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A R C H I V E S

RECREATING HISTORY

AMERICA'S HOPE

     When Bob Hope died Sunday July 26, he was 100 years old and had lived longer than most anyone he performed with in over 50 films, hundreds of television shows, and maybe a thousand radio programs.
     Hope was richer than anybody too.
     Unlike many who find fame, then decline, and maybe live long enough to rise again, Bob Hope’s star and fortune were well managed, and always on the ascendance.
     I loved Bob Hope when I was a kid and America fought “The Good War,” World War 11.
     He was always on the big Magnavox radio in our living room in Toledo, Ohio.
     Bob Hope was out there in the camps with the troops too, as a pioneer of the USO, as were many Hollywood stars.
     But we always remember Hope, because he was the wise-cracking, in your face comic sixty years ago, before anybody had ever thought of that kind of delivery.
     Hope was an edge comedian before that term was thought up. While he delivered his carefully crafted monologues, he often left people wondering:
     “Can he say that?”
     When you hear those old Hope monologues today, it all sounds pretty tame, and then you realize just how innocent the world once was, ages ago, six decades back.
     In 2003 it’s hard to image topical humor, delivered dead pan, without foul language, as ever being avant-garde, but during the 1940’s and early 1950’s, that’s just what Bob Hope’s humor was.
     I didn’t like Bob Hope much when I was a soldier in Vietnam, because like most of my buddies we thought that war was bullshit, even while we were fighting it.
     Bob Hope, ever the patriot, (even though he was born in England) would duck into some base like Danang or aboard an aircraft carrier out in the South China Sea, and do his show with his signature golf club, a breezy repartee, and always a bevy of beautiful women.
     But now the jokes that were cutting edge in the 1940’s, to us twenty-year olds, were flat and ponderous.
     I kept thinking why didn’t Hope open up and score the utter futility and uselessness of the Vietnam War?
     But he never did.
     Come to think of it, how could I ever have expected that this icon of America, would ever be anything more than an entertainer?
     But Hope’s image to a child, changed to the man, and was destined to change again as time passed by.
     That’s what’s neat about living to be 100.
     You get to keep coming back to be reevaluated or rediscovered.
     Bob Hope deserves to be credited as being one of the dozen or so greatest performers of the twentieth century.
     Everything he did including radio, television, the movies and the stage, he did first rate.
     He was the consummate professional, so when he performed in any of the aforementioned mediums, he made it look easy.
     My favorites however are his movies including the “Road” pictures he did with Bing Crosby.
     During the 1950’s and early 1960’s, we would gather around the black and white television that replaced the radio as the biggest piece of media furniture in the house, and watch Bob Hope host the Oscars in Hollywood every year, without ever actually winning one himself.
     Bob Hope, not getting an Oscar was a long running gag.
     Bob appeared in many excellent films and one outstanding one, called “The Seven Little Foys.”
     Bob Hope did everything in that movie.
     He sang and danced, told jokes, and tugged at heartstrings.
     Bob should have won the Oscar that year.
     But now that he is gone, it occurs, that maybe he really didn’t care about an Oscar, deciding that his self depreciating humor about not winning the coveted prize, had better staying power with his audience than the Academy Award itself.
     But the lasting image to most Americans is Bob Hope performing at a military base, after hopping off an air cargo aircraft like a Lockheed Hercules or a De Havilland Caribou at some remote location in Southeast Asia.
     He passed through our offices here at LaGuardia Airport in 1985.
     Here, where the multi-million dollar corporate jets of the rich and famous used to visit, before the Delta Shuttle moved in and the Jet Streams and their high profile clientele moved across the river to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Bob Hope paused for a short while en route to California after business in New York City.
     We gave Mr. Hope an airport book we had created and he was gracious, interested, asked questions and thanked us warmly.
     But what we really remember about that day was this most famous person, Bob Hope, in a bright yellow golf cardigan, standing alone and unescorted in the middle of the Marine Air Terminal, surrounded by a hundred ramp rats, UPS delivery men, airline employees and others.
     For at least an hour he signed papers, pictures, posters and books.
     Bob Hope answered every question, told some funny, even off color jokes, and was just having one hell of a good time without the lights, action and cameras, all by himself with some regular people.
     We loved Bob Hope all over again.
     Now he is in another place.
     We are certain that in the second it took his spirit to escape this mortal coil, a long departed voice started humming an old familiar tune.
     Now Bob and Bing are together again, on the Road to Forever.

Geoffrey Arend