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Fred Allen Jokes His Way Through Dirty Old Boston

Before Groucho Marx, before Johnny Carson and before Saturday Night Live, there was Fred Allen. A wildly popular radio comedian, he created a fictional backstreet called Allen’s Alley on his show. In it, commentary on the news of the day came from his ensemble of actors, like Senator Beauregard Claghorn, so Southern he wouldn’t drink water unless it came in a Dixie cup.

Fred Allen in the 1940s

There is a real Allens Alley in Boston. It’s across from Lagrange Street on Tremont between Boylston and Stuart in the heart of the theater district. It was there that Fred Allen began his career as a wisecracking juggler on the vaudeville stage. He moved onto radio, and from 1932 to 1949 The Fred Allen Show made him a star. It also put him in the pantheon of great American humorists like Mark Twain, S.J. Perelman and Robert Benchley.

The vivid characters that populated Allen’s Alley were a big part of his appeal. So was his wordplay. He delivered lines like “What’s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?” He honed his humor through years of study, a habit he picked up as a teenaged employee of the Boston Public Library. And he developed his observational humor from the people he knew in a city we might know today as Dirty Old Boston. A city that teemed with corner saloons, flophouses, triple deckers, stockyards, Odd Fellows Halls and dim alleys.

Years after he made it big in New York and Hollywood, he said,

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Allens Alley in the late 1890s

Fred Allen

He was born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894, or, as he put it, his tiny cry soiled the acoustics of Cambridge, Mass. His birth certificate put his birthplace in Boston, but Allen speculated his father, Henry, made the mistake after celebrating the occasion a little too much. A year later came a brother Bob, and then their mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, died.

His Aunt Lizzie took in the three Sullivan males. She already had a houseful that included her brother Joe, her two sisters, Mary and Jane, and her husband, Mike, a plumber who couldn’t work because lead poisoning had paralyzed him. Her tenants paid her $5 a week for room and board, and sometimes her sisters would quarrel and move out. Lizzie would then have to make do until they returned. She could make a leg of lamb last a week and sifted ashes from the furnace to salvage coal, her nephew wrote.

Henry Sullivan never earned his eldest son’s respect. “My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense,” Allen said.

Henry worked as a bookbinder by day, and when he returned home late at night ‘he seemed to have an impediment in his tread.’

“When my brother and I ran out to greet him we noticed that his breath was dominated by a potent element with which we were not familiar,” Allen wrote.

Perhaps because of his early poverty and family difficulties, or perhaps, simply, because of his Irish heritage, Fred Allen had a persistent sense of tragedy. Once, after rescuing a small boy from getting hit by a car, he shouted, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to grow up and have troubles?”

Dirty Old Boston

They lived in a duplex on Bayard Street in the Allston section of Boston, where the local characters ranged from an overoptimistic candy salesman to a mountainous schoolmarm he tried to forget without success. Mr. Harrington, the pungent soap-grease man, visited Aunt Lizzie in a great and rancid weekly event. Allen’s super-religious Aunt Mame left the bedroom window open at night to let in the Blessed Virgin. A neighbor, a retired gentleman named Tom Carpenter, burst into wakes and took over whenever he saw a funeral wreath on a door, whether he knew the departed or not.

As a boy Fred Allen attended North Harvard School and St. Anthony’s Church, where he got drafted as a choirboy. “The first Sunday I sang in the choir two hundred people changed their religion,” he wrote.

Choices

After 12 years at Aunt Lizzie’s, Henry shocked them by announcing he would remarry. He told his sons they could come with him and his new wife, who they had never met. Or they could stay with Aunt Lizzie. Fred chose Aunt Lizzie, his brother chose his father.

On his 14th birthday, his Aunt Lizzie told him to put on his best suit and meet his father at a saloon, Con Keefe’s on Dartmouth Street in Boston. The characters and the setting could have populated Allen’s Alley. In his autobiography, Much Ado About Me, he wrote:

“Con Keefe’s was a popular alcoholic shrine, a cheer chapel with all the routine accouterments: the swinging doors, the five-cent beer, the free lunch, the starched bartenders, and the inevitable quota of frowzy thinkers draped along the bar.”

