Word: jacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Coming after Goren's pass, Mrs. Sobel's five-club bid was bold, though it might possibly have been made (finesse South's king of clubs, discard West's losing dia mond on the jack of hearts). The payoff decision was Goren's final pass. At most other tables, West doubled the five-spade bid - naturally enough, since West held 15 of the deck's 40 high-card points (according to the Goren system of counting four for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, one for a jack). But Goren...
...about 5,000,000 fans - along with happy NBC executives, satisfied advertisers and fellow entertainers whom his show helped to success - think that Jack Paar should be precisely what he is: a first-rate, refreshingly different TV performer who in a single year has come out of nowhere and made a huge hit of a special kind of entertainment. What Paar brings into American living rooms five nights a week is both more and less than a comedy, variety or chatter show - it is a special show business blend that Paartisans consider uniquely satisfying...
...surrounded by a band, singers, guest comedians, skits. But what really gives the Paar show its shape is the L formed by a scarred desk and a well-worn couch. Behind the desk, Jack is barricaded; the couch supports a "panel" of regular or irregular conversationalists. Says Paar: "The show is nothing. Just me and people talking. Historic naturalness. We don't act, we just defend ourselves...
...permits off-color humor. On the whole the charge is unjust. The show's most celebrated blue note was struck while Paar was on vacation and Stand-In Jonathan Winters allowed Anthropologist Ashley Montague to talk about how lack of breast feeding gives American males a bosom fixation. Jack says he would never have permitted it ("After breast feeding, there's just no place to go"). But Paar does occasionally tarry near the brink of the blue, and this brinksmanship is another reason why the Paar show provokes the implicit question: "What's going to happen next...
...Gamble. When asked about Jack Paar, the late Fred Allen once said: "Oh, you mean the young man who had the meteoric disappearance." A year ago the description still fitted Paar, sometime minor movie actor and perennial radio-TV summer replacement. He had done well with a radio program and a daytime television show of his own, but never well enough to make it big. One TV executive dismissed him as strictly a "pipe and slipper type." What happened next is told by NBC's Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff: "We faced a critical decision. The America After Dark version...