by Tim Conway
“Please, I hardly know you,” I protested, slapping his hand. The expression on the doctor’s face was priceless. Lucky for me, he had a sense of humor. I like to imagine that he might still be telling that story and getting a laugh. That’s all I ask of life, residual laughter.
The night before I was to leave for basic training at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Sophia and Dan had a small gathering of friends and neighbors at our Orange Street mansion. Everyone wished me well, and we all enjoyed Sophia’s canapés—that is, her Romanian version of them, which were bigger and spicier than any canapés you ever ate. After the party, I went to bed and was up the next morning at 6:30 A.M. Sophia got up, too. She fed me, and gave me the classic, tearful take-care-of-yourself good-bye that mothers have given to their soldier boys for generations. It was peacetime, but my Sophia carried on as though I was headed for the Normandy Invasion.
I took a bus to Cleveland and arrived at the train station at 8 A.M. From there I was to board a train for St. Louis where I’d connect with another train for Fort Smith, Arkansas. (Fort Chaffee was in the town of Fort Smith, a bit confusing but I was in the army and “confusing” was the operative word.) I showed my ticket to an official who informed me that I was a day early. So I got on a bus and was back home in Chagrin by 10:15 A.M. I walked in the door and found Sophia in the kitchen. She looked at me and said, sharply, “You crazy? What you doing home?” This from the woman, who, a few short hours ago, was sobbing at my departure.
“I’m on leave,” I told her, but she didn’t get it.
The next morning I was up and out and on my way to a two-year stint with Uncle Sam.
I arrived at Fort Chaffee and immediately was given another physical. Thanks to the eye-test portion of this exam I learned that I had a birth defect in my left eye. The vision was slightly blurred in that eye, but not in the other. That meant I could draw a bead on targets with the right eye. Naturally, birth defect and all, I was cleared for front-line duty. The doctor wrote a prescription and sent me off to be fitted for frames. The technician was all business. He put a few frames on my face and without asking my opinion, chose a pair, put them in a carrying case, and handed them to me.
“Take these. They’ll notify you when the lenses are ready, and you can bring the frames back to have them put in.”
I thanked him and then, remembering my last physical, asked if he wanted to check “my private parts.” He didn’t say a word. I headed for the exit. The sergeant at the front desk looked up as I walked by and said, “You got glasses?”
“Yes,” I answered and took out the case with the frames in it. I was about to explain that there were no lenses, but the sergeant didn’t wait to hear what I had to say.
“Put those things on!” he ordered.
I opened the case and slipped on the frames.
“And don’t let me catch you without them,” the sergeant warned. “You got that, soldier.”
“I got it,” I said.
“You got it, what?” he said.
“What what?” I replied in all sincerity. I looked at him with complete ignorance written on my face. He was fuming. Then I realized what he wanted me to say.
“I got it, Sergeant,” I blurted out, at the same time saluting him.
That threw him off guard. You’re really only supposed to salute high-ranking officers. He returned my salute, realized what he was doing, made a fist, shook it at me, and screamed, “Get out of here!” I obliged. There was no sense of humor in the army, but that never stopped me from trying.
About a month after I arrived at Fort Chaffee, I pulled guard duty. It’s a pretty standard routine. You walked your post with your rifle in hand, for what seemed like twenty-four hours but probably was more like eight. Guard duty in peacetime is extraneous. For one thing, I was guarding a service club, and for another, there were no bullets in the rifle I carried. Part of the ritual called for a lieutenant to appear every two hours to make sure you were doing your duty. When he approached, you pointed your rifle at him and said, “Halt. Advance and be recognized.” The lieutenant then gave you his name and serial number, and you’d respond, “Carry on.” He’d go off, and you wouldn’t see another officer for two hours. You did this all night. It wears you down especially when you’re only guarding a service club full of Ping-Pong tables and not NATO headquarters.
