ALAN writes:

One day I was reading about people’s memories of growing up in a certain neighborhood. One woman remembered:

“How friendly people were, and how open everything was. People left their doors unlocked. One lady who lived in a big white house put on a scary costume and handed out candy to children who came to her door on Halloween. It was all very friendly. In front of another house, children had a lemonade stand.” Are these the memories of the fictitious town in “Leave It To Beaver?” No, but they could be. Are they the memories of the place where I lived in boyhood? They might be, but they aren’t. They are the memories of people who grew up on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills in the 1940s-‘50s.

They are the memories of people like Joan Benny, Jack Benny’s adopted daughter. They lived at 1002 North Roxbury Drive. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz lived next door, and it was she who handed out the candy. Other neighbors included James Stewart and Rosemary Clooney. [See Todd Purdum’s “The Street Where They Lived,” Vanity Fair, April 1999]

Much of America was like that at one time. Police officers who grew up in the same neighborhoods of St. Louis where I did remember many residents leaving their doors unlocked. That, of course, was at a time before the Communist-engineered destruction of city neighborhoods and strong Catholic parishes.

One sunny day in June 1960, I took a picture of that house on Roxbury Drive—the house where Jack Benny lived. I was ten years old. I knew who Jack Benny was because we watched his program on television in the 1950s. My mother and I were passengers that day on a tour bus that drove along Roxbury Drive and paused in front of the homes of Jack Benny and Lucille Ball.

Not being clairvoyant, I did not foresee that that moment would become a link in a chain of memories. Nor could I foresee that one day 41 years later, I would walk into a nursing home and find my mother holding a book written by the girl who grew up in that house.

On the day before Christmas 2001, I went there to visit my mother. She was 80 years old. Her memory of events in the distant past was fairly good, but she could not remember what happened yesterday or even an hour ago. Seeing her that way was the worst experience of my life. I hated whatever it was that caused her powers of comprehension to diminish. I hated myself for being alive yet powerless to do anything about it, and I hated life itself.

As I walked to where she was seated, I saw that she was holding a book on her lap and looking down intently at its open pages. That was notable to me because I was not certain that she could still read or comprehend what she had read. The book was Joan Benny’s book Sunday Nights at Seven (1990), about her father and their life in the house on Roxbury Drive. I purposely did not say anything to her because I did not want to interrupt her concentration. Nor did I ask her afterward what she had been reading. I had substantial reason to believe she would not remember it even five minutes afterward. So I said nothing about it. But I stood there for a moment or so, watching her and hoping that something she found in the pages of Joan Benny’s book helped her to remember happy Sunday evenings in the 1940s when she and my grandmother enjoyed listening to Jack Benny’s program on radio. I knew they did that because only a few years earlier we had talked about radio programs that she remembered best from those years. She named three: Your Hit Parade, Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge, and The Jack Benny Program.

I am confident that my mother and grandmother enjoyed Jack Benny’s program for precisely the reasons given by Thomas Bertonneau in his all-too-brief discussion of Jack Benny’s kind of comedy and the day he saw Jack Benny perform at UCLA [“The Comedy of Resentment,” The Thinking Housewife, Jan. 29, 2013]: Namely, gentle humor, nearly all of it aimed at himself, and the benevolent sense of life embodied in that kind of comedy.

Jack Benny achieved his popularity via radio, which appealed not to the eye but to the ear and therefore to the imagination. And it was at a time when there was still such a thing as a unified American culture. President John Kennedy “recalled that his father used to herd the family into their home’s library every Sunday night to hear the Jack Benny program on radio. No one was ever excused from listening. So it was with much of America.” [New York Times Biographical Service, Dec. 1974 ]

The day comes in a person’s life when any such apparently little connections are better than none. And so it was that the comedy of Jack Benny became a thread in our lives over a span of seven decades: From the golden age of radio in the 1930s-‘40s when each of my parents (long before they met) enjoyed Jack Benny’s program on radio, to his program in the early years of television, to that day in 1960 when we rode past Jack Benny’s home on Roxbury Drive, to the years when my father clipped and saved newspaper obituaries for Jack Benny and his fellow actors, to the day in 1974 shortly after Jack Benny died when St. Louis radio host Jack Carney presented a tribute to his life and career, to that day in 2001 when my mother held Joan Benny’s book on her lap on what would prove to be her last Christmas Eve.

Is there anyone over the age of 65 for whom the melody of “Love in Bloom” does not bring fond memories of Jack Benny walking out on stage in the opening scene of his television program in the 1950s-‘60s?

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