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I don’t know about you, but I generally think of the Winter Olympics as the Second Darrin of Olympic Games…but boy, the airborne, ice dancin’ excitement of the Sochi Snowthletes may have me changing my mind about that!  Yessir, ol’ Mr. Remarkable had a grand old time sittin’ back in his Craftmatic, a Rob Roy in one hand (don’t be stingy with those bitters, barkeep!) and a Lucky Strike in the other, watching winter’s most talented boys and gals go for the gold.

But did you know that the Winter Olympics were once almost in Brooklyn!

The story starts in 1936 with Stephen W. McKeever, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers.  One day while watching a ball game, he and his pal Robert Moses  (yes, the master builder – try sayin’ those two words three times fast!) were jawin’ about the pomp and spectacle of the recently concluded Olympic Games in Munich.  They agreed that the krauts could sure put on a show, but they thought they could do better! So McKeever and Moses decided to join forces and bring an Olympics to Brooklyn!

The first thing they needed to do, of course, was put together a good proposal, and pitch it to the International Olympic Committee, who were then headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland.  Now, Moses and McKeever cleverly thought that getting the winter games would be easier than getting the summer ones!  The Winter Olympics were only a few years old at that point (they had started in 1924), and they weren’t the big deal they were to later become (in fact, the first Winter Games in the U.S., in 1932 in Lake Placid, had been a decidedly tepid affair – only fourteen events in four sports were staged, and many of the world’s greatest winter athletes were no-shows because they didn’t want to spend the money to come over from Europe!).  In fact, this was one of the things Moses and McKeever wanted to change, and oh boy oh boy, they had big plans.

In January of 1937, McKeever, Moses, and famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, arrived in the land o’ banks and chocolate (that would be Switzerland! Ha!) to try to convince the IOC to award the 1944 Winter Olympics to Brooklyn!  Here’s what McKeever, Moses, and Mies had in mind:  They wanted to build an ARTIFICIAL MOUNTAIN in Prospect Park for all the downhill skiing and bobsleddy-type events; they wanted to convert Bed Stuy Armory into a state-of-the-art indoor arena to house hockey and skating; and they wanted to put a ROOF on McKeever’s own Ebbets Field, so they would have a site for a majestic opening and closing ceremonies befitting the grandeur of the games!

Boy, the ’44 Brooklyn Winter Olympics was sure gonna be a sight to behold!

Moses, of course, had long-term goals in mind:  he hoped to make the Prospect Park mountain permanent and create an income generatin’ tourist attraction to bring skiing and hiking into the city (it would be called Mount Moses, of course); and he also wanted to keep the dome on Ebbets Field, to create a forward-looking monument to the future which he hoped would compliment his plans for the 1939 World’s Fair, then being built in Flushing Meadows’ Park.

Well, when the Moses and his pals presented their ambitious plans to the crusty old burghers at the IOC, the reaction was swift.  Henri de Baillet-Latour, the Belgian head of the IOC, bluntly pronounced “C’est le travail de rêveurs et les Juifs, bien haut sur l’opium Hébreu” (“This is the work of dreamers and Jews, clearly high on Hebrew opium”); and with that one withering sentence, he dismissed Moses, McKeever, and Mies, and awarded the 1944 Winter Olympics to the city of Cortina d’Ambezzo, Italy.

Moses was never one to take defeat lightly.  Angrily, he announced that he would start his own International athletic competition to compete with the Olympics; this would be called The World Congress of Athletic Progress, and he would hold it every two years, to be permanently housed in the new Brooklyn winter paradise Moses was planning on building.  Now, McKeever thought that such an endeavor would surely bankrupt Moses, McKeever, the Dodgers, and the borough of Brooklyn, so he suggested to Moses that they all be good sports and accept that you win some, you lose some (a phrase first attributed, by the way, to the Roman Emperor Elagabulus; very shortly before his execution in 222 A.D. for his “unspeakably disgusting life”, ol’ King Gabby famously said “vincis, aliquam perdas”).   Well, ol’ master builder Moses didn’t like that kind of conciliatory talk, and he attacked his former partner with a rather large decorative ashtray presented to him in 1935 by New York Governor Herbert Lehman.  This incident was later hushed up, but there are some who believe the injuries Moses inflicted on McKeever contributed to his death in 1938, though that’s never been remotely proven.

