Bob Hope Poem: vaudeville to radio, television, and movies

Hope, Leslie, later called Bob, was the fifth of seven children in an impoverished family. Arriving in Ohio at age five from across the Atlantic, Bob danced, sang, busked, and boxed. He rose on the vaudeville circuit from six-a-day shows to the two-a-day big-time. At age twenty-eight in 1931, he played New York’s Palace Theatre.

That was just about when the vaudeville business died from radio and talkies.

What would America be without vaudeville? Just minstrelsy, circuses, freakshows, and crude saloon fare. Vaudeville brought together Italian and German, Irish and Jew, woman and man. Vaudeville made the American public. Vaudeville performances were a public trust.

There was no more money in the vaudeville business.

Bob began to come up in Broadway musicals. Roberta (1932), Say When (1934), Ziegfeld Follies (1936), Red Hot and Blue (1936). Playing Huckleberry he met and soon married Dolores, who separated from him at his death. He achieved major success on the stage.

There was more money in the movie business.

Bob first sang his trademark song, Thanks for the Memory, in his first major film, The Big Broadcast of 1938, which would now be called The Big Broadcast III. Then Bob found success and Lamour in Road to Singapore, Road to Zanzibar, Road to Morocco, Road to Utopia, Road to Rio, Road to Bali.

Film series, like poetry, witness to the Hollywood business maxim that no one knows anything.

Bob diversified in radio. Hope first came to radio in 1933 in the brilliant NBC executive Bertha Brainard’s The Fleischmann Yeast Hour. In 1937, Bob came up with a twenty-six week radio contract for NBC’s Woodbury Soap Show. Then, from the spring of recovery in the late 1930s to the wave of prosperity in the 1950s, Bob Hope led the highly successful weekly series, The Pepsodent Radio Show.

Television killed the radio stars.

Bob had doubts about television’s commercial potential. He thought a television series wouldn’t work. Or maybe the price wasn’t right. His business plan for television was specials. His first special, broadcast on NBC in 1950, cost more to produce than any other show to that time. His second special appeared six weeks later. Within the next year he produced another five specials. From 1954 until 1972, a ninety-minute Bob Hope Christmas Special broadcasted every year. From 1958 to 1975, Bob Hope hosted the Oscar Awards broadcast every year. Hope made more than 270 television specials.

The most rewarding business is acting in the public interest.

Bob valued public service. From a visit in 1941 to the Army Air Force Field in Riverside, California (parts broadcast on Bob’s Pepsodent Radio Show), to a visit in late 1990 to U.S. soldiers preparing to fight in the Gulf War (parts broadcast on NBC), Bob voyaged around the globe to entertain U.S. solders. He also entertained every U.S. president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush and golfed with most of them, too.

For more than fifty years, Hope was a major money-maker supporting the public service of the fourth estate. In these deeply troubling times for traditional media, industry leaders might nostalgically recall Hope.

One foot, two feet
Can you count to five?
Class, pay attention!
The final’s this Friday!

“Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.”

hope bobs eternal