As his father lubricated his throat, he told him he had to get a job. Then he introduced his son to a Mr. Hempstead. “If I had been old enough to attempt character reading, I would have judged Mr. Hempstead to be the custodian of a thirst and, as acting custodian, to be fulfilling his every obligation to his charge,” wrote Allen.

Boston Public Library

Mr. Hempstead did indeed get him a job as a runner at the library. He eventually got promoted into a job that gave him spare time to peruse the stacks. There he found a book on juggling and a book on the history of comedy. He began to collect jokes:

“The professor’s mouth was an adjective hutch.”

“Wind of my prowess spread through the grammar school like bad news at a pessimists’ convention.”

“The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover’s Lane holding his own hand.”

High School

He entered the Boston High School of Commerce, which he called a pet project of Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Honey Fitz, grandfather of President John . Kennedy

“There was a rumor that Mayor Fitzgerald had sung “Sweet Adeline” in office for so many years that the City Hall acoustics had diabetes,” wrote Allen.

The family moved to the Savin Hill section of Dorchester and later to a bigger place on Columbia Road in Dorchester. He was so busy working his way through high school he had little time and formed few friendships. So in his spare hours he learned to juggle or he squandered his money on vaudeville shows.

One day the library held a talent show for its employees. Fred Allen did his juggling act, and afterward a girl told him he was crazy to stay at the library. He should go on stage, she said.

If it hadn’t been for her, he wrote, he might have ended up the Boston Public Library librarian.

Piano Row

After graduation he worked for the Colonial Piano Company as a piano mover on Piano Row. He performed mini-dramas with two husky piano movers, a horse-and-wagon, a rope and a block-and-tackle. When a reluctant household failed to make installment payments on their piano, Fred Allen and his crew showed up at the door. They would go through the motions of repossessing the piano. The usual result was a housewife taking an oath on the graves of a number of departed relatives that she would pay up. On the rare occasion when that didn’t happen, they would give the person one more chance and leave with as much dignity as they could muster.

Piano Row today

When he wasn’t pretending to repossess pianos, he took his juggling act to Amateur Night shows, then all the rage.

Fred Allen took a two-week vacation from the piano store and toured amusement parks and resorts in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Later he bought a vacation getaway in Old Orchard Beach. There he developed an affection for rural New Englanders, who inspired the Allen’s Alley denizen Titus Moody. Moody, played by Parker Fennelly, was a dour Yankee who didn’t hold with furniture that talked—meaning radio, then television. Moody parlayed the character into the Pepperidge Farm spokesman well into his 80s.

Aunt Lizzie didn’t approve of her nephew’s theatrical ambitions, and routinely told him about an actor she knew who ended up in a drunkard’s grave. But he couldn’t resist the dollar, the fun and the excitement.

Scollay Square

He did well enough to turn professional. That meant Scollay Square, Boston’s Tenderloin, which he called the hot foot to Boston’s conservative high-button shoe.

Scollay Square back in the day

There he found plenty of colorful, cheerful Dickensian characters to inspire his imagination: chorus girls, freaks, acrobats, song-and-dance teams, sailors returning home from long cruises. The sailors, he wrote, ‘invariably rushed to the Old Howard [Theatre] to check on the current models of female pulchitrude and to see if any improvements had been made during their absence.’

Years later, he remembered his vaudeville days with fondness.

Vaudeville is dead. The acrobats, the animal acts, the dancers, the singers, and the old-time comedians have taken their final bows and disappeared into the wings of obscurity. For fifty years–from 1875 to 1925–vaudeville was the popular entertainment of the masses. Nomadic tribes of nondescript players roamed the land. The vaudeville actor was part gypsy and part suitcase. With his brash manner, flashy clothes, capes and cane, and accompanied by his gaudy womenfolk, the vaudevillian brought happiness and excitement to the communities he visited.

Becoming Fred Allen

Finally his act was good enough for New York. His arrival in New York was met with as much excitement as another flounder arriving at Fulton Fish Market, he wrote.