But that’s another story, and Moses plowed ahead with his plans for his own personal Olympics.  To help promote the idea, he enlisted some corporate sponsors, high-profile politicians, and contemporary celebrities for a radio telethon to both raise money for The World Congress of Athletic Progress and familiarize the public sector with the concept. So, on November 14, 1937 a telethon titled Champion Spark Plugs and Pepsodent, the Antiseptic Toothpaste Present Muscle, Pride, and Progress aired on the Mutual Broadcasting Network, beamed live for eleven hours from the Mutual studios at 1440 Broadway.  It was quite an event!  Hosted by Comedian Fred Allen and surrealist painter/celebrity Salvador Dali, the remarkable evening also featured performances by the Boswell Sisters, Orson Welles, Kay Kyser, Chester Lauck and Norris Goff of Lum and Abner, Ed Wynn, noted juvenile Eddie Cantor impersonator Larry “L’il Banjo Eyes” Kase, the Dandy Dixie Minstrels, and star athletes from the New York Giants (Moses had switched team allegiances after the rupture of his relationship with McKeever).

The telethon was a disaster.  First of all, in order to emphasize the gravity of the event, Moses insisted that every reference in the script to the proposed inaugural games of The World Congress of Athletic Progress (slated at that time for February, 1942) include the date being written out in Roman Numerals.  This detail wreaked havoc with all the talent on the show, who found themselves attempting to pronounce “MCMXLII” as a word!  By the middle of the show, the considerable vocal talent had agreed upon a pronunciation of “Mick-Mix-ell” (as in “I’m Ray Corrigan, and Ernest Truex, Rosita Serrano and I want to tell you about The World Congress of Athletic Progress in February of Mick-Mix-ell”), and this infuriated Moses to such a degree that he physically attacked Ed Wynn’s wife and infant daughter.  Secondly, less than a third of the way through the marathon broadcast, news broke of the Japanese victory at Shanghai (in the ongoing and tragic Second Japanese-Sino War), and Mutual continually broke into the broadcast to update news about the event.

Within days, the grand idea of The World Congress of Athletic Progress was dead.  Moses licked his wounds, concentrated on the 1939 World’s Fair, had Rita Serrano deported to Nazi Germany, and went on to many great projects, but Prospect Park never got it’s mountain, Ebbets Field never got its’ roof, and the remarkable events of the global conflagration known as The Second World War preoccupied everyone’s minds for years to come.

There was an interesting fall-out from the event, however:  Salvador Dali and Fred Allen formed an unlikely friendship, with amazing results!  The artistic insouciance and conceptual savoir faire of the genius artist and the witty, fertile, and febrile mind of the great comedian combined to come up with one of era’s greatest inventions:  the toy we came to know as The Slinky.  But that’s another story.  Let’s just say that Dali saw the tightly coiled spring as the only possible reaction to the ludicrousness of the Civil War that had just wracked his native Spain (he envisioned the toys being dropped in the tens of thousands over the war-wracked plains of Andalusia), whereas Allen saw the ultimate commercial potential of the strange and mischievous object.

Once again, no time for THE THREE DOT ROUND-UP! Boy, there’s a lot of gossip and news piling up!  AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE LIVING IN BROOKLYN! 

(The author’s opinions and grasp of reality are entirely his own)

Tim Sommer has been employed as a musician, record producer, DJ, VJ, and music industry executive of some little note.   He is the author of the critically acclaimed I, Wellonmellon:  The Dark World of the Women in the Films of Jerry Lewis, and he continues his efforts to get the New York Mets pitcher Al Jackson into the Hall of Fame.

