For several years now, I have read about Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and its ease of use and installation on Power Macintosh computers. I recently bought an older version of YDL 2.3 and attempted to install and run it on my Power Macintosh G4 733 Quicksilver this afternoon.

”Installation”

The older version of YDL I bought came with no printed documentation. I was entirely on my own to figure out how to get the installation disc started. This was somewhat easy after poking my way around the CD from within the familiar confines of OSX.

I inserted the YDL CD into the G4’s drive and proceeded to restart the Mac by holding the “C” key down. Instead of OSX showing up, the CD booted the Mac into a very simple text only interface which allowed me to choose which YDL installer I wanted to run. The procedure was as simple as typing the desired installer into the command line.

Once that was done, the CD proceeded to a graphical installer. After going through a few initial screens YDL prompted me to choose where I wanted to install the system and what type of installation I wanted.

I had hoped that YDL would see my external firewire drive because that is where I always wanted to install a third operating system. No option for my firewire showed up. The only discs that the YDL installer could see were my 2 internal ATA drives and to my surprise, my external SCSI Zip 250 drive.

The Zip drive was completely out of the question. Each of my ATA drives has OSX in one and OS9 in another. Both of those drives have 2 partitions each with the respective OS’s occupying the first partition of each drive.

I decided YDL would go into the slave drive’s 2nd partition. This is the same drive I use almost daily to boot and run OSX.

The next step in the installation process was to decide whether I wanted the YDL “basic”, “home/office”, “developer”, “internet server” or “everything” options. I am a total Linux newbie and decided to just go for what I think I would be using YDL for. I chose “home/office.”

After that option was selected the installer proceeded along its happy way by installing all of the various packages and software into my hard drive’s partition. Familiar names such as Mozilla, Pine, Gimp, abiWord, Gnone, KDE and others zipped by as I watched the graphical bars fill themselves from left to right, indicating that the installation was going as smoothly as it could get. Upon finishing the installation stopped.

I was then prompted to select my local time, super user password, regular user login name and password and what default OS that I would like to use. The installer also asked me about monitor resolutions and whether or not I wanted some kind of boot installer loaded.

It also asked me where my OSX and OS9 partitions were located.

This was the funny part. When YDL’s installer asked me if I was using OS 9 and X I clicked yes. It then asked me where the OS’s were, as YDL presented me with a blank box that looked like the volumes for OSX and 9 should have been included. The trouble is that none were present in the box.

I figured perhaps that this was normal for YDL and proceeded to just click the option for DONE to each of the OS questions. I fully expected YDL to know where my OSX and OS9 discs were. The installer certainly let me continue.

A short time after, YDL told me that the installation was successful.

”Reboot and Trying to Run”

I know for a fact that I got the installation of YDL done. I know all of the packages and graphical front ends were installed.

The trouble is on the first boot into YDL, the computer just simply could not find YDL! It booted into OSX.

No problem I thought. I would just go to OSX’s Start Up Disk panel and choose YDL from there. I fully expected to see YDL listed as my 3rd start-up option along with the ever familiar OS9.

Nada. No YDL.

Another thing I noticed is that the YDL volume of its hard disc partition did not show up on any of my Mac’s desktops. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that the partition was now a Linux partition and as far as I know both my OSX and OS9 systems do not recognize that partition … hence its failure to show.

”Erase and Reinstall”

After trying to get this thing to mount through OS9 or through holding the OPTION key down at start-up, I decided to try and reinstall YDL again.

I went through the same installation procedure and had YDL reinstalled onto the same partition. One of the nice things that the YDL installer does is lets you erase a partitioned drive without resorting to blanking out the whole thing. Therefore on this second attempt I only had YDL erase YDL while keeping my OSX partition intact.

Again the installer was successful but still had the same problem in locating where my OSX and OS9 partitions were. The thing that I did differently here was to install the bootloader onto a small partition of my hard drive.

”Running YDL Again”

This time after the computer rebooted, YDL did kick in, but only into the command line. I could login to my user account and I could choose from the command line which OS I wanted to boot into (OSX, OS9 or YDL).

However I suspect that since YDL could not see OS9 or OSX during the installation process, it could not take me back to any of those OS’s through its command line option.

What made things even worst was that I could not get the thing to boot into one of the graphical interfaces, either KDE or Gnome.

While I am familiar with some of the common commands and programs in the Unix shell as well as on Darwin from within OSX, as I said earlier I am new to Linux. I also did not have time nor the desire at this point to want to continue using YDL … not with this set up at least.

I decided that YDL had to go.

”Easier Said Than Done”

I booted the computer back into OSX and proceeded to delete the partition from which YDL resided on.

Trouble was that YDL was on the same hard drive as OSX!

