Rest assured, gentle reader; this is not my annual Christmas novel–but it does have Christmas right in the title, so it seemed a timely read. When I picked this book up eight years ago, I must have wanted to save it for a season such as this.
At any rate, this is partially a picture book which explains its large size, but it’s basically the story of Bob Hope’s Christmas tours to various bases between World War II and Vietnam. As I mentioned, it has lots of photos of the celebrities that he brought with him and photos of different environments/bases where they performed. He includes a number of gags and quips, often self-deprecating, and the final chapter is actually a transcript/script of the final show he put on–although they were not probably that big of a deal at the onset, by the 1960s, a film crew came along and cut the shows down for broadcast television in the U.S.
The tours took place over Christmas and were often whirlwinds where they would hit multiple bases in multiple countries and sometimes on different continents and ships at sea. The troupes put on several shows a day and then had formal dinners at night with the brass or with royalty (Hope and crew often visited the King and Queen of Thailand when in Bangkok).
You know, I kind of give Bob Hope a bit of short shrift in my memories of the comedians who were old when I was young–I remember his later television specials in the 1980s, but that’s about it. Contrasted with George Burns, who had contemporary movies out at the time, I guess. And I’ve watched Burns’ television shows and read many of his books, so he seemed younger and more vital. But I’ve seen some of Hope’s movies, and it’s easy to overlook what he did for troop morale in three wars (in some situations, for different generations of soldiers with the same family). And the shows were broadcast on television. I cannot think of a contemporary who had the same impact–Gary Sinise, maybe?
Oh, and researching this post (reading the Wikipedia entry) indicates that this might have been the last television program, he continued on USO tours up until the first gulf war.
I have another Hope book around here probably very similar–I Owe Russia $1200 is somewhere–so I’ll have to pick it up sometime soon.