Around 2 A.M., just after a lieutenant had been halted, been seen, been recognized, and had gone, I decided I needed a little break. I went into the parking lot, got into the backseat of a car, and grabbed some shut-eye. I awoke with a start, checked my watch, saw that it was 3:55 A.M., and realized that another officer was due. I jumped out of the car and raced back to my post. I got there only to discover that I’d left my rifle in the car. There was no time to go back and get it. I needed a substitute fast. I found one in the Dumpster next to the service club—a three-foot fluorescent tube. I grabbed it and hustled back to my post just as the lieutenant came around the corner.
“Halt,” I cried, pointing the tube at the officer. “Advance and be recognized.”
He gave his name and started to rattle off his serial number when he caught sight of the weapon in my hands.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“It’s a lightbulb, sir, and if you come any closer, I’ll turn it on.”
Didn’t get away with that one, folks. For two weeks, I had to pick rocks out of a pile, paint them white, and place them along the drive to the officers’ mess.
Following the guard duty debacle I was put on fire duty. Instead of a rifle, I was armed with a shovel. My duty consisted of shoveling coal into a furnace thus heating the building, in this instance the infirmary. One evening, duty called and I began shoveling—6 P.M., 8 P.M., 10 P.M., you get the picture. By midnight, I’d had enough of this every-two-hours business. I figured if I just shoveled all the coal into the furnace, it would pretty much take care of the job for the rest of the evening. So I loaded every lump into the furnace and went back to the barracks to get some sleep. Around 4 A.M. I heard a fire engine. From the siren’s sound I figured the engine was heading toward the hospital. By golly, I was right. I threw on my clothes and raced over. When I arrived, the infirmary’s occupants had been evacuated and were lounging around on the lawn. The hospital wasn’t on fire; it was just full of smoke. The next day, I found myself in front of my superiors, the you-can’t-handle-the-truth gang. They had a bunch of unkind things to say to me and then asked if I had anything to say in my own defense. I should have kept my mouth shut but no, I spoke.
“In a way, you could look at what I did as a kind of miracle.”
“Miracle?” the lieutenant in charge boomed. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, you know that a lot of guys in the hospital were faking illness to get out of duties on the base. Some of them were even carried in on stretchers.”
“What’s your point, soldier?” demanded the lieutenant.
“Well, those guys may have been carried in on stretchers, but when that smoke hit them, they came running out. I think that qualifies as a miracle.”
It didn’t matter what I thought, I was back at the rock pile. Like I said, with a few scattered exceptions, there was no humor in the army.
After basic training, I was sent to Fort Lewis near Seattle, Washington. What a cushy assignment that was. I was part of a small team based in the States; our command unit was in Japan. The main job was to send out replacement troops to our bases in the Far East. Guess which private was in put in charge of the books? Keeping track of the men sounds easy, but a lot of my GIs got lost in the shuffle. Sooner or later, they’d show up but no thanks to Private Conway. One time a unit in Korea sent a request for two cooks. I don’t know how it happened, but they got fifty of them.
It may have been chaotic for my comrades in the Orient, but I was living the life of Riley at Fort Lewis. The officers lived off base with their families, so we enlisted men had the barracks all to ourselves. We had a TV room, a pool table, a Pin
g-Pong table, couches, and easy chairs. We also had very little to do. I usually could be found at my desk tapping my pencil on a note pad. All I did was tap; I don’t think I ever took a note. The warrant officer was a good egg and let us take turns taking afternoons off to watch TV or to hit the service club for a sandwich and soft drink. The command unit would call once a week and ask how things were going. We’d say, “It’s going good,” hang up the phone, and go back to doing nothing. And that’s the way it went for the rest of my army years.
For decades after my discharge (honorable), I suffered from what I called the soldier’s nightmare, a variation of the actor’s nightmare. The latter goes like this: You’re onstage and suddenly, you can’t remember your lines. It’s happened to me. I dream that I’m doing a play or a show and I go completely dry. I run around looking for somebody to lend me a script. The audience starts booing, and I start shaking in my boots. I wake up screaming “Curtain! Curtain!” In my soldier’s nightmare, I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, to the enlistment office for a physical. I keep trying to explain that I’m too old and that I’ve already served, but they won’t listen. I wake up holding my crotch, screaming “4-F! 4-F!”
