Word: kid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...amateur contest after he had done an impromptu street imitation of Charlie Chaplin. Milton won the contest, and Mom promptly went to work on his career as if it were a sacred mission. As he grew, his age could be reckoned by his billing: "The Shimmy Kid," "The Child Wonder," "The Wayward Youth...
When the child wonder was about ten, a veteran of kid shows, benefits and early Eastern movies, Mom once broke up a ball game at a Catskill resort just after Milton's playmates had chosen sides. As one of the players recalls it, Mom announced: "Milton has to be the captain, because it's his bat and ball, and besides, he's going to be a big Broadway star some day." By the time he was 15, the lesson was well learned. "Kid," he confided to another trouper, "I'm going to the top in this...
After Kennedy& Berle broke up, Milton had some trouble catching on as a single. His brashness, coming from a gawky kid with loving-cup ears, struck most people as intolerable. But Milton and Mom persevered. When he was 21, illness made a vacancy at the New York Palace, vaudeville's top spot, where he had played with Elizabeth several times. An agent booked Milton at $750 a week and discreetly vanished on a cruise. But Milton "fractured 'em," ran for seven weeks and won a firm hold as a headliner...
...Whole Gamut. Always reaching for more laughs, Berle has even tried stooping for them. At Chicago's Palace in 1933, he broke records for five weeks but he outraged the late Chicago Daily News Critic Lloyd Lewis, who found him a "blab-mouthed, satyr-eyed kid" who "toys with physiology, pathology and pruriency, tossing them about with all the freedom of a delinquent boy." On television, acutely conscious of his juvenile following and of the strait-laced National Broadcasting Co., Berle keeps it clean...
...marathon radio shows (from 12-24 hours) in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Pittsburgh to raise funds for heart associations. Last year he spent four hours clowning with each of 75 patients in a Chicago hospital for children with rheumatic fever. Said a witness: "He has a way with kids, a way of being a kid himself...