Word: paar
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...sort of migrant Middle Westerner, thanks to his father's job with the New York Central Railroad, which kept the family forever on the move, Jack Paar was born in Canton, Ohio on May 1, 1917. With time out for a stretch in Detroit, he did most of his growing up in Jackson, Mich. But wherever he went, his childhood memories are almost all somber ("I never had a childhood. I was born an old man"). When he was five, an older brother was killed by a car. All that comes back to Jack from his tenth year...
...never joins the rest of the cast at the corner bar. At home in Bronxville. where Miriam is waiting up, he has a cup of soup and a beer. At 3:15 a.m., after reading two scripts that Writer Douglas has put together for future shows, Paar turns out the light...
...last through this kind of performance five nights a week takes a talent spawned by radio, toughened by Hollywood and burnished by the demands of an unforgiving clutch of television cameras. No comedian in the U.S. can boast a more abundant supply of the necessary skills than Jack Paar. He has been practicing them almost all his life...
...spent six months in bed recovering from tuberculosis. He quit high school at 16. He was already working as an office boy and part-time announcer at a station in Jackson (WIBM) for $3 a week. Oldtimers still remember his style. "This is Jack Buh-Buh-Buh-Boo Paar, your announcer," he would croon, or "This is your young and popular announcer, Bing Paar." He kept a discarded microphone in the attic at home. It was hooked up to nothing, but he sat before it by the hour, reading aloud from plays, books, magazines. At 18 he left home...
Caine Mutiny. In 1942, when Paar was 25, he was called up into the Army and was put in the 28th Special Service Company as member of an entertainment troupe. Jack's first weeks in service were miserable. "I still talked like an announcer, and they didn't understand me." Even in Special Services, the average draftee did not dig his insistence on clean fingernails. Things were better overseas. Crossing to Guadalcanal on an Army troop transport, he took on a Caine-type commander who kept the soldiers on a near-starvation diet. One day during an alert...