I can kid all I want about my years in the military, but, bottom line, the army did me a service. While I was defending our country, I initiated and participated in the kinds of misadventures that were later integrated into my television role as Ensign Parker on McHale’s Navy. One sketch took place in a military hospital, and a bunch of soldiers in wheelchairs jumped up and ran off just like those guys in the Fort Chaffee infirmary. Most important, while I was serving my country the idea of going into show business really took root. I’d been kicking it around for a long time, now, after two years away, I decided that I was going to become a professional comedian. Thanks, Uncle Sam.
Let the Laughs Begin
Dick Moss, my college chum and erstwhile business partner, got out of the army a little while before I did and came to Fort Lewis to visit me. Like I said, I wasn’t exactly tied down with work, so Moss and I had plenty of time to sit around and schmooze. Our thoughts drifted back to college days. We’d had a great time doing our cut-rate Martin and Lewis comedy skits at the frat house and the Newman Club, and, at the time, had toyed with the idea of going professional. Any such thoughts were put on hold when we both enlisted. During the two years we served our country, Moss had come to the same conclusion as I had regarding the future. We really wanted to give showbiz at least a try. And that’s exactly what we did right after I got my discharge.
First, we moved into the local YMCA and then we did what all comics did in those days, we bought used tuxedos. (I wonder if there’s a young comic today who even owns a suit let alone a tux.) Next, we arranged an audition with the manager of The Country Club, a Seattle comedy nightspot. Ah, Seattle. Remember Noah and the forty days and forty nights of rain? Well, Seattle had eighty-one days of rain in a row that year, and our audition took place around the seventy-first day. Moss and I set out in a downpour to make our debuts. We didn’t have raincoats and wore our army overcoats to protect the tuxedos. Army overcoats are made of wool and when they get wet they reek like a herd of billy goats. That’s exactly what Dick and I smelled like when we turned up for our audition. We were taken to the owner/manager’s office and, after removing our stinking coats, stood before him, resplendent in our tattered tuxedos. The manager, an Edward G. Robinson type, sat behind his desk puffing on a cigar, which, by the way, smelled worse than our coats. Moss and I went through our snappy seventeen-minute routine while Eddie G. chomped on his cigar, staring at us. At the end of the audition he was still staring at us. He hadn’t said a word. I figured we didn’t have a cat-in-hell’s chance of working for him. After an interminable amount of time, Mr. Robinson took the cigar from between his teeth, leaned forward, and said, “I’m going to give you boys a try. I need you to do four shows an evening, five thirty, seven thirty, nine, eleven, and if things go well, you can do the twelve-thirty spot, too. You’ll start tonight.”
Moss and I were absolutely floored, four spots, and a possible fifth. This was unreal. It did cross my mind that we never mentioned we had only one routine for those four-possibly-five spots. I didn’t dwell on it. Because of the weather, we decided to hang out at the club rather than go back to the Y. The overcoats already were moisture laden; another couple of trips would have made the smell, and the weight, lethal. We settled in at the club for the day. Eddie G. was kind enough to send out a couple of soggy sandwiches and some tepid coffee from the kitchen to fuel us. I munched on a sandwich and sipped the coffee. All I could think was, I’m going to be in show business.
At the 5:30 show, a grand total of twelve people sat at tables that were placed around the apron of a small stage. At one table sat a mother and three young children. She was in the process of cutting up a toasted cheese sandwich and handing it to the kids. Moss and I leaped onto the stage. Recorded music blared forth and so startled the mom, the sandwich flew out of her hand and onto the lip of the stage. We performed our entire act with it lying there. I guess she was too embarrassed to retrieve it, and neither of us was savvy enough to kick it off, or, better still, to pick it up, take a bite, and then, give it back to her. (Later in my career, I’d have done twenty minutes with that toasted cheese sandwich.) I started the act with my version of a comedy monologue I’d seen on (stolen from) The Ed Sullivan Show on TV. At the end of my turn, Moss came onstage and did his imitations of musical instruments. Then I joined him for our closing comedy bits plus a couple of duets. Nobody clapped when I finished my monologue, nobody clapped when Moss finished his imitations, and nobody clapped when we finished the duets. Nevertheless, we took our bows, waved our arms, and enthusiastically shouted, “Thank you! Thank you!” to the silent horde. We jogged off the stage à la Martin and Lewis and turned around to go out for our final bows as the stage lights went off and the room lights went on. The audience members already were on their way to the exit.
