Margaret Boswell enters with
Garry. A columnist for the Southern
Illinoisan newspaper, she wrote a column praising the show last August, and mentioned
her desire to be on the show someday.
The producers brought her to New York, and for this episode, she sits on
Garry’s right for the entire program, taking in the action from “the best seat
in the house”.
Garry next recognizes in the audience
three Navy men (Allen Steele, Jim Dixon, Jim Bennett) who were part of the crew
of the USS Triton, a nuclear submarine which had just completed the first fully
submerged voyage around the world.
Next, Garry introduces Betsy, their “Foreign
Correspondent” who went to London to cover the wedding of Princess Margaret (
E384
) last Friday. He reads from a fake
“bulletin” that CBS News made up as a prank, suggesting Betsy caused all sorts
of mayhem while she was there. Then
finally, more than eight minutes into the show, we meet our first actual
contestant.
Michael McNamara from Crown Point, New York: “I can tap dance
while standing on my hands”
McNamara,
who’s 13 years old here, dazzles the panel and studio audience with a brief but
astonishing acrobatic routine, ending with the promised tap dance. He has “tap mittens.” McNamara would appear again on the show two
years later (
E504
), but his promising acrobatic career would be cut short in
1967 when he died after being struck by a car while in college.
Special Guest Wally Cox: “I have enough full-size furniture to
fill a room”
Cox wheels in a small, covered pallet
and proceeds to assemble the furniture while the blindfolded panel asks their
questions. The furniture is a new line of modular pieces called “Magic Wedge”
which did not make much of a dent in the industry. The demonstration starts off
impressively, but dissolves into slapstick lunacy to the great delight of the
audience. Cox first gained fame as science teacher Mister Peepers (1952-1955) and was a popular character actor in TV
and film for years after. He later would
provide the voice of the canine cartoon superhero Underdog and was seen regularly in the upper left corner of the
grid in the original version of The
Hollywood Squares.
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