"I Am Resembling Maybe the Bloomer Girls?": The Way It Was, 14 January

1945---Returning to New York (specifically, the Astor Hotel) to do a couple of shows, Jack Benny learns one of those wanting to welcome him is Allen’s Alley’s resident Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious), who invites him to be guest of honour at her new restaurant ("What a romantic place---we feature soft lights and hard salami") after the show ("We are also featuring a floor show which would make Sherman Billingsley turn Greek with envy"), on tonight’s edition of The Lucky Strike Program with Jack Benny. (NBC.)

CHANNEL SURFING

1907: AUDION THE AIR---Lee DeForest receives the patent for his Audion vacuum tube, the tube that improved the earlier John Fleming diode vacuum tube detector, and helped make longer-distance radio transmission possible and more practical at once.

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN ON THIS DATE, BUT I DIDN’T KNOW THIS UNTIL NOW---The child prodigy whose performance of Schubert’s The Bee triggered the Fred Allen-Jack Benny mock feud (the lad performed on Allen’s Town Hall Tonight; Allen cracked that a certain violin-playing comic "should be ashamed") didn’t go unforgotten by either Fred Allen or Jack Benny.

The two comedians (who were actually good friends in real life) ended up collaborating to begin Stuart Canin’s advanced musical education, when they handed him a check for $1,000 at the premiere of their 1940 film Love Thy Neighbour. That check began Canin toward a distinguished musical career that has seen him become a distinguished violinist, teacher, and concertmaster, the latter including with the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, and the Los Angeles Opera.