This time of year, I get stopped on the street by little children, old ladies, butcher’s assistants, bellhops, international women with no body hair, all wanting to know the story of Presidents Day! Apparently, I told this fantastic and fascinatin’ tale on a talk show a long time ago, but for the life of me I can’t recall what show it was!  Tim Russert? Charles Grodin?  David Susskind? Carnie Wilson? Joey Bishop?  It’s all a blur, friends.  Lady Percodan is a cruel mistress.

Anyway, it’s a story I love to tell…so here, Ladies & Gentleman of the most Kingly of Counties, is the story of Presidents Day!

Like so many great American holidays, the roots of Presidents Day lie in Germany…but that part comes later, so let’s begin here:  Due to unforeseen problems in the calendar reforms introduced by Pope Pius XI and Vice President Charles Curtis in 1930, the year 1935 was going to be 26 minutes too long…unless no fewer than THREE new three-day weekends were introduced into the American work calendar! So in February of 1934 the government created Memorial Day and Labor Day, but they still needed one more!

Enter legendary film director King Vidor, who was an avid follower of current events (as we all know!); he was also a great friend of another Vice President, FDR’s John Nance Garner. In September of 1934 while Garner and Vidor were on the Hearst yacht pulling a train on Marion Davies, they were discussing the calendar problem. Vidor mentioned something interesting that had just happened in Germany:  the Nazis had introduced a holiday to commemorate the life and achievements of their legendary President, Paul von Hindenburg, who had recently died. In fact, not only had the Krauts created Präsident Tag, they had made it – you guessed it – a three-day weekend! (Or, as they call it, Einen Tag Nach Sonntag Knödel und Kalbfleisch ohne Angst vor Arbeitszeitverdauungsstörungen Essen – “An extra day after Sunday to eat dumplings and veal without fear of work-time indigestion”).

After cleaning up, Vidor and Nance discussed their brainstorm with some of the other guests on the yacht (who included actors Adolphe Menjou and Franklin Pangborn, Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw, and George Putnam, the husband of aviatrix Amelia Earhart).  They all agreed that a holiday to commemorate America’s Presidents was a first-rate idea! Not only would it solve the calendar problem that was dangling over the very fabric of time like the Sword of Damocles, but the holiday could also boost the economy due to increased revenue from both tourism and Presidents Day souvenirs.

Within three days, Vice President Nance and the newspaper big-wig William Randolph Hearst were in Washington to present the Presidents Day idea to a phalanx of congressmen and senators (and also to seek out a legendary specialist to cure a rather persistent case of the Suppurating Gleet they had both acquired).  Provisionally, they slated the holiday for March to coincide with the birthdays of Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, James Madison, and John Tyler, but this notion got caught up in the heated racial politics of the day.  The southern contingent loved the idea of a March holiday, because it honored both hootin’ an’ hollerin’ Andrew Jackson and because John Tyler was the father-in-law of Reb-in-Chief Jefferson Davis.  The Northern politicos, however, bristled at the idea of turning the new holiday into an excuse to wave the rebel flag, so the whole Presidents Day idea stalled for a while, bogged down in partisan politics.

But the clock was ticking!  By now it was already the middle of October 1934, and 1935, with it’s potentially missing 26 minutes, was just weeks away!

Enter the legendary Adolphe Zukor, the founder and head of Paramount Pictures.  Born a poor Jewish girl in Hungary, few Americans loved their adopted land as much as ol’ Addie.  He had read about the holiday deadlock in Der Hollywood Teglekh Bleter, the popular Yiddish-language Tinsel Town gossip daily, and he sprang into action, getting directly in touch with ol’ FDR himself!  Zukor promised the President that if the Federal Government would move the proposed holiday to February, he would personally guarantee that Paramount would produce movies about the three Presidents born in that short and cruel month — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and William Henry Harrison.

