I have several favorite bookstores.
One of those is Chartwell Booksellers in New York, which I have never visited but have done business with by mail. Chartwell is a bookshop specializing in Winston Churchill books and related items.
They turned 40 on April 11th of this year, and have been celebrating by doing a series of readings. The first one was John Lithgow reading from William Manchester’s The Last Lion.
I thought some folks might get a kick out of the most recent reading: Bryan Cranston reads from Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins.
They are less than halfway through the series (the Cranston video is #19 out of a planned 40), so it might be worth subscribing to their YouTube channel so you can see what comes next.
Here’s something else I thought was interesting. I was tipped off to it by the second edition of Holstory, R.E.D. Nichols and John Witty’s book about the history of holsters in the 20th Century. I’ve written about that book previously (in both editions) so I won’t repeat myself here.
This is legendary holster designer Chic Gaylord’s appearance on “What’s My Line?” on May 1, 1960.
I’ve set the video to start with Mr. Gaylord’s appearance, but it won’t hurt you to watch the whole thing. The guest before him was Gloria Bale, a very cute trapeze artist. (If she was 17 at the time, she’d be 80 today, so there’s a chance she’s still alive. Miss Bale, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you had a wonderful life.) And the mystery guest is Laurence Harvey.
This is a nice flashback to a time when guns were less demonized then they are today (well, NYC possibly excepted). I really like Dorothy Kilgallen’s “Ooooo, I’d like one of those.” My only complaint is that they don’t show Mr. Gaylord with any of his products, but I’m sure there were practical and legal reasons why they couldn’t do that.
The TV gameshow I’ve Got a Secret, with host Gary Moore once had a guest whose secret was that he had a bunch of concealed handguns hidden on his person. I looked it up and his name was Mel Bernstein, who was known as the
“Machine Gun Preacher”, and was a gun dealer from Colorado.
I remembered seeing a recording of the episode and it was pretty impressive. The show ended in 1967, so since I was born in 1960, I was likely too young to remember it if I had seen it.
Thanks, pigpen. John Taffin also says he saw Mr. Gaylord with guns on another TV show when he was young, but he doesn’t sound sure what TV show it was.
I suppose there are only a limited number of possibilities, given the state of TV at the time.
If I can locate the videos of Mr. Gaylord or Mr. Bernstein, I’ll post them here. YouTube has a lot of “I’ve Got a Secret” episodes, but they don’t seem to be well labeled.
Chic appeared on Long John Nebel’s NYC-based TV show, according to The Record dated 27 May 1961. Nevel was the immediate predecessor to Larry King. Chic was a PR man by trade and this was the peak of his publicity; 1967 was his last press appearance, also in a NYC newspaper (Paris Theodore had just opened up Seventrees and took Chic’s maker with him).
A third edition is possible, even likely.
The appearance of Arvo Ojala as a contestant on To Tell The Truth is also available on Youtube.
Mr. Nichols:
Wow. Thank you for the comment, and for the backlink.
Long John Nebel’s show was a little before my time, and also outside of my geographic area. But I’m kind of generally familiar with him: he was mentioned more than a few times in James Randi’s and Martin Gardner’s books on pseudo-science. I didn’t even think of him in the Chic Gaylord context, but it’d make sense he’d show up there based on your history.
I will be looking forward to the third edition of Holstory, and hoping I can get both you and Mr. Witty to sign my copy.
Mr. Smith:
Thank you for pointing that out. I appreciate it.