Despite the lack of applause, Moss and I thought that things had gone pretty well. At 7:30, we again strutted our stuff. The fifteen people in the audience didn’t even look at us. We finished, and the silence was deafening. As we stood at the side of the stage, Eddie G. came over.
“Fellas,” he said, “I think that’ll be it for the act. But, since you’ve got those tuxes on I want you”—he pointed to me—“to cover the front of the house and seat the guests. And you,” he said to Moss, “grab a water pitcher and fill up the glasses on the tables. I’ll settle with you after the last show.”
Our first gig and we had gone from feature act to maître d’ and water boy.
The next morning, Moss and I took inventory of our assets, discovered that we didn’t have any, and decided to go home. We packed up our belongings and put them in the trunk of the used 1948 Pontiac that I’d purchased a few short weeks earlier. I got into the driver’s seat and Moss slid in beside me. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened. I tried it again, same result. I must have tried a half dozen times when Moss said, “Call the automobile club.” I got out of the car, went to the phone booth inside the Y, and dialed the auto club. They sent a guy over in a truck. He got into the Pontiac and tried the key. When nothing happened (I could have told him) he muttered under his breath, got out, and took a look under the hood.
“Look,” he said, “I can’t see anything wrong. I think if you start the car up and I get behind you and give you a little push forward, the engine will click in.”
I got back into the car, and the guy brought his truck up against the Pontiac’s back bumper. He started nudging us forward, I turned the key, and, bingo, the engine came to life. We took off, followed by the truck. Our rescuer was beeping his horn; I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him motioning for us to pull over. I didn’t want to test the Pontiac’s ability to start again so I waved back and zoomed away. The last thing I saw in my rearview mirror was our rescuer throwing us the bird. We probably should have paid
him before we got in the car.
The ride home was uneventful. For three days and three nights we ate peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches and drank Coke after Coke. For a while we talked about maybe trying to get our act into a couple of nightspots in Cleveland or Akron, but Moss’s enthusiasm petered out.
“I’ve had it, Tom,” he said with a sigh, “It’s time for me to retire. I want to get married, get a job, and settle down.”
“How can you leave show business?” I asked.
“I think I can handle it,” he replied.
He did. Moss left show business, married his girlfriend, moved to Florida, and became an insurance salesman. He led a good normal life, and yet I’ll bet you anything that ratty old tuxedo is still hanging in his closet.
Be It Ever So Humbling (and It Was)
There I was in 1958, out of uniform, out of Seattle, out of work, and, frankly, out of ideas about what to do with my life. Naturally, I went home. There’s a line of poetry that’s stuck with me over the years. It goes, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I was welcomed with open arms by Sophia and Dan. But even their unconditional love wasn’t going to solve my problem. What was I going to do with myself? I’d been working since I was ten years old. Now, my obligations were out of the way, and I was expected to start my life’s journey. The problem was I didn’t have a clue as to where that journey was going. My situation wasn’t unique. Every young person comes to the point where he or she has to ask, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” And the answer usually comes back, “How should I know?” I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to be a whip. I didn’t want to deliver newspapers, or mow lawns, or drill holes in plastic, or make donuts. I could get a job as a night watchman at one of the Cleveland plants down in the flats, but that wasn’t going to lead to anything. I wasn’t trained to do anything that I wanted to do. Screw it, I thought, I’ll just lie in bed until spring. Which is what I tried to do.