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Tony Peyser's Christmas Story

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Tony Peyser

My Dad, Arnold Peyser, died in 2000 and I seem to miss him most around Christmas. A comedy writer and awfully swell guy, he made a point every year for us to go through all of the family Christmas cards together. He met a man named Bill Zuckert in 1969 who mailed Arnold holiday greetings for the next 28 years. I got a particular kick out of them because the highlight of Zuckert's cards were the poems he wrote about what he, his wife and daughter did that year. The verses were kind of corny, but always fun.

Anyway, one of the presents my wife Kathy recently got me were several CDs of classic radio broadcasts, which were all at least 50 years old. A few days after Christmas, I headed out to listen to them on the treadmill. I felt like I'd tried to find the yuletide spirit this year but it never seemed to officially materialize. I was slightly encouraged that I wasn't alone in this sentiment. A columnist (I forget who) complained that while department stores were full of holiday songs, the usual holiday movies (Christmas In Connecticut, Holiday Inn and The Bishop's Wife) for some reason weren't on TV channels in the proverbial heavy rotation.

The first CD I put on was a 1946 Christmas broadcast for Armed Forces Radio, recorded in Los Angeles and hosted by Bob Hope. His opening monologue was a hoot. But as I kept listening, I wondered if the whole show would seem quaint and distant from Christmas in general and me in particular.

One of the first guests on the show was singer Dinah Shore. This got my attention because Arnold (that's what I called him, not Dad) was a writer on her TV variety show and that job was the reason my family left New York in 1957. I thought, Jeez, Arnold would have loved hearing this. A few guests later was Garry Moore, another top talent in the 1950s. Arnold (and my Mom, Lois Peyser) also worked on Moore's popular TV show. Another rather stunning coincidence. Later on in this radio broadcast, a fast-talking comedy bit was between Moore and Jimmy Durante. In the early 1960s, my parents wrote a star-studded TV special and Durante was one of the featured guests. I was now thinking, This is getting weird.

The other CD I listened to was Twenty First Precinct, a hard-boiled, no-nonsense radio drama from the mid-1950s in the Dragnet mode that was set in New York. The installment was called The Giver and was about a nosy woman who thinks her reclusive neighbor across the hall is selling stolen merchandise. The broadcast aired on December 22, 1954, the day I turned one. (That date certainly caught my eye.) The star of this show was Everett Sloane, who is perhaps best remembered for his featured role in Citizen Kane. When I met Kathy in 1982, I was renting a tiny apartment above a garage in Hollywood and Sloanes widow, Lovey, was my landlady. (People, I'm not making this stuff up.) Also in this episode was Harold Stone, an imposing character actor who died just this year. When I went to Berkeley in the 1970s, I was friends with one of his sons. Sometimes the world is an open buffet of amazing intersections.

In 1979, no doubt having already read Zuckert's Christmas card, I decided to write a poem of my own about the 1970s. I then asked a friend at The L.A. Times if he thought they might be interested in using it. They were. What I Did In The 1970s --- the first of several long poems over a number of years I did for that paper --- appeared on the front page of The Times' op-ed section. It's what got me writing the topical poems that some of you BuzzFlash folks are rumored to be reading every day.

As you can imagine, all these magical coincidences were more than enough to banish my lackluster holiday spirit. And Kathy assured me that she knew of none of this when she ordered the CDs --- she just though they sounded like things I'd enjoy hearing.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this Zuckert fellow was an actor --- and a busy one at that. He had hundreds of credits from the 1950s until his death in 1997. I guarantee that most of you will know his face. Zuckert did comedy and drama but seemed to always be cast as stern authority figures, i.e. judges, sheriffs or politicians. He played the mayor of a small town in The Trouble With Girls, a 1969 Elvis Presley movie that was written by my parents. Zuckert's Christmas poems were also an unofficial history of show business. One of the rhymes went something like this: This year, the presents from my wife weren't chintzy/Did you see me as Police Commissioner Parker on Quincy?

While Zuckert had a long career in television and movies, he worked before that in radio. In fact, he appeared in a supporting role on a December 22, 1954 episode of Twenty First Precinct called The Giver --- the very same one that Kathy gave me.

After I printed out the story you just read, I placed the two pages on my desk underneath the smiling photo of Arnold. Maybe it was just the afternoon light in the room but I could swear his smile somehow looked a little bigger.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

You can read Tony's topical poems and see his cartoons on BuzzFlash.com.