Molly

Plotnik just took an unexpected jaunt down memory lane. In The Great Mushnik's blog this morning, he was lamenting being unable to find anything to watch on TV on a Saturday night, to the point of even having surfed past Lawrence Welk. He's still on!

Grammy and Grampy Plotnik LOVED Lawrence Welk. In the 1950s they would make us watch with them if we were staying over on a Saturday night. It was dreadful even then.

The only other show Plotnik remembers his grandparents watching was "The Goldbergs." It starred Gertrude Berg, who was known as Molly Goldberg on the show, and who wrote, produced and owned the show, first on radio in the 1930s and then on into the mid 1950s on TV. Grammy and Grampy P. would laugh hysterically at the warblings of the stereotypical Jewish mama living in a tenement in the Bronx. Plottie's grandpa had come from Rumania and his grandma from Ukraine, and neither had ever lived in the Bronx, but Molly Berg really made them happy. She was their soul food.

So Plot Googled her this morning. What an interesting story. A fascinating sidelight is that on radio she had a husband, Jake, played by an actor who died in 1945. So she just continued the part, always having him off-mike, so she would repeat the words he would have spoken if he'd really been there.

Then, when Berg convinced CBS execs that her show would run successfully on TV, the husband was played by Philip Loeb. But there was a problem: Loeb had been accused of being disloyal by Senator McCarthy, and so he, like so many others, was blacklisted. This meant nobody in Hollywood or New York would hire him.

When CBS asked Berg to drop Loeb and get another 'husband,' she refused. So they canceled the show. There was such an uproar from the public that NBC decided to sign the show for the following year, but only if Berg dropped Loeb.

So she did -- others played her husband on the show - but she continued to pay Phil Loeb his salary through all the years he was unable to work anywhere as an actor, all the way through 1955 when he committed suicide.

And then NBC decided to 'modernize' the Goldbergs and move them from the Bronx to a suburb, and there the show died.

What does TGP remember about The Goldbergs? Just the old lady, Molly Goldberg, sticking her head out the window. She seemed like Plotnik's and every one else's grandmother, though he knew nothing at all about tenement life. Each show began the same way: Molly would yell "Helll-LOOOOOO!" Grampy and Grammy would also yell "Helll-LOOOOO!," he in his easy chair at the end of the room, next to the little wooden caddy with the holes for his pipes and humidor for his cigars, and her from the sofa, sitting on top of the plastic slipcover, which probably never came off all the years they owned it.

Gertrude Berg died in 1966, which was seven years before the Broadway Musical "Molly" premiered on Broadway.

"Hellll-LOOOOO!"