In the days of 39

My very first home town was Waukegan, Illinois, which was Jack Benny's home town. I didn't realize this until many years later, but it makes sense to me: whatever comic skills I have — the sense of timing, the willingness to play straight man, the occasional bit of self-deprecation — are all basically a low-budget version of Jack Benny's. And today I drop his name, not because of any desire to sound au courant, but because I know I owe him big-time. So when I returned to Waukegan for a visit in 2002, I was delighted to see him honored by the city that he called home.

Dawn Eden, who knows me too well, pointed me to this New York Daily News reminiscence about the day Jack played Carnegie Hall, and not for laughs, either. He loved the violin, and while he was never especially good at it — his lack of musical chops became an early piece of Benny shtick — just once, he thought, he wanted to do a serious concert.

It happened in 1959, and while nobody was going to confuse Jack Benny with Fritz Kreisler, Jack, after some scary practice sessions, did a creditable job: "a much better virtuoso than one would expect him to be," said the man from Variety. The concert, a benefit for the New York Philharmonic pension fund, raised $36,000, and Jack would go on to headline similar fundraisers in the years to come.

But he never let his newfound prowess go to his head. In 1961, home in Waukegan for the groundbreaking of the new Jack Benny Junior High School (now a 6-8 middle school), he beamed at the crowd and said, "Who would have thought that they'd name a high school after Jack Benny Junior?"

The audience roared, as they always did, and as I still do when I remember this story.

Posted at 1:20 PM to Almost Yogurt