“Teachers don’t appreciate zingers …”

 

Jul/Aug 2003

I wonder how much time the average cartoonist spent at the principal’s office. Let’s just hope your school year goes better than depicted in these cartoons.

“I figured if I have to be here every day, I’d might as well make a little money.”

 

Mar/Apr 2007

This is known as free enterprise. It is also known as another free trip to the Principal’s Office.

“I suffer from test-taking anxiety, brought on by lack of studying.”

 

July/Aug 2003

Yep, that’ll do it. I don’t mean to encourage deceit, young lady, but you might leave off the second part of that sentence next time. Just go with the “test-taking anxiety” defense.

“You said we learn from our mistakes, so I must be learning a lot.”

 

Jan/Feb 2006

I have to say that, as defenses go, this isn’t bad. I don’t think Pop is buying it, but it was worth a try.

“Excuse me, but at what point during my career as a supermodel will I have need for English?”

 

Jul/Aug 1998

I foresee another trip to the Principal’s Office. This sassy cartoon appeared in the Post in 1998.

“My parents think I watch too much TV, so I’m not allowed to watch unless my homework is done by 8:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m. Central.”

 

Jul/Aug 2003

Geeze, where do parents get these notions? This is by Marty Bucella, one of the artists spotlighted in our “Meet the Cartoonist” feature.

“They call it the ‘Three R’s,’ and then say we can’t spell!”

 

Jul/Aug 2003

Well, kid, I can’t argue with your logic. I don’t know if you’re “smarter than a 5th grader,” but you may be smarter than the average adult!

“Does your mother always sign your report cards, ‘My Mom’?”

 

Sep/Oct 1998

Oops. This is from Bob Vojtko, who was featured in another one of our “Meet the Cartoonist” posts.

“I sure hope I grow up to be beautiful—’cause if I can’t get by on my looks, I’m doomed.”

 

Sep/Oct. 2006

One more, simply because I think it’s so darn cute.

Cartoons: Back-to-School The Saturday Evening Post

I looked at his hair. It was thick. It had a tendency to curl. It was exactly the right length — not too long, not too short. It wasn’t a butch through which his scalp showed pinkly. I envied him his hair and his even tan, every inch of which was exactly the same degree of darkness. There were no freckles, no peeling spots, I thought, figures that his hair should look right. He should know about such things. After all, fit’s the most famous barber since Delilah, although he abandoned his tonsorial trade about twenty-five years ago to sing for his living.

“I understand you’re a big man in the icechomping field,” I said to Perry Como. “I’m an ice eater myself, and it drives my wife to distraction. She says she can hear the echo of my molars all over the house. Does your dentist tell you it’s bad for your teeth when you crack a whole cube with one bite?”

Como looked cautiously around his office as if he were afraid it was bugged. “I’ve never told him,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“You mean he can’t tell by just looking into your mouth?” I asked.

“He’s preoccupied with some other dental problems of mine,” Como explained. “For eighteen years I’ve had a small space between my two front teeth. That was my Number One problem. It was a minor one. I acquired a major one many years ago when they drilled why you should know this, but once your teeth are ground and capped, they’re tender afterward. If you get a little cavity or decay on the uncapped part of the tooth, the dentist has to take the cap off, drill a little higher and put on another cap. Dentically speaking, I’ve been going through hell for eighteen years. In all honesty, I guess if I had laid off my ice-breaker bit, my teeth would be in pretty good shape.”

I said, “I’m curious about how you go about crunching ice with caps on.”

“Obviously my caps are made of concrete,” Como said, “I can polish off a whole bowl of ice in no time at all.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m an ice craver. When I play a lot of golf, as I frequently do, and it’s very hot, I perspire bucketfuls. I get dehydrated and I have to push that lost water back into my body, I’m not very big, but in one round of golf I can ooze between five and seven pounds.”

“On just an ordinary, peaceful, quiet day of golf?” I asked.

“It’s actually water. It’s bloat that vanishes.”

I said, “I understand that you play a very leisurely game of golf, a lazy game. So why all the perspiration?”

He smiled, confessing, “I can sweat like a herd of wild animals. My pores are wide open and ready to go any time. I’ll tell you a secret,” he went on, “I know your spies have told you that my rounds of golf aren’t strenuous, that I keep my eyes and ears open to the crunch of grass underfoot and the sound of birdsong as I journey around eighteen holes. They doubtless tell you also that I seem to relish these things so greatly that I play very slowly. Well, to use a sweet word instead of a crude one, that’s a lot of hooey. I may appear to loiter, but honestly I’m just as fast as anybody else on a golf course.” He thought of something and added, “With the exception of England. I really had a problem there. For some reason, British players hit the ball and run. Their wives may find them something less than volcanic at home, but put them down on a golf course, and it’s Balaklava and The Charge of the Light Brigade all over again. They charge at you like wild boars — polite wild boars, mind you, but if they want to play through you, if you’re smart, you let them play.”