Well, that sealed the deal (an expression first heard, coincidentally, in the Presidential campaign of Benjamin Harrison, ol’ William Henry’s grandson), and F.D.R. used his considerable powers to push through the February date for the new Presidents Day Holiday!  But the kerfuffle over the new holiday wasn’t over yet!  Remember how I just said there were two President Harrisons (and you probably do, unless your memory is impaired by, say, an overwhelming Percodan addiction that greatly reduced your ability to recall events between 1972 and 1983, and left 11 years of your life a soiled, soggy fog of regret and sadness)? Well, some of the same southern politicos who were pressing for the March holiday were inexplicably confused by the relatively simply notion of there being two President Harrisons.  One of the leaders of the Southern Dems, South Carolina Senator James F. Byrnes, completely mistook the latter Benjamin Harrison for the former William Henry Harrison!  And since Benjamin Harrison was very forward thinking on segregation and civil rights, Byrnes and the Southern Dems – confusing, as I just said, William for Benjamin – said they would only approve the February holiday if Harrison was eliminated from the list of Presidents commemorated by the Holiday!

(Boy, what a story!)

So, Harrison was kicked to the curb, and the February Presidents Day Holiday was signed into law just in time, on December 19^th, 1934, and the dilemma of the extra 26 minutes was solved.

I know what you’re thinking:  If Harrison didn’t pass the muster of the Southern Dems due to his support of Civil Rights, why did they support ol’ Abe?  Well, to be frank, I’ve never been able to figure that out.  I first heard the gist of the Presidents Day story from Nelson Rockefeller, Lou Walters, and Walter Winchell on one very, very long night at the Latin Quarter Club when I was still in my twenties, and I was able to confirm virtually all of it via extensive research conducted by my crack staff in the lonely days after the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967 (everyone was pretty stunned, and I thought it would cheer everyone up to engage in some serious investigatory work!), but that was one question we never were able to answer.

Oh…and what ever happened to the Presidential biopics Adolphe Zukor promised an eager nation?  Well, that’s an interesting story in its’ own right, but I’ll try to “shorthand” it here:  The Abe Lincoln biography was re-scripted as a comedy vehicle for Paramount’s reigning bombshell, Mae West, and ol’ Banjo Eyes himself, Mr. Eddie Cantor.  In the film, titled Dumb Mr. Lincoln, Lincoln (as portrayed by Cantor) worries that Mrs. Lincoln (West) is cheating on him; and she is, in fact, carrying on with virtually everyone in sight, including Ulysses Grant and Vice President Andrew Jackson (played by the vaudeville team of Smith and Dale, also signed to Paramount).  She even has a peccadillo with Frederick Douglass (played by Cantor in blackface, surely one of the most offensive portrayals in Cantor’s otherwise distinguished career). A young Gary Cooper shows up briefly as the bodyguard at Fords’ Theatre who West distracts from his duty with her womanly charms.  Now, unfortunately – or maybe fortunately – the film was withdrawn almost immediately upon release, and all copies thrown into San Pedro Bay; movie censor Will Hays said that “…not only is this film a savage desecration of the memory of one of our greatest Presidents, but a scene with Mae West and Charlie Dale hints at a depravity only known in the darkest alleys of Algiers.”

How about that.

Now, the Washington biographical film also got handed over to the Paramount comedy department, but with happier results:  The L’il Georgie series, starring Jackie Cooper as young George Washington (and also featuring Ben Turpin and Ernie “Sunshine” Morrison), was a popular series of 12 two-reelers depicting somewhat idealized scenes from the childhood of our first President.

(Bizarrely, Dumb Mr. Lincoln got remade in the late 1960s, despite – or perhaps because of – the infamy and ignominy of the original picture. In the 1968 version, Lincoln is portrayed by Pat Buttram – Mr. Haney from Green Acres – and the lusty Mrs. Lincoln is portrayed by Beverly Garland, a last-minute replacement for Jayne Mansfield, who died just weeks before filming.  Arnold Stang plays Ulysses Grant, and V.P. Johnson by a somewhat miscast Nick Adams. A peculiar and discordant anti-war theme, obviously inspired by the contemporary situation in Vietnam, underlines the movie.)

WHEW.  Now, I warned you it was a long story, didn’t I?  No time left for the THE THREE DOT ROUND-UP!  But, as I said so many years ago on that mysterious talk show, you’ve been a great audience, AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE LIVING IN BROOKLYN! 

