A Christmas Memory

This is me on Christmas morning in 1963, brandishing my big gift of the year: a Mike Mercury Supercar by REMCO. Despite the big smile on my face, I was bitterly disappointed. 

I know, I know, what an ungrateful brat. I am ashamed of my six-year-old behavior, but you see, even then I knew that Supercar was a lame knock-off of the way cooler Fireball XL5, which happened to be my favorite TV show at the time.

Though Supercar could drive across land, fly and submerge under water, the Fireball XL5 was a rocket ship that could go into, you know, SPACE! Super cool! This was 1963, remember, and hadn’t our president just challenged America to put a man on the moon before the decade was over? Space was on everyone’s mind at the time. Space was the place to be. Not land, sea, or air! 

My disappointment in this gift was to be a harbinger of many Xmases to come. It seemed that no matter what was on my Santa list, I’d usually end up with the “also-ran” version that never quite measured up. 

Like the year I desperately wanted Levi’s bell-bottomed jeans, and Santa put the cheaper Lee “flared” jeans under the tree. 

Or the Christmas my brother and I got matching Defenders action figures. Not G.I. Joe, mind you, which we desperately coveted, but a cheap facsimile made, weirdly enough, by the same company who created the G.I. Joe: Hasbro. This action figure was so bad, I didn’t feel too upset about blowing it to pieces soon after with an M-80 strapped to its cheaply constructed body. 

(Anyone remember M-80 firecrackers? They used to be sold over the counter, but were so powerful and dangerous that they were eventually declared illegal. It was the stuff of legend that somebody somewhere had either blown up his toilet or blown off his hand with an M-80.)

The bottom line is, in our house, Santa was a frugal coupon clipper, an S&H Green Stamps collector, a thrift shop maven, and who we affectionately called Mom. 

In our house, Santa was a frugal coupon clipper, an S&H Green Stamps collector, a thrift shop maven, and who we affectionately called Mom. 

I can’t blame Mom for scrimping and saving, cutting every corner, buying cheap versions of products, or driving miles out of her way just to save a few pennies. She had six kids to feed, dress, and put through school, which forced her daily to come up with creative ways to stretch Dad’s military income.

She once made beef stew from leftover steak she’d brought home from a date night with Dad the evening before. She even served the stew with the untouched dinner rolls she’d also thrown into the doggie bag. As a matter of fact, Mom loved bringing home leftovers so much, she would load up on all of the culinary swag still on the table at the end of a meal: rolls, breadsticks, butter, and jelly and ketchup packets. “They’re just going to throw them away,” Mom would announce by way of justification, as if any of us ever dared question her methods.

Mom’s frugality was so deeply ingrained that it continued long after the last child was grown and gone, and even though my parents were by then financially well off. I was home visiting once and she made Dad and me wait while she argued with a store manager over a $1.25 discount she was supposed to receive. As the haggling dragged on, and Dad’s and my frustration mounted, I blurted that I’d give her the damned buck twenty-five if we could just get the hell out of there! But Mom wouldn’t give in; she wanted that discount. And she got it.

This behavior was typical among those of Mom’s generation. Most came from humble roots, had lived through the Great Depression, and had done their civic duty during WWII: rationing gas and consumables, and recycling everything from aluminum cans to rubber tires. Putting away for a rainy day was a no-brainer for the Greatest Generation. And even though America enjoyed phenomenal economic growth and prosperity after the war, many couldn’t shake the memory of those periods of great want, and swore it wouldn’t happen to their own kids.

I suppose it is ever the job of children to look under their friends’ Christmas trees and envy all the cool toys they got. But even though we didn’t always get exactly what we asked for, Mom made sure all six of us kids got gifts, more than one, and at every single Christmas. As the father of only two children, that accomplishment is pretty spectacular.

There is, however, one instance of Mom’s frugality that had unforeseen, certainly unintended and innocent, but nevertheless long-term, consequences. It ended up pitting two well-known entertainment industry rivals against each other, caused them to become bitter enemies, and prevented a musical from making it to Broadway. 

And it was all because of Mom. 

The story begins when I was in my mid-teens. For Christmas that year, Mom gave me a used, dog-eared comedy album she’d found on one of her thrift store runs. It was called Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years. I remember tearing off the wrapping paper, staring blankly at the cover of the album and with that classic dazed, frozen smile muttered “Ohhhhh, Stan Freberg…thaaannnkkksss!” In my head, of course, I was thinking “Stan who??”

For those who are having the same thought now, Stan Freberg was an American voice artist, comedian, and radio personality in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, who eventually had his own advertising agency in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s.

His television commercials were often self-referential and funny, and influenced a whole generation of advertisers who began injecting humor into their own campaigns.

Freberg’s most famous ad was undoubtedly the Alka-Seltzer commercial-within-a-commercial, where an actor takes a bite of food and says “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball!” But he keeps screwing up the line. After too many failed takes—and too many meatballs—his heartburn won’t let him go on until he’s given a couple of Alkla-Seltzers. That does the trick, and he’s finally able to get out the line correctly, only to have the oven door fall off and ruin the take.

