Man 1: Who was that ladle I seen you with last night?

Man 2: That was no ladle; that was my knife.

George was the logical leader. He lived in a real house and made great spaghetti which he was willing to share. Also there was nearly always a penny ante poker game if any pennies were available. The matchstick version wasn't quite as interesting.

Each year the Playhouse did a summer festival of plays with a given theme. In 1937 it was the Great Southwest and included turkeys like Girl of the Golden West. In one of them I was cast as a dancer at a fiesta; no lines, but as an ACTOR I had to work up a complete characterization: background, makeup, bits of business while not dancing. Dwight played a servant at the rancho. At the conclusion of a big dance number, he appeared upstage center with a plate of refreshments and slowly worked his way through the dancers offering them the plate. Throughout rehearsals I had declined the plate with a flowing gesture and turned away haughtily. And then one night, Dwight had apparently stopped by the local watering hole before performance. On cue he made his entrance a bit off course, approached with the plate, came the haughty gesture of denial, and then out of the blue the unscripted line: "Aww, g'wan, Have a cookie!" I imploded. And it took a very long time for me to forgive his blatant destruction of a magnificent performance.

I lost track of Dwight after he graduated and I was writing copy and doing commercials and disc jockeying for a local advertising agency. I discovered his next incarnation when he showed up as program director for a new radio station in Pasadena. He casually offered me a job as a staff announcer at KWKW. I was floundering at that time and jumped at the chance. George Barclay and I constituted the announce staff. George later went to ABC. And there was a kid who used to hang around all the time named Stan Freberg but I can't recall his ever being on the air. Then Dwight mysteriously left for greener pastures; I left after six months, and Dwight was now an assistant director at CBS. By this time I was trying desperately to crack the wall around network radio and not doing a very good job of it. My wife and I were not starving because we were living with friends in Arcadia, out by the Santa Anita racetrack.

On a Saturday afternoon, the telephone rang. Dwight. He said he had a network job for me. The network was the Pacific regional network but it was a network and it was at CBS. When I asked him about the part I was to play he said it was a Hindu. I told him that I had never heard a Hindu dialect; the only East Indian I knew spoke perfect British English. Dwight replied that was tough, I was cast; he had told the director that I was fluent in Hindu and be at rehearsal at CBS at 7:30.

Santa Anita Oaks was about 45 minutes by car from CBS. On the drive over I was desperately developing a Hindu accent. I was sitting in the foyer mumbling to myself when the director, J. Donald Wilson arrived with an armful of scripts. He was a small man, but peering over the glasses at me he seemed ten feet tall. He said, "Are you Bartell?" I told him yes. And he said, "I understand you do Hindu?" I am proud to say that my voice didn't crack when I answered, "Oh, yes!" He than asked me to read a bit for him and I knew I was down the drain. I hauled out the now polished Hindu and read the lines. He retrieved the script, said "Fine. You can use a little more accent." Nothing to it.

The amazing Mr. Hauser turned out to be a very good writer and it was one of his scripts that got me to Mr. President, a series of programs that was essentially biographical sketches of American presidents starring Edward Arnold. It came as a considerable surprise to me every peerless leader from Washington to Roosevelt sounded exactly like Edward Arnold.

Dwight and I really got to know each other during the war when we were both living in Hollywood. His father was a butcher at the market where we shopped and was most helpful in occasionally stretching the limits of the meat ration coupons. His wife was a lovely, warm lady and our kids were about the same age. We frequently had dinner at each other's homes and there was naturally a great deal of talk, a lot of it political. At one point Dwight asked me to read a book on dialectical materialism. I waded through it, returned the book and told him that it wasn't my way to go. I don't know to this day if Dwight Hauser was a Communist. Of all the suspects that I knew during the McCarthy period, I can truthfully say that I could not testify to a single one of them actually being a card-carrying Communist. I do know that The House Un-American Activities Committee ruined Dwight Hauser's life.