Heyyy Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaay-borrrrrrrr Dayyyyyyyyy-eeeeeeee!

[captainsblog]

Enjoy your day off, (most of) you wage slaves.  And tomorrow, all of us can look forward to a four day workweek packed with at least five days worth of stress (in my case, more like eight due to the vacay last week). 

This "holiday" always stuck me as a depressing one.  Corporate America, frightened by the labor movement and its ties to Komyunizm, tore the organic May 1st workers' holiday away from US workers and replaced it with this one on the first weekend of September. The hope of spring, turned into fall. No more festivals or cool outdoor things to go to. Baseball in these parts is over, and while the big kids still play another month, that's nail-biting or worse for Mets fans.  And no, I am NOT ready for some football:P

The day itself doesn't lend itself to the celebrations of the Fourth or the memorializing of the last Monday in May. Oddly, there isn't even a Labor Day parade of any significance in Buffalo, but Rochester, one of the most union-averse towns in the Rust Belt, has had one for decades.  Both as a parent and as a parented, we didn't do much on this day because, dum-dum-DUMMMMMM!, school started back up the next day or maybe the day after that.  So my strongest memory of the holiday, going back to the late 60s and even with check-ins years later, was of spending the day with a horrible actor and his millions of "kids" while he begged for money.



This was Jerry Lewis's other connection to my childhood. In the early 70s, he got into the franchise business and promised investors a popcorn money-printing machine by tying his name to what were usually two or three screen miniplexes fit into corners or outparcels of strip plazas.  East Meadow got one, at the time its second cinema and the only one with, wow, two different screens in  it!  I can't remember if he came for the grand opening, but his hand/footprints and autograph were in the concrete outside the auditoriums.  The concept lasted less than a decade there, it turning into an indie duplex run by the legendary Uniondale Mini Cinema people for a few years.  Today, there's no evidence of it at all, as a dollar store now sits where Jerry once clipped the ties pocketbook of some shlub. 

Others held out longer; I remember seeing The Natural, not in the Buffalo where it was filmed, but at a Jerry Lewis up in Niagara Falls that was still there in 1984.  Some years before that, both Jerry and his cinema venture company wound up in Bankruptcy Court; this piece reviews why it didn't work and how, even years later, Jerry's annual telethon appearances still angered those who lost not just their ties but their shirts to him.

My fondest memories of Late But Not Dead Jerry were from Letterman appearances in the 90s, where Dave would goad him into doing bits from his goofy heyyyy layyyydee period and Jerry would try to come off as a serious actor. Yet those memories will never overtake in quantity the ones spent inside, on this day, watching his most famous schtick for year after year.

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I could swear I did a piece here about this experience on one of the previous 15 Labor Days I've been blogging, but I see nothing about it in the archives, so here goes.  This telethon was an institution around the country, but even more so in his native Noo Yawk. Channel 5 carried it for most of its life, and from Sunday evening until Labor Day sundown, all through the night, with Jerry and his pals, primarily Ed McMahon, hosting mostly B- and C-level stars who sang, danced and told jokes in between the pictures of the "kids" in wheelchairs, the filmstrips of the scientists feverishly working on a muscular dystrophy cure, and the hourly shots of the toteboard:



Yeah, like that one. That was the year they surprised him with Sinatra backstage; they even pulled off a Dean Martin reunion one year.  Through it all, on channel 5 and I'm sure others, was the constant crawl of the local phone numbers. This was all back when calls to long distance area codes, or from our house to "the city," were precious and few; 800 numbers were only beginning to arrive. So the organizers had a string of them, from the main 212 number to the one I called more than a few times in the 516, all the way up to the edge of the viewing area, to Jerry's Borscht Belt home at the Brown's Hotel.  The event always ended on that last afternoon with Jerry's final spiel, and just before the final tote count, his rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone."  (Go ahead and google it; I tested well for no diabetes the other day and don't want to take chances with too much sugar.)

As entertainment and fundraising evolved in the years since I last watched, the telethon shrunk in duration, and the Association ended its association with Jerry in 2011. By 2015, the show was gone, and Jerry would follow it to his own grave a couple of years later.  Brown's Hotel is now condos.  Channel 5 is showing reruns of tabloid shows followed by a drag race at 1 p.m.

And I'm blogging. So I guess there are some things that never change.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer]

You should read Theodore Sturgeon's short story "The Comedian's Children." Written _years_ before the JLCinemas came to be, it is a brilliant takedown of the whole telethon thing.

Also: in the '70s, a boy with Muscular Dystrophy managed to bicycle across 100 miles of desert to deliver a check for $1000 to the telethon, and Lewis ordered that he not be put on the show. A disgusting hoomin bean.