he realized the royalties from songs and endorsements would one day dry up, and he decided to make business a full-time pursuit.

His first major acquisition came in 1948, when he bought a radio station in Phoenix. That purchase became the cornerstone of a financial empire that at one point included eight other radio stations, a Los Angeles television station, a Palm Springs hotel, a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in Arizona and the California Angels baseball team.

He had his own radio show on the CBS network from 1940 to 1957 and enjoyed a friendly rivalry with America's other great singing cowboy, Roy Rogers, who died in July. He also was the first major film star to have his own TV series, "The Gene Autry Show," which began in 1950.

He stopped performing in 1964, saying he "stopped making films when they started making the horses taller." There were rumors that he drank heavily.

In a 1978 autobiography, he confronted the issue. "Without realizing it," he wrote, "I had grown dependent on liquor to relax. Drinking was a way to celebrate the end of a day or a deal.... It's a hard habit to resist and, after a while, you really don't want to resist."

He said his drinking never interfered with his work.

When the Angels became available in 1960, Autry moved with customary speed and confidence. The opportunity came about when Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley pulled his team's game broadcasts off Autry's radio station, KMPC, complaining of poor audio quality.

Autry immediately tried to tie up radio rights to the American League's California expansion team and found that the prospective owners of the new club had soured on the deal. Three days later he produced a letter of credit for $1.5 million and became the owner.


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