I said, “The only English golf match I’ve ever seen was one played between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for the Playing Fields of England Fund, They had to call it off on the fourth hole because they were driving their balls right down the spectators’ throats. Twelve or fifteen thousand people crowded onto the fairways until there weren’t any fairways; there were just masses of people.”

“I played in a few of those things myself,” Como said. “They’re fun until they start leaving you no room to play in. After that they’re murder.”

I said, “I helped Bob Hope write his story for The Saturday Evening Post. There are those who say he’s no good without his writers around him, but I can testify that there were many times when he said sidesplitting things to me on his own, without his writers thinking them up for him.”

“He’s a swifty with an ad lib,” Como agreed. “Hope’s played a lot of golf exhibitions for charity, and I’ve played with him on some of them. You gather together three or four characters like Hope, and ten or twenty thousand people are apt to turn out. When the galleries start lining up on the fairways until they leave only a long, narrow slit for you to drive through, it scares the hell out of you. You could kill a spectator if you hit him in the wrong spot.

“Most of the benefits I’ve played,” he went on, “have been for boys’ clubs or for such things as cerebral-palsy funds. I remember one day in Washington, D.C, when there were five of us—Hope and I, Ben Hogan, Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Demaret. Most of the people who’d come out to see us play weren’t golfers and knew no golf etiquette. They didn’t even have enough gumption to know they were in danger and get out of the way when Hope and Sullivan and I were shooting. Hogan and Demaret knew where their shots were going, but you can’t stand in front of Hope or me when we’re shooting without running a good chance of having a slice or a hook slam into you.

“That was the maddest day I can remember. Bob was flying in from somewhere with Jim Demaret. They were supposed to be there at one o’clock, but when they didn’t show up, Hogan gave the crowd a golf clinic.
He showed them how to hit some balls, then he explained his shots over a microphone to kill time. People were milling and trampling around out of hand, and I was hiding in the locker room. I wasn’t about to go out there and get flattened. Finally there was the sound of police-motorcycle sirens, and in came Hope.

“From the moment we teed off on the first hole, trying to play golf was ridiculous. By the time we got to where a ball had landed, it was gone, and we never saw it again. I didn’t see the same ball twice all day. There were supposed to be marshals to protect us — they were really to protect the crowd —but they didn’t. So the people gathered in the middle of the fairways and grabbed the balls as fast as we hit them. We kept trying anyhow and finally got to the fifth hole, which was a well-trapped par three. I’ll never forget what Bob did then. It showed a softer and kinder side of this man who seems so cocky on the outside. He told the rest of us, ‘I’m going to hit it in the trap,’ and sure enough, that’s where he hit it.

“I wish I had a movie of the action for the next fifteen minutes. Bob deliberately hit that ball from one trap to another, dealing out stale jokes for the crowd every second of the time. He was giving the crowd a show for their money, and it was hilariously funny. He’d hit under the ball so it would go straight up in the air, or he’d top it and bury it in the sand. You know, people consistently underestimate Bob. He’s much more than just a funny man; he’s a very kind man too.

“We played four more holes because we thought we ought to play at least nine, after which we dropped everything and ran for the clubhouse like rabbits. I simply couldn’t have stood another nine holes. We’d be there yet. It had taken us four and a half hours to play the holes we did play. When we saw a ball, we hit it. The rest of the time we were signing autographs and walking. A couple of times I even walked in the wrong direction because I couldn’t see the fairway.”

From Our Archives: I Call On Perry Como The Saturday Evening Post

In the numerous articles and interviews that Bob Hope did for The Saturday Evening Post, he often mentioned Dolores and spoke with pride about their long, happy marriage. In “A Century of Hope” (Mar/Apr 1998) he told how he met his future wife:

One night while I was in Roberta, my pal, George Murphy, who was doing a fine job of specially capering in the show, invited me to the Lambs Club. We downed a couple of beers, and he said. “I want you to hear a girl sing. Her name is Dolores Reade. She sings at the Vogue Club.”

We went over to the Vogue, on 57th Street … and I heard this girl sing. She had a low, husky voice, and she sang somewhat in the style of Marion Harris—soft and sweet, not a shouter. She sang “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” That did it, and I asked if I could take her out.

Once we were alone, she asked. “You’re in Roberta?” “Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you catch me in the matinee tomorrow?”

She did, but when she didn’t come backstage to see me afterward, I couldn’t understand it. A couple of days later I saw her, and I asked, “What happened?”