For Heinz Great American Soups, Freberg hired Ann Miller—the leggy Hollywood dancer/singer/actress from the 40s and 50s—to play a housewife whose kitchen transforms into a giant Busby Berkeley-style production number. Amid a chorus of dancing girls, she sings “Let's Face the Chicken Gumbo and Dance!” while tapping her way up and down the constantly moving platforms. After she twirls her way back to the kitchen and into her husband’s arms, he leans in and asks “Emily, why do you always have to make such a big production out of everything?”

Freberg’s satirical sense of humor was honed from his early years producing comedy albums that satirized popular shows, musicians, personalities, and political issues of the time. United States of America Volume One, released in 1961, was one such album: an audio musical comedy that parodied the story of America from Columbus up to the Revolutionary War.

Mom bought the album for something like 25 cents (a steal!) because she knew of my interest in American history, not to mention musical comedy. But after giving the record a listen, I was less than thrilled. At a time when Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Cheech and Chong were my comedy mentors, Freberg’s humor went over like a lead balloon filled with groan-inducing Borscht Belt one-liners. Here’s a sample:

Columbus lands on a beach in the New World and announces to the Indian he “discovers” there that he wants to open America’s first Italian restaurant, but needs to cash a check first:

Native: You out of luck, today. Banks closed.

Columbus: Oh? Why?

Native: Columbus Day!

Columbus: [pregnant pause] We going out on that joke?

Native: No, we do reprise of song. That help ...

Columbus and Native together: But not much, no!

The album is chock full of these kinds of mildly culturist, corny wise-cracks, antic skits, and zippy musical numbers, without a single hip, underground joke on the whole record.

Or so I thought.

It wasn’t until I went away to college that I began to understand the true genius of Freberg’s piece. One night, while ignoring homework in favor of studiously exploring the effects of mind-altering substances, I put the LP on the turntable, lay back, and listened.

To say I was blown away is an overstatement, but I was more than surprised to find myself laughing out loud at certain parts. Sure, weed often makes everything funny, but in this case it actually served to open my mind to the cleverness of Freberg’s writing, the snappiness of his lyrics, and the subversive nature of some of the scenes. Like when Thomas Jefferson shows up at Benjamin Franklin’s door:

Jefferson: I’ve got this petition here I’ve been circulating around the neighborhood. Kind of thought you’d like to sign it. It’s called the Declaration of Independence.

Franklin: Yeah, I heard about that. Sounds a little suspect if you ask me. 

Jefferson: What do you mean, suspect?

Franklin: Well, you’re advocating the overthrow of the British government by force and violence, aren’t you?

Jefferson: Well, yeah, yeah, but we’ve had it with that royal jazz.

Franklin: Who’s we?

Jefferson: Well, all the guys.

Franklin: Who’s all the guys?

Jefferson: Oh, George, Jim Madison, Alex Hamilton, Johnny Adams—you know, all the guys.

Franklin: Hah! The lunatic fringe.

Jefferson: Oh, they are not.

Franklin: Bunch of wild eyed radicals, professional liberals, don’t kid me.

The reluctant Franklin then tries to shuffle Jefferson out the door while rattling off a list of his inventions to prove he’s a businessman and has to play it conservative. 

Franklin: I got the printing business going pretty good, the almanac made “Book of the Month” and I’ve got pretty good distribution on the stoves now. 

Jefferson: Yeah... Getting back to the signing of the petition—how about it, huh?

Franklin: Well, I—

Jefferson: It’s a harmless paper.

Franklin: Oh, sure, harmless. I know how these things happen. You go to a couple of harmless parties, sign a harmless petition, and forget all about it. Ten years later, you get hauled up before a committee. No, thank you. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life writing in Europe.

The actor voicing Jefferson plays him like a young Madison Avenue ad man from the 50s, and Freberg himself is hysterical as the old, grouchy, conservative Franklin. When they launch into the rousing “A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days,” the comparisons to McCarthyism are inescapable, and for me the sketch took on a whole new rebellious flavor.

And the music. The glorious music, also written by Freberg and lavishly orchestrated by Billy May, who was best known as a composer and arranger for some of the top singers of the day, like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bing Crosby.

There’s the exhilarating “It's a Round, Round World” duet between Columbus and King Ferdinand, arguing whether the world is flat or round:

Columbus: Friend, get hip, would I climb aboard this ship, if I didn’t have odds the Earth was highly spherical

King Ferdinand: It’s a miracle if it is ...

Or the Broadway show-stopper “Top Hat, White Feather, and Tails,” sung (and tap-danced) by the Lenape Indians who sell the island of Manhattan to the Dutch for “24 dollars worth of junk jewelry”:

Dutchman: Say, you kids get a pretty good sound outta them moccasins!

