79     April 14, 1954
Bill, Jayne, Henry, Polly Bergen

Gonzalo Naranjo from Havana, Cuba:  “I caught the first baseball thrown by President Eisenhower.”
The tradition of a president throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of a baseball season goes back to William Howard Taft in 1910.  Ike's pitch happened earlier today in Washington, DC, and the Secret staff whisked Naranjo to New York to appear on this live broadcast just hours later.  Thing is, the secret as stated didn't happen that way.  In those days, the president threw the ball from the stands, and there was no designated recipient of the pitch.  M uch like wedding guests do for a bride's bouquet, players from both teams would jostle and scramble to see who could catch it.  The honor that day fell to New York Yankees pitcher Johnny Sain.  But afterwards, Eisenhower playfully engaged the 18-year-old Naranjo, a lowly batting-practice pitcher on the Washington Senators staff, in a brief game of catch.  The crowd and the press loved it, and the Secret people brought Naranjo with them to New York instead.  They didn't even bother to replace the art card with the secret on it.  Naranjo, known as "Cholly" to his friends, never played for the Senators, and was in fact sold by the team that same day.  He would briefly play for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1956, but otherwise played minor league ball and winter leagues in his native Cuba.  He died from COVID complications in 2022 at the age of 87.

Dr Don Wiseman from New York City: "I helped take out Polly Bergen's appendix"
Polly had the surgery a few days ago at Mt Sinai Hospital, which is why Faye had filled in for her last week.  Polly was excused from playing this round.

Special Guest Thomas Mitchell: "I'm sitting on Jayne Meadows' Easter bonnet"
An easily recognizable character actor, Mitchell's movies include Stagecoach (for which he won an Oscar), Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Only Angels Have Wings, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Gone With the Wind .  Remarkably, all five of those films were released in 1939.  He made films in other years too.  Today, he is possibly best remembered as the bumbling Uncle Billy in It's A Wonderful Life (1946), one of the four times he worked with director Frank Capra.  Mitchell also has the distinction of being the first male actor to have won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award.