 |  |
| December, 1949 Hi, gang! “Frankie says” a very Merry Christmas to all of you and that comes from all of us, both my Nancys, Frank and Christina. It’s been a grand ten years I’ve had with all of you. I hope there are ten more glorious years coming up and after that another ten, because plans are in the making for me to do my first ten years in show business in a picture in which I play myself, thank you. At the end of the next ten, up will come another picture along the same lines, in which I will still play myself. The third picture in the same vein, twenty years hence, maybe then I’ll ask Larry Parks to bat for me. But not until. My Christmas is going to be just like yours. I won’t be on the road some place, playing a theater or a benefit or anything, because I have ten radio shows to do each week, and that keeps me close to home. I’ll have time to do some shopping. I haven’t done that in five years because something has always kept me away from home. I usually landed back Christmas Eve or Christmas morning and poor Nancy had to do it all. But not this year. Ten years ago I was away from home, too. I was in Cleveland with Harry James where we were playing a theater engagement. I was feeling terrible, because about a week before Christmas I had caught a cold and as per usual had neglected it. Then the day before Christmas I was ordered to bed and ordered to stay there, because the doctor told me that I was on the verge of pneumonia. It was awfully lonesome in that room of mine. The doctor had sent the bellboy out for a small bottle of a brown mixture that tasted terrible. My instructions were to take a spoonful every hour on the hour. No more, just a spoonful, because it had a. powerful drug in it. Along about ten o’clock Christmas Eve, the phone rang. It was my wife calling from Jersey City to wish me a Merry Christmas. She wanted to know what was the matter with me and I told her that I had a slight cold and was taking it easy. But I knew Nancy and how she would worry her pretty little head, so I tried to be jolly and carefree on the phone. When she hung up, I passed out. At eleven o’clock that evening, the bellboy brought me a package. It was Nancy’s Christmas box and in it was a pair of heavy leather gloves. I tried them on but my fingers got stuck and I discovered a rolled-up dollar bill in each finger. Boy, I was rich. Ten whole dollars. Right there and then I decided nothing was going to get me down and that I’d do anything to keep faith with that grand wife of mine. I hopped out of bed, pardon me, I crawled out of bed, and phoned downstairs to the clerk to send a bellboy up. When he appeared, I gave him the bottle of that horrible brown mixture and told him to get me ten dollars’ worth of it. I drank the whole thing right down when he came back with it. After that I don’t remember anything until I woke up the next morning, which was Christmas, with the doctor bending over me and in the background the faint outlines of two of the maids. The doctor was giving me a terrific bawling out for doing what I had done, but with an added chuckle he told me that it had probably saved my life. My temperature was normal and the fever had gone someplace else. He also added that it probably would have killed anybody else. But that’s all water under the bridge. Ten very hectic years have passed since that little episode but once a year, at this time, I like to get by myself and go over each individual Christmas and recall memories. Somehow or other I always come out of my revery a more humble and thankful human being. Yours, 
|