Garry is taking a week off, so the three regular panelists take turns hosting segments. Day and Monroe are both on hand to keep the panel at four.
Jack Warhop: “I pitched Babe Ruth his first home run ball”
Bill hosts this segment. Warhop was a last-minute substitution for Roger Bannister when the runner’s scheduled appearance flamed out (See below). He started his pro career in 1908 with the New York Highlanders, a franchise that would officially become the New York Yankees in 1913. He played his entire career with the team, ending in 1915. Warhop had a career record of 69-92 playing for a team that was not nearly the powerhouse that they would become just a few years later. The home run pitch came on May 6, 1915. Ruth, at that early point in his career, played for the rival Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox would sell Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 for $125,000. Warhop is almost seventy years old here.
Unidentified judge: "I fined my mother-in-law five dollars"
Jayne hosts this segment. No details are known.
Special Guest Frankie Laine: “I have the
President of Vaughn Monroe’s fan club under the desk”
Henry hosts this segment. Monroe was a singer and big band leader who enjoyed two decades of success in the 1940s and 1950s. Laine was also a popular singer of roughly the same time period. Henry gets the two confused and says at the end of the segment that the young woman hiding under the desk is Laine's fan, not Monroe's. The young woman is probably 15-year-old Carolyn Ford from Camden, New Jersey, described as "vivacious" in a Philadelphia Inquirer profile.
More interesting than who the guests were on this episode is the guest that got away. A few days earlier. British runner Roger Bannister had broken a seemingly impossible barrier in the world of track, running a mile in less than four minutes. This instantly became international news, and producer Allan Sherman arranged to fly Bannister to New York to appear on this episode. Despite Sherman's best attempts at secrecy, word soon got out that Bannister was arriving in the states, and when his plane landed at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, he and his small party were met with a circus-like atmosphere. Things deteriorate quickly for the Secret folks when the British faction learned that their guy would be appearing on a commercially sponsored program. Virtually all British television at the time was government-run. Worse, the sponsor was a cigarette company. That was a big no-no to Bannister, a medical student who would go on to have a forty-year career in neurology. In a mindset that seems almost adorably quaint today, a deeper concern was that Bannister could endanger his amateur standing by winning money on a game show, even (as was the plan) if the money was donated to charity. In the end, Bannister appeared on a few news programs and flew back to England, without ever facing the Secret panel.
John Crosby, a syndicated newspaper columnist and at the time one of the nation's leading media critics, wrote a delightfully snide article about the failure of Secret to land its prized guest.
This episode has not been reviewed. Information comes from alternate sources, including Gil Fates' handwritten notes. Quoted secrets are based on those notes and are believed to be accurate.
This site was created with the Nicepage