Column: Father’s experience with Bob Hope provided a good memory
Published 12:00 am Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Bob Hope died early last week, so these reflections are late &045; but that’s the price you pay when you only get one chance to annoy people each week. Although he was over 100 years old, an age where death is expected and each new morning is a gift, the news surprised and saddened many. Still, he lived a full life, and, in his own way, made a positive difference in the lives of millions of Americans &045; citizens of his adopted homeland.
First, though, I have to be honest: Bob Hope was never my favorite comedian. I mean no disrespect to his memory, but I prefer wacky and &uot;intellectual&uot; humor like the standup routines of Steve Martin and Paula Poundstone or the skits of Monty Python and the Second City improv group.
Whether his style of humor was to my taste or not is really irrelevant, because the most important thing about Hope was his gift of time and talents for USO shows during wartime. He didn’t do it because he believed in war as an occupation, or was a great fan of whoever was president at the time (he made fun of all of them). He did it because he knew the soldiers deployed in dangerous places needed to laugh once in awhile, too. So I don’t have to be a supporter of war to see the value of bringing some joy and a couple of hours of entertainment to men and women in uniform who are far away from home, on duty in a war zone, and maybe even a little scared.
There is also a personal reason for valuing the life and work of this comedian. My father met him when he was doing his bit for king and country over in Vietnam, serving as a naval intelligence officer. Hope was doing a series of shows for carrier-based troops, and my father was assigned to the team providing security on one of the ships (I can’t remember anymore whether it was the USS Enterprise or the USS Saratoga, since my father served on both at different times).
The story my father told about Hope wasn’t about anything that happened on stage, though. It was about afterwards, when he invited his bodyguards to play poker with him in his cabin. According to my father, they played all night long &045; and Hope won most of the games. This was not a problem, however, because after he’d won everybody’s money, he gave it all back so they could keep playing. Continuing to play the game, it seemed, was more important than winning. I think that was an indication that a lot of what we did see on stage was real; he was genuinely interested in whether people were having a good time.
Most of my father’s stories from that time in his life were dark. Even if they were humorous and not overtly horrible, there was always something wrong with the picture he drew of what that war did to people &045; the absentminded acquaintance who got sucked into a jet engine, the insane captain who sailed his ship into the middle of Vladivostok harbor, the prickly admiral who flew bombing missions while he was supposed to be at his desk.
The story about playing poker all night long with Bob Hope was different. He was a famous man, who could have stayed home instead of traveling all over the world for so many Christmases, putting so much effort into entertaining men who could be dead in a few days or weeks, or staying up all night playing poker with my father and his detachment of MPs.
Bob Hope may not have been the funniest comedian in America, but he was funny enough. What’s more, he knew how to entertain people and help them forget about the unpleasantness of their own lives. Sometimes an escape from reality is just what a person needs, if only for a couple of hours. Remembering my father’s story about him helps me see my own father in a better light. His life in the Navy wasn’t all about the bad things that eventually killed him; he had at least one really good day, and Bob Hope was the man who made that possible.
(David Rask Behling is a rural Albert Lea resident. His column appears Tuesdays.)