The first thing I did was to go to Apple’s Disk Utility program from within OSX. I remember having used it to partition my firewire drive.

I opened Disk Utility and selected my OSX/YDL drive. The OSX volume showed up but not the YDL. Drats I thought. How can I erase the YDL partition without messing up OSX?

Simply put, I couldn’t. Not from within OSX since it was my start-up volume.

I thought about nuking the drive from OS9. If I went that way, I would not only erase YDL, but also erase OSX. I certainly did not want to erase OSX and reinstall everything again!

”Send in the Clones”

Luckily not too long ago I had read about Carbon Copy Cloner and remembered that I installed it on my OSX partition. I decided to give the utility program a go.

I launched Carbon Copy Cloner and selected my OSX partition as the source drive. I also selected everything on that volume that I wanted to clone.

My firewire drive is a recently acquired LaCie 120GB that I split into 4 partitions. Since my OSX partition is only 18GB out of which only 5GB are actually being used, I decided to clone it to a blank partition on the LaCie drive. I selected the drive as the destination, logged in with my super user password and let carbon copy cloner do its job.

It took less than 10 minutes for Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from my OSX partition to my new partition on the firewire drive.

Now let me tell you here, that I had always known you could boot a G4 Power Mac from an external firewire device as long as it was plugged into the Mac itself and not a hub. I had never done this before, so this would be the test.

After Carbon Copy was finished cloning OSX to my firewire, I did a rudimentary check to make sure all of my OSX files and apps were on the firewire.

I knew what I had to do now.

I had to erase my entire original OSX drive in order get rid of the Yellow Dog.

I proceeded to restart the Mac and selected the external drive with my newly cloned copy of OSX on it. The Power Mac rebooted as normal and everything down to my desktop picture and the handful of files I had strewn on the desktop showed up from its new firewire home. The external boot into OSX was a success. The clone of my drive worked!

”Go Away YDL, Go Away!”

Upon that action, I proceeded back to my utilities folder and launched the Disk Utility. I selected the 40GB internal drive where I had my original copy of OSX and YDL installed. The first thing I did was simply ERASE the entire drive so that the whole thing was back to a blank Mac OS Extended format slab.

This got rid of YDL and also my original OSX 10.2.6.

After that I partitioned the drive back into 2 Mac sectors as I originally had before the YDL installation.

The last thing I did was launch Carbon Copy Cloner again and recopied all of my OSX partition back from my firewire drive onto its familiar home on my ATA internal drive. OSX is now running normally from its original home. YDL, you’re gone for now.

”Lessons Learned”

This little but time consuming exercise has taught me several things.

*1. If you are going to play around with an alternate OS, do it on an alternate Mac or at least an alternate hard drive.

*2. This exercise has reinforced my belief that it is best to have 2 different operating systems on 2 different hard drives. Even if we are talking about Mac OS9 and OSX here, having each on their own drives can solve a lot of potential problems (earlier this year my OS9 drive crashed and burned, but the Mac could still function with OSX until I installed a new drive and put OS9 back on that). The same holds true for Linux.

The Yellow Dog Linux installer could also see my external SCSI Zip Drive. I am quite confident that if I installed a large (let’s say 18GB) SCSI hard drive to my Power Mac G4, whether it be internal (the Mac has an empty bay for another drive) or external, that I could install YDL or another Linux distro there. I hope.

*3. The third lesson is that I probably should have bought the latest distro of YDL. They are currently at version 3. However since I had a shipping issue with Terra Soft, the vendors for Yellow Dog Linux, I went the cheap route and bought the older distribution from another source.

I know for sure that YDL 2.3 is compatible with my Power Mac G4 as it did recognize most all of my devices during installation and during the text only boot process. It did have an option to choose my 15 inch flat panel 2001 Mac ADC display. So I know it was compatible.

Perhaps it was a bug or something that I did completely wrong that made YDL not see my OSX and OS9 partitions. I’ll never know since the dog is now completely out of the house.

I have not given up. I will face the Dog another day and when I do, you will read about it again.

”’Mel is a Macintosh user and consultant and runs a Mac Web site at:”’ https://www.headgap.com/~macstar

For several years now, I have read about Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and its ease of use and installation on Power Macintosh computers. I recently bought an older version of YDL 2.3 and attempted to install and run it on my Power Macintosh G4 733 Quicksilver this afternoon.

”Installation”

The older version of YDL I bought came with no printed documentation. I was entirely on my own to figure out how to get the installation disc started. This was somewhat easy after poking my way around the CD from within the familiar confines of OSX.

I inserted the YDL CD into the G4’s drive and proceeded to restart the Mac by holding the “C” key down. Instead of OSX showing up, the CD booted the Mac into a very simple text only interface which allowed me to choose which YDL installer I wanted to run. The procedure was as simple as typing the desired installer into the command line.