Eventually an Australian booking agent saw his juggling act and booked him for a year on the Fuller circuit in Australia. He started in Brisbane, where he did one show a night and had not much else to do. So he picked up a hobby he’d abandoned when he left the Boston Public Library: reading. For the next 11 months, he used his spare time to read the American humorists, including Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Charles Dickens, Bill Nye, Artemus Ward and Eli Perkins.

red Allen and dummy, 1916

He wanted to write, but he claimed his High School of Commerce education hadn’t taught him to weld nouns and verbs together into an acceptable literary pattern. In Brisbane, he resolved to improve his act, his jokes and his writing.

His Australian tour lasted so long he returned to the same cities, where the audience knew his jokes. So he took from his trunk a ventriloquist’s dummy that he bought on impulse – “I was lonely” – and adapted a routine with it. Later he added a banjo, then a guitar.

When he returned from Australia, he no longer performed as a juggler. He was Fred Allen, a monologist.

At Last, Success

In 1932, he went on the radio. For the next 17 years, The Fred Allen Show appeared in various guises and with various sponsors. It became Town Hall Tonight and finally the Texaco Star Theater.

Allen’s Alley

He wrote his own jokes, featured guests and satirized the news and musical comedies. In 1942 he introduced Allen’s Alley with characters like Moody, Senator Claghorn, the malaprop-prone Mrs. Nussbaum and the comic Irishman Ajax Cassidy. He had married Portland Hoffa in 1927, and she introduced the show with a high voice that sounded like ‘two slate pencils mating or a clarinet reed calling for help.’

He also appeared on television and in film. Allen had little good to say about either. “Imitation is the sincerest form of television,” he wrote. And, “Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

He had even less use for Hollywood. “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart,” he wrote.

Last Years

John Steinbeck advised him on how to write an autobiography. Fred Allen wrote Treadmill to Oblivion, published in 1954, and had almost finished Much Ado About Me in 1956 when he died. On the night of St. Patrick’s Day he had a massive heart attack while taking a late night stroll down West 57^th Street in New York.

“The droll humorist’s death plunged his fellow entertainers into mourning,” read his New York Times obituary.

Fifty years after his death, the introduction to the reissue of Treadmill to Oblivion called him ‘one of the great radio comedians – not to mention one of the great wits – of the 20^th century.

You can hear one of Fred Allen’s radio shows here.

Images: Piano Row District By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003597. This story was updated in 2022.

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1913, the Year of the Great Tango Controversy

In April 1913, 90-year-old Henry McHenry walked out of the Chelsea Old Soldiers Home, telling his friends he was going to town – which they assumed meant Boston – and he didn’t come back. Three days later, word arrived that he had surfaced in New York City with a pocketful of cash. McHenry pointedly told police, who wanted to send him home, that he would leave when he had seen what he came for. What enticed this cantankerous Civil War veteran and retired stonemason to travel all the way to New York? He wanted to see this new dance phenomenon everyone was talking about: the tango.

The year 1913, the writer H.G. Wells noted, was “the year of the tango.” This new dance where couples danced cheek-to-cheek, legs and arms pressed close against each other in an erotic embrace, had everyone’s attention.

Chelsea Old Soldiers Home (Boston Public Library Archive)

And New England was no exception. Just like controversial dances today, the tango in 1913 gave rise to fascination, longing, disgust and fury – depending, of course, on your age and point of view.

Tango Travels to America

Where the tango originated is open to debate. But it took firm root in Argentina. Poor people danced it in the slums. At the time, Argentina was a wealthy nation (seventh richest in the world), but there were tremendous inequalities. So while the wealthy danced their sedate steps at fancy balls, the poor danced the tango in bars, brothels and dance halls.

Among the young and wealthy, the tango became a fascination, and they would slip into the ghettos for a taste of the dance craze. As these young people went to Europe to polish their education, they brought the tango with them.

In 1909 and 1910, the dance began popping up. But in 1913, it took the entire world by storm, first sweeping Europe and from there to the rest of the world, including the United States. Among the non-dancers, curiosity turned to outrage as soon as they got a firsthand look at the new dance. It was disgust at first-sight.

