America in WWII - (Page 41) BOB HOPE and The Road to GI Joe by Richard Sassaman soldiers. In the end, a group that included Hope’s mustachioed sidekick Jerry Colonna, announcer Bill Goodwin, and singer Frances Langford, who recently had replaced Judy Garland on the show, made the trip to March Field. If nothing else, Hope figured, the show would provide welcome publicity for his upcoming summer movie, Caught in the Draft, but he was completely unprepared for what he found: “an audience so ready for laughter, it would make what we did for a living seem like stealing money.” He wrote later that “laughs came from simple harebrained foolishness, reluctant heroism, and even blatant cowardice set against a climate of high seriousness.” “One of the aviators here took me for a plane ride this afternoon. I wasn’t frightened, but at two thousand feet one of my goose pimples bailed out.” (live at March Field, California) HE FOLLOWING WEEK, the Pepsodent bunch was back in the studio after the trip to March Field, but when the impact of that first camp show became obvious, Hope and company began traveling around California in subsequent weeks to visit sailors at the San Diego Naval Station, marines at Camp Roberts north of Paso Robles, and soldiers at Camp Callan in La Jolla. By that time Caught in the Draft had become the most popular Paramount film of 1941. The pattern was set. Only nine of Hope’s 144 radio shows during the war were broadcast from NBC’s studio. The others all took place at military bases. Hope would identify the base right away, opening his monologue with “This is Bob (insert location here) Hope.” Sometimes the jokes were accidental. At one naval base, Langford set out to sing “You Go to My Head,” unaware that, to sailors, the “head” is the toilet. Almost always, the response was T OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; ABOVE: COURTESY OF DARRELL ENGLISH Previous spread: Bob Hope works a crowd of sailors and marines at a naval base on Pityili, in the Admiralty Islands, in September 1944. Criticized by some for entertaining GIs rather than being one, Hope won praise from war reporters and Time magazine for his exhausting travels and acceptance of war’s dangers to accomplish his mission of mirth. Opposite: Singer-actress Frances Langford—a Pepsodent Show regular who traveled with Hope from his first military base performance—joins Hope on stage at Coco Solo Naval Station in the Panama Canal Zone in March 1944. Above: Hope’s USO crew was a mix of pretty women and kooky men, such as Jerry Colonna, here coaching Hope at slapstick golf in the Pacific. OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 41
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