Talk about a blast from the past! Not to mention, showing my age. So when George the Galapagos Tortoise was discovered in 1972, he might have been named after the comedian. Don't mean to highjack your thread, but older DUers will enjoy remembering George Gobel.
'Lonesome George' Gobel, early TV comic, dies
February 25, 1991|By Los Angeles Times
GEORGE GOBEL, the sad-eyed comic with the flat-top haircut whose battles with his television wife, "Spooky Old Alice," added a dimension to domestic warfare in the 1950s, died yesterday.
Gobel carried several sobriquets throughout his lengthy career, which began when he was 11 and singing as "Little George Gobel" on radio's "The National Barn Dance." He next became "Lonesome George," singer of sad cowboy ballads in which he would pick at his guitar while pining for lost loves, or evenings on the prairie.
But his flair as a short, 5-foot-5 teller of tall tales, kept him at, or near, the top of the ratings throughout the 1954-to-1960 run of "The George Gobel Show." (Later, he was a regular on Hollywood Squares.)
Gobel learned to fly and in 1943 enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Although he wanted to be a fighter pilot, he was assigned as a B-26 pilot instructor to Frederic, Okla. As Gobel recalled: "You might laugh at that, but we must have done a good job down there because not one enemy plane got past Tulsa."
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-02-25/features/199105613
And from Wikipedia:
"Gobel began a comedy show on NBC in 1954.[6] It showcased his quiet, homespun style of humor, a low-key alternative to what audiences had seen on Milton Berle's shows. A huge success, the popular series made the crewcut Gobel one of the biggest comedy stars of the 1950s. The weekly show regularly featured guest artists, and the biggest stars of the day appeared (including Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Tennessee Ernie Ford). In 1955, Gobel won an Emmy Award for "most outstanding new personality."[7] Gobel and his business manager David P. O'Malley[8] formed a production company, Gomalco, a composite of their last names Gobel and O'Malley. This company also produced the first four years (1957–61) of the 1957-63 television series Leave It to Beaver.
The centerpiece of Gobel's comedy show was his monologue about his supposed past situations and experiences, with stories and sketches allegedly about his real-life wife, Alice (nicknamed "Spooky Old Alice" and played by actress Jeff Donnell). Gobel's hesitant, almost shy delivery and penchant for tangled digressions were the chief sources of comedy, more important than the actual content of the stories. His monologues popularized several catchphrases, notably "Well, I'll be a dirty bird" (spoken by the Kathy Bates character in the 1990 film Misery), "You don't hardly get those any more" and "Well then there now" (spoken by the James Dean character during a brief imitation of Gobel in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause)."
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