Rushing headlong into the First World War, the nations and religions of the world didn’t seem to agree on much. But the tango proved an exception. The people loved it; the leaders did not.

Germany’s Kaiser banned the dance. And England’s Queen Mary also ordered it kept out of any palace functions.

“Tango Tee” from Puck Magazine.

In the United States, ministers, priests and rabbis began speaking out against the immoral dance. The more strident labeled it “unwholesome degeneracy.” They were especially angry at the hordes of adults who tangoed, making it seem acceptable to children. The more moderate clergy saw it as a passing fad; an evil, but a temporary one.

In the summer, towns throughout New England began waking up to the fact the tango being performed in their midst. Town officials began issuing directives to local dance committees to ban it from town and benefit dances.

Banning the Tango

In Lebanon, N.H., the selectmen announced that people attending dances at the town would be expelled for dancing the tango. But it had little effect. The students of Dartmouth College were singled out as the offenders, but the dancing continued until the selectmen finally voted to ban dances altogether.

In the popular summer destination of Nahant, Mass., the police chief learned the dance halls of Bass Point were promoting tango exhibitions to lure customers. He ordered all the posters for the event torn down and announced the police would stop any such dancing.

Opponents also expanded their battleground. “Medical authorities have lately expressed the opinion that these objectionable dances are nerve-wracking, and if persisted in must undermine both health and morals,” they told the newspapers.

And one newspaper editorial bemoaned the state of affairs where citizens would ignore the bills from their dentists and butchers to instead pay for tango lessons.

U.S. Vice President Thomas Marshall, speaking to a Methodist camp meeting in August of 1913, denounced the dance craze. The tango, turkey trot and slit skirts, he said, were all signs that the churches were losing their hold on people: “It is high time that the people were waking up.”

Finding Popular Support

The tango had advocates as well, mostly among dancers, dance instructors and young people. These factions tried a multipronged approach to making the tango acceptable. First, they tried to calm people’s sensibilities. They pointed out that new forms of dance often excited outrage. The polka, they noted, had been widely criticized when first introduced.

Similarly, the waltz scandalized people when it was introduced in America. It was known as the Boston, and a variation was known as the Boston Dip. Both were abhorred by moralists. But both were eventually accepted as proper. The tango was no different, its defenders said.

This line of reasoning did little to persuade the anti-tango factions.

Advocates reached out to their own medical experts, who pointed out the tango helped people lose weight and stay in shape.

But most of their efforts focused on convincing tango dancers themselves to embrace a more modest form of the dance, one that didn’t involve so much physical contact and flamboyance. And no dipping, they instructed. At least not “deep dipping.”

Banning the Tango

In October of 1913, Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald upped the ante.

The Boston Musician’s Protective Union had announced its opposition to “freak dances” that involved “glides, slides and hugs.” While the union didn’t pledge that its members would not play music for these dances if directed to, they would discourage it.

Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, known as “Honey Fitz”

Fitzgerald put the force of government behind their opposition, and he announced a ban on the tango at all city dance halls:

“The prohibition includes all the so-called animal dances such as the turkey trot, bunny hug, bear dance, etc. also the kitchen sink, tango and other extravagances,” the announcement said.

The new rules further stated:

All dancing would stop at 11:45 on Saturday nights.

“No moonlight or shadow lighting effects. The hall must remain fully lighted.”

A police matron would be assigned to each dance hall, and have charge of the ladies room. A police officer assigned to the hall would have the authority to stop the music if necessary.

In November, Pope Pius X declared the tango immoral and off-limits to Catholics. If they partook in the dance, they were instructed to include it in their confessions and would need to do penance. Supporters of the dance fabricated a story that the pope had witnessed a demonstration of the dance and recanted his opinion, but the Vatican quickly shot that down as a falsehood.

With New England’s large Catholic population, the edict had weight. But not enough to kill the tango.

Happy Dance

The fight against the tango finally came to a head in 1914. At English High School in Lynn, Mass., students made headlines by boycotting dances where the principal had banned the tango.