P.S.  You know…now that I think about it…I believe the talk show may have been Agronsky & Company.

Tim Sommer has been employed as a musician, record producer, DJ, VJ, and music industry executive.   He is the author of the critically acclaimed From Duel to Prinze:  How Suicide Framed Television in the 1970s , and he continues his efforts to get the city of New York to rename the borough of Queens after Gil Hodges.

Now, we got a lot of reaction to last week’s piece about good ol’ Ennis Shalit and the invention of the Cobb Salad!  Apparently, there are some Doubting Thomas’s and Skeptical Susan’s out there who took issue with my account. This is America and I welcome all of these engaged voices!  As the late, great Arthur Treacher once said, “The only time to start complainin’ is when they stop complainin’!” Listen, friends: I just call ‘em like I hear ‘em.  Like my idols, Joseph Mitchell, Jimmy Breslin, Paul Harvey, and Lee Leonard, I am a collector of stories; The Big Apple is full of ‘em, and your humble correspondent is here with an old spiral notebook and a sharpened pencil takin’ notes.

Now, as you know, I took over this column in 1966 from its’ creator, the amazin’ Kermit Roosevelt Clinton-Henry, whose work was so admired in this parish that the city fathers named not one but two streets after him. The rest is history, and I am proud to be part of such an estimable legacy of accuracy and mirth.

Nevertheless, I will be the first to confess I am human and I do make mistakes.  So this week, I’m gonna do something I’ve never done before:  note some of my errors of the last 38 years.  As Brooklyn’s own Walt Whitman said, “All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.”  So here goes (oh, and I’ve noted the original publication date of the column):

*  Borough Hall did not get it’s name from the burros that originally grazed there (6/11/94).

 *  The word “semitic” descends from Shem, the eldest son of Noah and Emzara, not from Shemp, the third born son of Solomon and Jennie Horowitz (5/4/02).

*  Walt Disney’s Fantasia was not “in part” based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion  (11/10/70).

*  Moe Berg, the second-string baseball catcher of the 1920s/30s who was also an Atomic spy (and who came within a hairs’ breadth of assassinating German physicist Werner Heisenberg), played for the Boston Red Sox, not the Boston Braves  (5/28/84).

*  During the manpower crisis of the First World War, trains on the IRT subway line were not manned by monkeys “most” of the time  (10/8/09).

*  The German title of Billy Crystal’s 1992 film, Mr. Saturday Night, was not Crystalnacht.

*  My statement that French Fries were “neither French nor Fried” was not entirely accurate  (8/2/80).

*  Funnyman Jerry Lewis did not have a stillborn twin named Jesse Garon Levitch (7/5/94).

 *  Speaking of the King of Comedy, there is no convincing evidence that in the early 1990s he was planning a sequel to The Geisha Boy exploring the “dark side” of Mr. Wooley, to be titled The Day Watanabe Cried, (10/26/93).

*  In my second-ever column (published on 3/5/66), I gave a misleading account of the censorship controversy surrounding the Disney film That Darn C**t.  The film, starring Don Knotts, Dean Jones, Roddy McDowell, Kathleen Freeman, Ed Wynn, and Clint Howard, was withdrawn from circulation not because of the somewhat risqué title, but because of a brief scene in which Clint Howard held hands with an African American child.

THE THREE-DOT ROUNDUP will be back next week!   Thank you for letting l’il ol’ me air some of my dirty laundry, and I am quite sure you very, very kind people will forgive me, AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE LIVING IN BROOKLYN! 

(Mr. Sommer’s opinions and grasp of reality are entirely his own)

Tim Sommer has been employed to varying degrees of gainfulness as a musician, record producer, DJ, VJ, and music industry executive.   This spring he will be in a bookstore near you with his co-author Paul Sherman promoting their new work, Dick Sargent:  Second Darrin But First in Our Hearts, and he continues his efforts to get the New York Yankees to rename Yankee Stadium after one of their best and bravest, Mr. Elston Howard.