Word: godfreys
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...Arthur Godfrey...
...sang like a frog and played his ever present ukulele like a hunt-and-peck typist. He talked with his mouth full and tossed aside his script to ad-lib whatever came into his head. He had no talent but folksiness. For Arthur Godfrey, that was enough. At his peak in the 1950s he was, after President Eisenhower, perhaps the best-loved man in America. Godfrey's daily radio show and two weekly TV shows on CBS brought the network as much as 12% of its total revenue. Said CBS Chairman William Paley of Godfrey in his heyday...
Everything about Godfrey seemed to capture the public's imagination. When he fired his prize discovery, Singer Julius LaRosa, on live network TV in 1953, purportedly for "lack of humility," the incident made front pages across the country. So did another burst of temper the next year, when Godfrey, an avid pilot, grew angry with the flight instructions he had been given for his DC-3 and buzzed an airport control tower in Teterboro...
...when doctors discovered that he had lung cancer, he underwent life-threatening surgery; waiting for word of his fate amounted to a national vigil. Godfrey initially announced his retirement so that he would not be seen to "waste away." But he was perpetually rejuvenated by optimism. At 65, a decade after the surgery, he said: "The only things I have given up are cigarettes and tap dancing." He continued on daily radio until 1972, and in the next decade made repeated attempts at a TV comeback before succumbing to respiratory ailments last week...
...Fine Arts, Brown University), Charles Briggs (Folklore and Mythology, University of Chicago), Michael Jennings (German, University of Virginia), John T. Kneebone (History, University of Virginia), James M. Weiss (History, University of Chicago), Ellen Fitzpatrick (History of American Civilization, Brandeis University), Misia Landau (History of Science, Yale University), and Sima Godfrey (Romance Languages, Cornell University...