Garry excitedly welcomes Faye back from vacation, even though she only took one week off.
Our first guest wheels in a wild-looking contraption.
Russell Oakes from Waukesha, Wisconsin: "It's a cigarette lighter"
Professor Oakes has made a name for himself with his wacky inventions. The name he originally made for himself was "I.M. Nuts," the silly pseudonym he used for a series of film shorts in the 1940s. He's notable enough that a couple of the panelists are familiar with him. The "Wizard of Waukesha" made around fifty inventions in his career, some simple and others that rivaled Rube Goldberg's comic drawings in their complexity, but all just designed to get a laugh. He never patented any of them. In addition to the cigarette lighter, Oakes demonstrates three other gizmos, including a giant "self-finding non-losable golf ball" and a "catsup getter-outer." Garry remarks that Oakes is the happiest person he knows.
Jill Adams from Lancaster, South Carolina: "Somebody stole my bathtub"
A silly secret, but one that provides a few laughs. Jayne wants to know, for instance, if the object is something that would be used for special occasions, such as if you were expecting guests. Henry rifles through various rooms of the home where the object might be found, and as soon as he lands on bathroom, he immediately passes. The robbery happened last fall, and the mystery has still not been solved. Garry therefore addresses the audience and warns them to be on the lookout for the bathtub thief. He even helpfully includes an artist's rendering of what the suspect looks like, which is just a drawing of a man carrying a bathtub on his back, his face completely obscured. Says Garry, "You better come clean, bub, because you're all washed up."
Special guest Ralph Bellamy upstages the panelists
With the panel offstage, Bellamy first explains the concept to the audience, using Garry as his stooge. In its simplest form, "upstaging" means to walk upstage (away from the audience) in a show, so that the people you're talking to must turn their backs to the audience to continue the conversation. Upstaging can take other forms as well, usually by doing distracting little things that draw attention to you and away from the other performers. As each panelist joins Bellamy at center stage to ask their questions, Bellamy masterfully pulls off various bit of upstaging, to the audience's delight.
Colleague Marshall Akers, who watched this show at the Library of Congress, said it was thoroughly entertaining all the way through. Bellamy, he says, is warm and fun throughout his segment. Marshall also points out that the timing may just have been a coincidence, but that just three weeks later, Bellamy would begin a long run as a regular panelist for the Goodson-Todman sister show To Tell the Truth.
This episode has been reviewed at the Library of Congress, but is not generally available to the public.