“I didn’t come back to say hello because I didn’t know you had such a big part in the show,” she said. “I thought you were in the chorus, and I was embarrassed at my stupidity.”

From then on, I was at the Vogue every night, waiting to take Dolores home. I must have given the doorman at her apartment thousands of dollars in tips to let me park in front of the joint and sit there with her. It was our inspiration point, our Flirtation Walk, and moonlight canoe trip all rolled into one—right there in front of the apartment on Ninth Avenue.

It wasn’t long before Dolores’ mother took her to Florida to play a nightclub date in Miami. While she was gone, I lived on long distance from morning till night. I was in love. Dolores said she was, too. She must have meant it, because she broke her Florida contract and came back to New York. We went back to sitting in front of her apartment and making plans to get married. We picked Erie, Pennsylvania, for our wedding. I can’t remember why. I was in a thick, pink fog anyway.

Once we were married. I put Dolores into my vaudeville act. Roberta had closed, so we went around the big-time circuits together. Our act went something like this: I did my regular act; then I introduced her. She came out, dressed in a lovely gown, looking very beautiful, and sang a song. I came back out, and when she started her second number, I didn’t leave the stage. I just stayed there, standing close to her and looking at her. Then I looked at the audience with an expression which asked, “Ain’t she beautiful? Ain’t she something? How about it? Just how about it?”

I stroked her arm, pretending it looked good enough to eat, which wasn’t hard to do. Then I nibbled it gently. This brought a roar from the audience. Then I hugged her; she stopped singing, broke up, and I said. “Don’t let me bother you. Just keep right on.” If she hadn’t been so beautiful and if it hadn’t been so apparent to the onlookers that we were really in love, the act would have fallen flat. As it was, it played well.

In an interview on his 95th birthday, the Post asked Bob, “So many show business marriages end in divorce. To what do you attribute your long, successful marriage to your wife, Dolores?”

Hope: We’ve been married for 63 years, but I’ve only been home three weeks.

Hope often joked about his long absences from home. Beneath the humor, though, was devotion and gratitude for her patience and her work in managing their home and family during his many trips.

It’s been suggested that I am inclined to travel a bit—that I wander from my happy home. This is not true. Just the other evening I said to my wife, “Dolores”— I knew it was Dolores, she introduced herself to me— “I’ve done an awful lot of traveling, but you’ve been very understanding about it—although you did rent out my room.”

Dolores has a wise and loving touch with our children. I’m lost in admiration of the job she has done with them, and with the job she’s done keeping me in line. A lot of children whose fathers are in show business grow up too precocious, too wise, too fresh, too unfunny. That’s not true of our four. Dolores sees to that. She also sees to it that they’re having a devout rearing. One day [a neighbor] overheard our littlest one, Kelly, ask our next youngest, Nora, “Is everybody in the world Catholic?”

“Yes,” Nora said, “everybody but daddy. He’s a comedian.” I was both surprised and pleased when I heard that. I have no trouble convincing them that I’m their daddy, but sometimes I have trouble convincing them that I’m a comedian.

It may surprise those who read this to hear that I’m a strong family man … I’m no angel. For that matter, I’ve known very few angels. My mother and Dolores are two. But I’m still married to the same girl I married twenty years ago, and that’s four or five under par for the Hollywood course. [Bob Hope as told to Pete Martin, "This Is On Me," 1954]

The Woman Who Never Lost Hope: Dolores Hope (1909—2011) The Saturday Evening Post

Audience reaction to Bob Hope Show Seol, Korea National Archives

Well, here we are ladies and gentlemen, at March Field, one of the Army’s great flying fields, located near Riverside, California.

And I want to tell you that I’m thrilled being here. But I’m really here on business. I came up to look at some of the sweaters I knitted.

And what a wonderful welcome they gave me. As soon as I got in the camp, I receive a ten-gun salute. They told me on the operating table.

When I arrived here I was dressed Hollywood style. I walked into the barracks wearing orange slacks, a lavender polo shirt, and blue beret. The soldiers saw me and that’s all I remember.

I watched them putting gas in one of the big bombers and boy what a big tank. It’s really remarkable. Just two pints short of W. C. Fields.

My brother is learning to be a flyer at a training field in Florida, but they must be having floods down there because in his last letter he said he’d just been washed out at Pensacola.

One of the aviators here took me for a plane ride this afternoon. I wasn’t frightened. But at two thousand feet my goose pimples began bailing out…

That was how it sounded 70 years ago on May 6, when Bob Hope gave his first USO performance. That show at March Field started a 50-year continuous run that appeared at combat zones and military hospitals across Europe, the Pacific islands, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf.

In 1967, Post writer Trevor Armbrister followed Hope’s troupe during one of its tours of Vietnam, and captured a sense of the hard work and dedication Hope gave to this cause.

