Presenting that bombastic banshee — bellowing breezy badinage, blowing buoyant bunkum, brandishing bewildering balderdash — Boston's blatant Blue Boy — Fred Allen — in person!"

Yes, folks, it's that dour dean of radio funsters, Jack Benny's nagging Nemesis, and he's out to quell a rumor.

"There's been a lot of small talk — you know how midgets gossip — " says Mr. Allen, "about who writes my program. The best way to set the public right is to tell something about the author.

"He's a sour-puss. He's so mean he wouldn't give a toothpick to a starving woodpecker. Many's the morning I've seen him with a razor blade splitting a caraway seed between two canaries. His family crest is a sneer rampant on a field of dill pickles. And I have it on good authority that when he was baptized they hit him across the skull with a bottle of angostura bitters."

In short, the author of Town Hall Tonight is none other than that "mad merry mountebank mumbling mealy mimicries ... Maine's Mickey Moose — Fred Allen — in person!"

Of course he has help at times, and he is quick to acknowledge the services of any co-authors; but, unlike any other top-line comedian on the air, his almost sole reliance is on his own ingenuity and, I might add, his own industry. He works all the time.

Portland Hoffa, his wife and stooge — you know, Portland "Peekaboo" "Tallyho" Hoffa — thus describes a New Year's Eve party at the Allens':

"I played rummy with our guests, and Fred typed away in his study. About ten seconds before midnight he stuck his head through the door and yelled 'Hooray!' and at ten seconds after midnight he disappeared."

With all his industry, he confesses that he doesn't know what he would do without his extensive library of old joke books and magazines. But it should be pointed out, in fairness to Fred, that the success of his program — and it has been in the select "first five" year after year — does not depend on his jokes, either newborn or shaved, so much as it does on his highly original ideas.

For instance, there is Fred's famous sleuth, One Long Pan, a real person who runs the Allens' favorite Chinese laundry. There are the animals and birds that are always being rung in. You may recall Chatterbox Pete, a big white Polish bantam, introduced by Fred as the World's Champion Crowing Rooster that Sings, and Pal, the Talking Dog, who won a silver loving cup offered by Frank Buck by saying "My mama." There were his Amateur Hour, his Bedlam Court, followed and topped by his Persons You Didn't Expect to Meet feature. In this he has presented, among others, a beachcomber, a toupee maker, a sniffer of truant gas, a tester of bulletproof vests, a laundry spot analyst, and a lady iceman.

But, of all the stunts that the Old Town Haller has introduced on his program, the one that has most caught the popular fancy is an inadvertent one — the superkilocycle battle of the century with Jack "The Bee" Benny, the frustrated violinist.

Impresario Allen, in his search for the unusual, chanced upon a ten-year-old violin virtuoso, Stuart Canin, who amazed the Wednesday-night radio audience by giving a masterful rendition of Schubert's The Bee. At the conclusion of the number, after calling attention to the extreme youth of the boy, Allen remarked: "Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."

The following Sunday evening, Benny, also in the spirit of good clean fun, replied that he too had played the Schubert composition in a masterful manner up in Waukegan at the age of ten. The matter might have dropped there if Jack had not been unfortunate enough to call the number, not "The Bee," but "The Flight of the Bumblebee," which, as Fred later pointed out, was not written by Schubert at all, but by "two other fellows named Rimsky and Korsakoff."

The Waukegan Wonder finally accepted Allen's challenge to play The Bee, which convinced some critics that Allen had been right all along. As for the latter, he was his usual magnanimous self.

"There were faint traces of The Bee during the playing of the number," he said, "but I later learned that this was Poetess Livingstone buzzing in Benny's ear."

Curiously enough, less is known about the private life of Fred Allen than about the private life of almost any top-line entertainer before the public. Few know, for instance, that his name is not Allen at all, but Sullivan — John F. Sullivan; and that, in spite of his Yankee drawl, he is as Irish as his real name implies. The Yankee part comes from the fact that he was born — some forty-four years ago — in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the drawl is something he can't do anything about, either.

After graduating from high school and taking a summer course at Boston University, he got a twenty-cents-an-hour job in the Boston Public Library, dusting books. Somewhere on the shelves he found a book on juggling. And this discovery impelled him to be a vaudeville actor.

Allen's entry into theatrical life occurred in 1914. When he billed himself as Fred St. James, World's Worst Juggler, audiences seemed to agree that the billing was justified.

Came the war. Fred enlisted and went to France with the A. E. F. Returning intact, he went back to the act in one — but not as a juggler. Gradually, for years, he had been insinuating wisecracks between plate cracks, and had found that the audience laughed at his word juggling even more than they did at his plate juggling. So now he threw away the chinaware and became a monologist.

Allen — he had changed his professional name again so that the Albee outfit wouldn't recognize him and keep on paying him his low prewar salary — finally landed in his first Broadway show, Arthur Hammerstein's Polly, starring Madge Kennedy and W. C. Fields.

They came fast after that: The Passing Show of 1922, Greenwich Village Follies of 1925, Vogues of 1927, The First Little Show, and Three's a Crowd — the last two with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman.

In 1932 he found a backer for a half-hour radio show. Then came the full hour. Then Town Hall Tonight.

He has been in Hollywood, made two pictures — Thanks a Million and Sally, Irene, and Mary — has been offered a long-term movie contract and has refused it.

"The Hollywood sky line," he says, "with all its red neon lights, looks like Broadway with varicose veins."

Fred and his blue-eyed stooge, Portland, met when they were both in The Passing Show of 1922, but it wasn't until four years later, in 1926, that they were married. They manage to live a happy, domestic, and oh-so-quiet life. Fred shuns restaurants and night clubs as he does Hollywood. He says he'd rather spend an evening with Portland than with N. T. G. So he stays home and works, and Portland sits beside him and knits and presumably thinks of the good times she had when she was third from the end in George White's Scandals.

As for the Benny-Allen feud, I don't suppose it will ever be settled. But neither the interest of the public in this mad battle of wits, nor that of the contestants, has abated.

When Benny agreed to a race between his Maxwell and Fred's Titmouse, he stated publicly: "If Allen drives, Rochester, my driver, has his orders — 'Steer to kill!"' This fall, when the talking violinist came back to the airways, he received a telegram signed "Fred Allen." It read:

JUST HEARD YOUR OPENING PROGRAM STOP MOTION PICTURES ARE MY BEST ENTERTAINMENT.

Meanwhile the Old Town Haller pursues his lugubrious way.

"All I hope," he says, "is that my relatives never find out what I'm doing. They're so proud of me. They think I'm a trap drummer in a prison band!"

Publication Date: January 28, 1939