Social and country clubs and hotels came under great pressure to eliminate the tango from the popular dances and “tango teas.” Some did, others did not. And people boycotted charity balls that banned the tango, which prompted a satirical cartoon in Puck magazine. Wellesley College vacillated, first banning the dance and then reversing course.

In the Massachusetts Legislature, Rep. Lewis Sullivan introduced a bill to outlaw the tango across the state. Like Henry McHenry, he traveled to New York to see a tango firsthand. He saw a sedate version of the dance. But he remained opposed to the dance in its more expressive forms.

By now, however, public opinion moved in the direction of the tango as people saw that it did no harm. With little remaining popular support for banning the dance, Sullivan’s proposal died in legislative committee.

Rudolph Valentino dances the tango

The tango soon became much more mainstream in the United States. Then it faded, only to be popularized again by Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 film, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Vice President Thomas Marshall would haul out the tango once again for political purposes. When a rival attempted to replace him on the ticket in 1916, rumors spread that the Missouri rival liked to dance the tango.

Vice President Thomas Marshall.

And in Catholic circles the dance remains controversial. When Pope Francis told reporters that he had danced the tango as a young man and still enjoyed the dance, his critics saw red and called him a weak successor to men like Pius X.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Boston’s Miracle 1914 Braves Most Improbable Comeback Ever

On July 18, 1914, the Boston Braves were in last place as usual. But that season the madmen from Boston made the most stunning comeback in baseball history after a humiliating 10-2 loss to a Buffalo farm team.

The team went from last place to first in two months and then swept the heavily favored Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Their last-to-first rally still stands as one of the greatest reversals in baseball history.

Boston Braves, 1914 World Series at Fenway Park. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The 1914 Braves

The Braves had languished in the cellar for a decade, averaging 100 losses a year. They played in a rickety little ballpark that seated 5,800, not that they needed that many seats. The team was sold in 1912 to former pitcher John Montgomery Ward, and John Gaffney, a Tammany Hall alderman. Until then they’d been known as the “Beaneaters,” the “Doves” or the “Rustlers,” but Gaffney named them the Braves after the New York political machine’s symbol, Chief Tammanend.

George Stallings. in 1914. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The new owners hired George Stallings, a crusty, some said sadistic, plantation owner from Georgia. Stallings could fly into a schizophrenic rage over a dropped fly ball. Even by baseball standards Stallings was extremely superstitious. He hated yellow signs and yellow clothing. Yellow ballpark advertisements had to be painted over before he’d let the team play. He would freeze in position when his team started a rally. Once, the Braves rallied as he picked up a pebble in the dugout. When the rally ended he had to be helped off the field.

But he knew baseball.

In 1913, Stallings’ first season, he managed the hapless Braves to only 82 losses and 69 wins. By the start of 1914, though, Stallings had begun to assemble his unlikely champions. He later described the team as having “one .300 hitter, the worst outfield that ever flirted with sudden death, three pitchers and a good working combination around second base.”

They also had game, and they would do anything to win. Once, shortstop Rabbit Maranville let himself get hit in the head by a fastball so he could walk in the winning run. In that tough, raw era of the game, Stallings’ 1914 Braves were the toughest, rawest team in baseball.

“Don’t end up in jail”

Stallings told his players “Do what you want but don’t end up in jail and come to play every day.” They did exactly what they wanted. Maranville once dove into a hotel fountain after a few cocktails and emerged with a goldfish between his teeth.

Rabbit Maranville famously swam with the fishes in a hotel fountain. (Courtesy Boston Public Library)

Stallings’ most astute move was to buy the contract of Chicago Cubs player-manager and Hall of Famer Johnny Evers before the 1914 season. Evers, the best second baseman in the National League, had an almost psychic ability to position himself right where the ball would be hit. Stallings also chucked a few veterans. Five rookies on the 26-man roster hadn’t played a day in the majors.

The Braves lost their Opening Day game to Brooklyn, then went on to lose some more. Pitchers were wild, or their arms were sore. Maranville came down with tonsillitis, Evers got sick. They lost game after game by one run. They seemed stuck in the cellar, 15-1/2 games behind the first place New York Giants.

