As most of you know, Uncle Don Carney was Chief Engineer of a Lionel sponsored club back in the 1930’s through his radio show.
Many others may know Uncle Don for his legendary “That’ll hold the little b******s” comment at the end of his show.
But Snopes says it never happened!
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/radio/bastards.asp
Jon [8D]
Thank you for posting this. It seems someone is always trying to sully the reputations of our heros.
Terry, I hadn’t noticed that anyone was trying to do that. In any case, “Uncle Don” would not have been among my heros, since I have never heard him nor heard of him.
Bob,
That’s understandable, as he passed away 10 years before I was born…
Jon [8D]
Jon, according to Wikipedia, he was broadcasting when I was a kid.
Jon,
Over the years, I’ve heard that quote attributed to Happy the Clown and Sally Starr. And maybe a couple of others. So I suspect Uncle Don is indeed innocent.
That’s one piece of evidence that it is indeed an “urban myth”, that the same thing has been attributed to other people too.
My guess is it’s probably a situation where a comedian did a nightclub routine where he pretended to be a child-show host and made the comment…kinda like I suspect that some people believe that Ed Sullivan made a disparaging remark about James Brown’s soul music on the air, when it fact it was a comedy routine by Gabe Kaplan. (In fact, when he was on Ed Sullivan, Ed called James Brown over and gave him a great deal of praise for his volunteer work with young people.)
Jon,
Being from the New York City area, when younger, I’ve never heard of ‘Uncle Don’ and now, I understand that his program was, I believe, broadcast from the WOR studio which is in N.Y.C. and I believe, also somewhere in N.J. they had and have another studio, then, as well, as now.
If, it was up to the late 1940’s, I was too young to even notice; if into the 1950’s, when I would have noticed, we just didn’t tune into his program and sometimes the program wouldn’t be broadcasted locally. I didn’t research it, so who knows?
As, for any ‘Unpolitically Correct’ statements, or remarks, I’ve heard that a lot of different Radio and T.V. personalities were to have said something off color. I’ve never witnessed any wrong sayings, or actions from Radio, or T.V. At, a movie set, now, that’s a different story!
Ralph
Uncle Don’s Lionel show was a very early radio show, starting perhaps as far back as the late twenties and running into the mid-late 1930’s IIRC. The pic of him in the “All Aboard” book shows him talking on the mic wearing a tuxedo, surrounded by huge Lionel standard gauge trains running around him on the floor. [:)]
Stix,
Thank you for posting the show’s broadcasting years. Not, untill the original post, have I known of ‘Uncle Don.’ I was born in the early 1940’s, so, whether the show ended in the late 1930’s, or late 1940’s, I wouldn’t have known about it. Also, the program probably was transmitted either from N.Y.C., whether locally, or not, an affiliate, or a different broadcast company.
Ralph
The Snopes article linked in the original post said his show was on from 1928 to 1947 from WOR, he later moved to Florida and broadcast there until he retired in 1954. The article notes part of the confusion might have been because his show was briefly carried by the Mutual network, then dropped with no explanation - perhaps prompting some outside of the NY area to believe he had been fired for some reason.
This “event” was almost mandatory reading for broadcast majors in college back in the 80’s. Makes me question Dan Rather’s story about going to Sam Houston Institute of Technology, until the tee shirts were printed, and then changed the school’s name to Texas Institute of Technology…
Jon [8D]
There are so many celebrity “urban legends” that it’s kinda silly…
Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in a car wreck. (A photo of the fatal scene showed one of her blonde wigs in the road still attached to the styrofoam “dummy” head she stored it on.)
“Mama” Cass Elliot died by choking on a sandwich. (She had a heart attack in her sleep, the autopsy showed her last meal had been a sandwich.)
Jeff Goldblum is dead. (He was reported on Australian network news as having fallen to his death while filming a movie in New Zealand a few weeks ago…the day the story aired, he was in New York guest starring on Stephen Colbert’s show.)
Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. (Nope, quite the opposite. After he died, his remains were cremated.)
Etc. Etc. Etc. [:)]
Uncle Don Carney played an important role in Lionel history, being a company spokeman from 1929-1931 before being dropped as “Chief Engineer”. Carney biographer Bill Treadwell attributed the famous (or infamous) quote to “a Baltimore columnist who made it up one dull afternoon and used Uncle Don’s name because the programs were not on a Baltimore station.”
Some of the Uncle Don Lionel items are extremely tough to find, especially the certificates and pins. You can read more about Uncle Don’s ties to Lionel in an article I wrote for CTT (“The Lionel Engineers Club”) in the October 1999 issue.
Bob Osterhoff
Thanks Bob. Love your work!
Jon [8D]