Barrett Kirkendall of Cleveland Heights, Ohio: "I'm escaping from a strait-jacket"
With the panel blindfolded, Kirkendall is lowered to the stage from above, hanging by his legs. He answers the questions upside-down while attempting his escape, which he achieves easily. He then demonstrates fire tasting and fire eating with Garry's cigarette. Kirkendall would continue to perform occasionally, mostly at trade shows and similar events, through the early seventies. By day, he was an insurance salesman. At some point in the sixties, he began billing himself as "Dante the Magician" but made no secret of his real name. Oddly, "Dante the Magician" was also the name of a popular vaudevillian prestidigitator who died in 1955.
Ida Link of Tuttle, Oklahoma: "My MOTHER is backstage"
Ida herself is a frail 75-year-old great-great-grandmother helped onto the stage by Garry. We then meet four increasingly younger generations of the family, all the way down to the youngest, two-month-old Gayla Jo West. After the game, 92-year-old Mary Lowry, the great-great-GREAT-grandmother of Gayla Jo, spryly walks on stage. Mrs Lowry says that she's a fan of Garry's and that she goes to her son's house to watch him on TV. The show presents her with a Philco television of her own.
Special
Guest Charley Weaver: “I'm not Charlie Weaver. I'm really Dennis Day pretending to be Charlie Weaver”
With the panel blindfolded yet again, Day comes out made up as Charley (The show spells Charley's name wrong on the cards.) Cliff Arquette, the real-life actor who created Charley, had been a co-star on The Dennis Day Show (1952-54) which is probably where Day picked up his remarkable impression. Charley wanders in during the game, and the two take turns answering the panel's questions. Arquette was a busy comic actor, primarily in radio, where he started playing his "Charley Weaver" character in the 1940s. He retired from show business in 1956, but a year later started making wildly popular appearances on Jack Paar's
Tonight
show, always in character as Charley. That led to a successful "second act" career in which Arquette made many television appearances over the next two decades (most notably on the game show The Hollywood Squares) almost always in character.
This episode HAS been reviewed at the Library of Congress, but is not generally available to collectors.
This site was created with the Nicepage