Then they lost in Buffalo to what Evers described as “a soap company team.” What happened next isn’t clear. Stallings may have chewed them out. Evers may have inspired them. Stallings may have told them to go out and tie one on. Whatever it was, it worked.

Suddenly, They Got Hot

They won 12 of the next 16 games on the road and rocketed to fourth place. In mid-season. During the streak, Stallings traded for new players.

1914 Braves left fielder, Joey Connolly, the pride of North Smithfield, R.I. Photo courtesy the Library of Congress.

The light-hitting team started to get hits when they needed them and coming from behind to win. Joey Connolly, the 5’7” left fielder from Rhode Island, started to hit, ending the season with a .306 average. Maranville hit a clutch homerun in one game; the Springfield, Mass., native admitted he was so hungover he didn’t see the ball.

They scrapped for every win. The players researched the opposing teams to come up with the best insults. Evers argued with umpires, Maranville mimicked them. More importantly, they transformed the infield into a hitters’ Death Valley.

With first baseman Charlie “Butcher Boy” Schmidt, they turned more double plays than the famed Cubs’ Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance infield.

The pitching solidified. From July 9, sophomore pitcher Bill James went 19-1 with a microscopic 1.51 ERA. The only game he lost was 3-2 to the Pirates in 12 innings. Pitcher Dick Rudolph, a clever curveball-spitball pitcher, went 26-10 that season. He had talked his way onto the team after a chance encounter with the third base coach. Lefty Tyler, a native of Derry, N.H., with a peculiar motion, rounded out the big three pitchers with a 16-13 record. Even George Davis, rarely used as a starter, pitched the National League’s only no-hitter that year in September against the Phillies.

Laying Waste to the League

As the team caught fire, Boston got caught up in the excitement. Their ballpark, the South End Grounds, could only hold 5,800 fans. The Red Sox offered them the use of Fenway Park. On their first home game at Fenway the attendance was 20,000. Among the fans were tavern keeper Michael T. “Nuf Ced” McGreevey’s small army of sports fanatics, the Royal Rooters, who happily transferred their loyalty from the Red Sox. (Nuf Ced got his nickname by pounding his fist on the bar and exclaiming “Nuff Said” when he’d won a sports argument.)

Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevey

From July 19 to the end of the season, the Braves lay waste to the rest of the National League, winning an incredible 51 of 67 games. On Sept. 29, they clinched the National League pennant.

The team was expected to lose the World Series to the dominant Philadelphia Athletics, who had a Hall of Fame pitching staff and a $100,000 infield. The A’s ace, Chief Bender, called the Braves “bush league.”

The Royal Rooters

The Royal Rooters followed the team to Philadelphia for the first two games. Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, his daughter Rose and her new husband Joe Kennedy went along. The Braves took the first game, shocking the Athletics with a 7-1 victory. They won the second game, too, 1-0.

Back in Boston, the Royal Rooters paraded to the field in Indian dress. They sang their fight song “Tessie” throughout Game 3, unnerving the A’s pitchers. Braves catcher Hank Gowdy won the game with a 12^th inning walk-off homerun, the only dinger of the series. (Gowdy, by the way, was the only Major League Baseball player to fight in both World War I and World War II.)

The Braves 3-1 victory over the A’s in the fourth and final game of the series inspired the wildest celebration ever. Fans swarmed the dugout, demanding Stallings give a speech on top of it. Maranville was dragged from the shower, and half-dressed he too gave a speech on top of the dugout. The Rooters’ band played “Tessie,” 5,000 fans marched around the park through the Fens and down Huntington Ave. where they serenaded the A’s at the Copley Plaza.

The losing manager, Connie Mack, was gracious in defeat. “A great team,” he said. “One of the greatest. It had great spirit and just wouldn’t be beaten.”

With thanks to The Boston Braves, 1871-1963, by Harold Kaese. Find out more about the Braves at the Boston Braves Historical Association. This story was updated in 2022.

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