The Miami News – Feb 4, 1947
On The Wing
With GRACE WING
ARCHIE: It was a far cry from
Duffy’s Tavern to the palatial yachts over which I climbed to find Ed (Archie)
Gardner yesterday afternoon. But Archie himself turned out to be the
dyed-in-the-wool image of just what you hear on the radio.
Reason is that Gardner doesn’t
tailor his personality to fit the role of Archie the Malaprop. The part was
written for him in the first place. His good-natured, slightly bewildered drawl
sounds just the same whether he’s stewing over a telephone call from Duffy or
regaling luncheon guests with spicy stories as he was doing yesterday.
“How’d you get to be Archie?” I
asked him.
He told me he used to be a radio
producer and writer, and that he dreamed up a serial about New York as seen
through the eyes of a rich man and a bum.
“Respective eyes, I mean—there were
two characters,” he chuckled. “We auditioned a lot of guys for the part of the
rich man and I always read the bum’s lines. When it came time to start the show
everybody had already begun thinking of me as the bum anyway so I just went on
with the part,” he explained.
“. . . so here I am on a yacht,” he grinned sheepishly.
There were two long yachts tied up at the dock of the Star island waterfront home where Gardner and his wife were visiting. In order to reach the outside boat where they were it was necessary to climb over the first one. The water looked gray and chill below as the yachts swung back and forth and I stepped waveringly from one to the other. It was a hard maneuver to execute sober and I wondered what would happen to anybody who tried it otherwise, I found out . . .
The night before, Gardner told me, he had come home humming happily to himself, from a party on somebody else’s boat, and had made a slight error in distance and fallen plop! into the drink. The crew fished him out shivering and chattering.
“I’d been wanting to go swimming in all pretty water,” he said waving at the surrounding bay, “but after you hear what they say about it you won’t let yourself. So I’m kinda glad I fell in anyway,” he mused philosophically.
CALL The Gardner own their own boat in California where their home is—only they don’t stay there much. Recently they
flew to New York and decided a few days after arriving that they would telephone their son who is exactly two years and nine months old. So they put in a call for Mr. Edward Gardner, jr.
“New York calling Mr. Edward Gardner. Jr.,” they heard the long distance operator tell the nurse in their home when she answered.
“Mr. Gardner will not be available for an hour and a half,” they heard the nurse reply. They assumed, correctly enough, that Mr. Gardner was sleeping. Next day they tried again.
“New York calling Mr. Edward Gardner, jr.,” the operator said again.
The nurse called time out for a moment then said, “He won’t talk.”
“But . . . but this is New York calling Mr. Gardner.” the operator insisted. “Doesn’t he wish to take the call?”
“I’m sorry. Sometimes he will talk and sometimes he won’t,” the nurse declared somewhat doggedly
By that time the Gardners were exploding at the picture the long distance operator was forming of their son—a hard-boiled executive who couldn’t be bothered with coast-to-coast telephone calls.
“Didn’t he ever condescend to speak to you?” I ask Gardner.
“Oh, yes the following day he began to ask for us and the nurse called us back,” he said.
On our way back to the house the yacht skipper asked Gardner for his autograph. He stood on the swaying deck, one foot on the gunwale.
“You got a fountain pen?” he asked me I handed it over and he wrote a few lines. “Now you can brag about having a pen that writes over water,” he told me.
BULK: Our elevator man in the News Tower voiced the concensus about Primo Carnera when the King-size Italian came around for a recent visit.
“Only way I’d wrestle that guy,” he observed grimly, “would be with him up to his neck in sand. He ain’t human.”
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