Bob Hope and his golf club Lackland Air Force Base 1990

As the plane began its descent into Saigon, he seemed apprehensive, “This is where the trip really starts,” he said to singer Jack Jones. “If you want to be nervous, now is the time.”

Landing at Tan Son Nhut Airport, the giant jet taxied to a halt, and the door was opened. Clutching a golf club, Hope stepped off the plane first.

“What’s the club for?” a reporter asked.

Bob grinned. “Well,” he said, “that’s just to keep my grip in shape until I get back, and also for a little protection.”

“From whom, Bob?”

“From both sides.”

“They blew up the Brink Hotel (an officers’ billet in Saigon) the last time you were here,” another newsman said. “Are you scared this time?”

“Not at all,” Hope replied. “In fact, I may even sleep on top of the bed.”

[Immediately after finishing his show in Saigon,] a limousine was waiting to speed him to a nearby military hospital. Followed by the rest of his troupe, Hope moved through the wards at a brisk pace. He asked each man how he got hurt and how he was feeling. He told a few jokes and signed autographs. But be never expressed any sympathy.

“That’s the last thing these guys want,” he says, “If you give them sympathy, they’ll turn away. You gotta be clinical about it and talk to ‘em on an honest basis. All these guys in traction—I say, ‘Don’t get up, fellas.’ or ‘OK, somebody get the dice and let’s get started,’ In the old days, [comedian Jerry] Colonna and I would even get in bed with the patients.”

“You have to show them that you’re really happy to see them,” Colonna says, “and in some cases, it’s really tough. You know how they feel and they know how they feel. I choke up and get a lump in my throat and I have to walk away. But Bob—he’s learned how to hold back his emotions.”

He hasn’t always succeeded. Once, on the island of Espiritu Santo in 1944, Hope stopped by the bedside of a severely wounded soldier who was receiving blood transfusions. “I see where they’re giving you a little pick-me-up,” the comedian declared. “It’s only raspberry soda,” the boy replied, “but it feels pretty good.” Two hours later, Hope was told that the boy was dead. “I thought about how in his last moments he’d grinned and tried to say something light,” Hope recalls, “and I couldn’t stand it. I had to go outside and pull myself together.”

Bob Hope entertain in Wonsan, Korea. National Archives Photo October 26, 1950.

At 10 o’clock next morning the troupe piled into a C-130 for the short flight to the marine base at Chu Lai. Hope has long had a special affection for he marines (During the Korean War he landed by an incredible mistake on the beach at Wonsan 20 minutes before the marines stormed ashore to occupy the place. “It’s nice to have you here,” he quipped. “You must come to all our invasions.”) and that affection is reciprocated.

“When I got off the plane this morning,” he said [in his opening monologue], “I asked a sergeant where the Viet Cong was. He draws wonderful circles…

“This trip. I’m traveling light. I just brought a toothbrush, a pair of black pajamas and a white flag…

“This is the most secret base I’ve ever visited. Everything’s strictly hush-hush. At dawn, the bugler just thinks reveille…”

Five hours later the plane landed at Guam. As Hope stepped down—his golf club in hand—a Navy band swung into Thanks for the Memory. Most of the entertainers went immediately to their quarters to get some sleep before the show. But when Hope learned that a squadron of 24 B-53′s was about to take off on a mission over Vietnam, he drove to the pilots’ ready room and—with Jerry Colonna and Carroll Baker at his side—performed for nearly an hour.

Bob Hope on the carrier Ticonderoga doing his monologue

There was a show that afternoon for 12,000 servicemen at Andersen Field, then another banquet in another officers’ club. At nine o’clock on that final night of the tour, the troupe climbed into the C-141 for the long haul back to Los Angeles, and all the entertainers fell asleep immediately.

All except Hope. In the last 24 hours, he had had three rubdowns, but his legs still hurt and there were dark circles under his eyes. A special bunk bad been prepared for him in the cockpit, but he couldn’t sleep, and he stood now by the galley in the darkened cabin and talked about the special thrill he gets from performing for servicemen.

“It’s instant satisfaction,” he said. “You do a movie or a TV show and you have to wait to find out if it’s any good. But here, you go out and sock ‘em and those guys applaud; it’s man to man and you have a feeling you’re really helping when you make those kids forget their own problems…”

“Aren’t you tired?”

For a second the comedian paused. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m happy tired.”

Shortly after the death of Bob Hope on July 27, 2003, CNN interviewed his grandson, Zach. When asked what he would remember best about his grandfather, Zach replied it was Hope’s laughter ”until the end.”

“We asked him where he wanted to be buried, and he said, ‘surprise me.’”

Pure Hope.

Bob Hope: 50 Years at the Front The Saturday Evening Post