But my all-time favorite musical number has to be “Yankee Doodle Go Home (Spirit of ’76),” where the famous Revolutionary War trio of flag bearer, fife player, and drummer argue over how the music should be played: Doodle’s “square” drumming, or the hipster flute player’s hot swing arrangement. The flautist wins, of course, and this is where May’s musical genius comes to the fore. It is one of the finest pieces of swing jazz I have ever heard. Anywhere.

To get Freberg’s comedy, you have to take yourself back to the era of gray flannel suits, lunchtime martinis, beatniks, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Sure, many of the jokes are corny to modern ears—maybe they were corny back then, too—but that’s the fun of it. And the cast of voice actors Freberg assembled is a “corn”ucopia of voices from my baby boomer youth. 

There’s the iconic Jesse White, who usually played fast-talking, cigar-chomping agents or salesmen, but whom many would remember as the sad-faced and lonely Maytag repairman on TV commercials. The album’s narrator is Paul Frees, who, in addition to being the basso profundo voice of the Ghost Host in the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disney parks, was also the evil Boris Badenov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Also on the album is June Foray, best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel in the same show, but who also voiced hundreds of characters in her long career, like Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the voice of Granny of Tweety and Sylvester fame.

Anyway, not long after listening to the album that fateful night, I introduced it to my friend and fellow actor Marc, and this is where the story really takes off. A musician and comedian himself, Marc fell even more head over heels for the album than I, and wore the grooves off the record listening to it. He loved it so much that he even used the Franklin/Jefferson scene as his final for a theater directing class he was taking, with me as the three-piece-suited Jefferson (complete with briefcase and giant quill pen for signing).

I gave Marc the album, and after we all graduated from college he took it with him to his post-graduate actor training as an apprentice at the Burt Reynolds Institute for Film and Theatre (then known as the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre) in Jupiter, Florida. Among his teachers at BRDT was the legendary Charles Nelson Reilly. Though most famous as a regular on television game shows, Reilly was a Tony Award-winning actor and a renowned director and teacher.

As part of the apprentice’s graduation show, Marc once again chose the Franklin/Jefferson scene, with him as Jefferson, a fellow apprentice played Franklin, and their teacher Charles Nelson Reilly directed. In one more bit of serendipity surrounding this piece, they discovered that BRDT’s musical director, along with most of the professional orchestra, were all huge Freberg fans. The musical director convinced the theater’s powers-that-be to contact Freberg in LA for permission to mount a full stage production at BRDT, with the ultimate goal of bringing it to Broadway. A Broadway run of the show had been attempted once before, in the early 1970s, by the notorious producer David Merrick. But due to artistic differences, Freberg withdrew, and the production collapsed.

This time, however, Freberg appeared to be enthusiastically on board and the show was cast, with Charles Nelson Reilly directing. It seemed that all involved were excited to finally put this legendary theatrical piece on the stage of the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, with visions of Broadway dancing in their heads. 

What happened next is unclear. As mentioned earlier, Stan Freberg ran his own award-winning advertising agency in Los Angeles. Reilly himself had his own LA ad agency, so he and Freberg were professional rivals. In addition, Freberg decided suddenly that he should direct the show and this obviously didn’t sit well with Reilly. The two argued, eventually refused to speak to one another, and once again Freberg’s History of the United States was consigned to the dungheap of theatrical history.

And it was all because of Mom.

If she hadn’t bought me the album, I never would’ve brought it with me to college, never given it to Marc, who never would’ve taken it to the Burt Reynolds theater, never performed it in the apprentice show, which never would’ve given the theater the idea to mount a production, never led to the inexorable rift between Reilly and Frieberg, and yada yada yada.

Many years later, when I’d fully understood the direct path from Mom’s purchase of that comedy album to the feud between two Hollywood rivals, I confronted her one night while helping her in the kitchen. 

“Thanks a lot, Mom,” I said out of the blue. “Because of you Charles Nelson Reilly and Stan Freberg now hate each other.” 

Mom blinked a little, a fleet look of concern crossing her face, not quite understanding, but used to my years of brattish ribbing. After I told her the whole tale, she went back to wiping the counter and replied nonchalantly in her slight Southern lilt:

“Well, I’m sure I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Mom passed away a few years ago, at home and in her own bed, with Christmas right around the corner and the house decorated with holiday cheer. She left this world to the sounds of her loving family moving in and out of the room around her, laughing, drinking, eating, and singing carols. Though I miss her terribly at this time of year, I’m so grateful for the Christmas memories that will always begin and end with her. The warm, beautifully decorated home, her brilliant smile, her joyful laugh, and her sweet, clear voice singing in the kitchen while she cooked Christmas dinner.

At the end of her life, we surrounded Mom with laughter and love because those were, when all is said and done, the greatest gifts she gave to us, not just at Christmas, but all our lives. And they were never cheap knock-offs, they always fit perfectly, and each of us got exactly what we wanted.

Merry Christmas, Mom, and to all, a good night!