Once that was done, the CD proceeded to a graphical installer. After going through a few initial screens YDL prompted me to choose where I wanted to install the system and what type of installation I wanted.

I had hoped that YDL would see my external firewire drive because that is where I always wanted to install a third operating system. No option for my firewire showed up. The only discs that the YDL installer could see were my 2 internal ATA drives and to my surprise, my external SCSI Zip 250 drive.

The Zip drive was completely out of the question. Each of my ATA drives has OSX in one and OS9 in another. Both of those drives have 2 partitions each with the respective OS’s occupying the first partition of each drive.

I decided YDL would go into the slave drive’s 2nd partition. This is the same drive I use almost daily to boot and run OSX.

The next step in the installation process was to decide whether I wanted the YDL “basic”, “home/office”, “developer”, “internet server” or “everything” options. I am a total Linux newbie and decided to just go for what I think I would be using YDL for. I chose “home/office.”

After that option was selected the installer proceeded along its happy way by installing all of the various packages and software into my hard drive’s partition. Familiar names such as Mozilla, Pine, Gimp, abiWord, Gnone, KDE and others zipped by as I watched the graphical bars fill themselves from left to right, indicating that the installation was going as smoothly as it could get. Upon finishing the installation stopped.

I was then prompted to select my local time, super user password, regular user login name and password and what default OS that I would like to use. The installer also asked me about monitor resolutions and whether or not I wanted some kind of boot installer loaded.

It also asked me where my OSX and OS9 partitions were located.

This was the funny part. When YDL’s installer asked me if I was using OS 9 and X I clicked yes. It then asked me where the OS’s were, as YDL presented me with a blank box that looked like the volumes for OSX and 9 should have been included. The trouble is that none were present in the box.

I figured perhaps that this was normal for YDL and proceeded to just click the option for DONE to each of the OS questions. I fully expected YDL to know where my OSX and OS9 discs were. The installer certainly let me continue.

A short time after, YDL told me that the installation was successful.

”Reboot and Trying to Run”

I know for a fact that I got the installation of YDL done. I know all of the packages and graphical front ends were installed.

The trouble is on the first boot into YDL, the computer just simply could not find YDL! It booted into OSX.

No problem I thought. I would just go to OSX’s Start Up Disk panel and choose YDL from there. I fully expected to see YDL listed as my 3rd start-up option along with the ever familiar OS9.

Nada. No YDL.

Another thing I noticed is that the YDL volume of its hard disc partition did not show up on any of my Mac’s desktops. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that the partition was now a Linux partition and as far as I know both my OSX and OS9 systems do not recognize that partition … hence its failure to show.

”Erase and Reinstall”

After trying to get this thing to mount through OS9 or through holding the OPTION key down at start-up, I decided to try and reinstall YDL again.

I went through the same installation procedure and had YDL reinstalled onto the same partition. One of the nice things that the YDL installer does is lets you erase a partitioned drive without resorting to blanking out the whole thing. Therefore on this second attempt I only had YDL erase YDL while keeping my OSX partition intact.

Again the installer was successful but still had the same problem in locating where my OSX and OS9 partitions were. The thing that I did differently here was to install the bootloader onto a small partition of my hard drive.

”Running YDL Again”

This time after the computer rebooted, YDL did kick in, but only into the command line. I could login to my user account and I could choose from the command line which OS I wanted to boot into (OSX, OS9 or YDL).

However I suspect that since YDL could not see OS9 or OSX during the installation process, it could not take me back to any of those OS’s through its command line option.

What made things even worst was that I could not get the thing to boot into one of the graphical interfaces, either KDE or Gnome.

While I am familiar with some of the common commands and programs in the Unix shell as well as on Darwin from within OSX, as I said earlier I am new to Linux. I also did not have time nor the desire at this point to want to continue using YDL … not with this set up at least.

I decided that YDL had to go.

”Easier Said Than Done”

I booted the computer back into OSX and proceeded to delete the partition from which YDL resided on.

Trouble was that YDL was on the same hard drive as OSX!

The first thing I did was to go to Apple’s Disk Utility program from within OSX. I remember having used it to partition my firewire drive.

I opened Disk Utility and selected my OSX/YDL drive. The OSX volume showed up but not the YDL. Drats I thought. How can I erase the YDL partition without messing up OSX?

Simply put, I couldn’t. Not from within OSX since it was my start-up volume.

I thought about nuking the drive from OS9. If I went that way, I would not only erase YDL, but also erase OSX. I certainly did not want to erase OSX and reinstall everything again!

”Send in the Clones”

Luckily not too long ago I had read about Carbon Copy Cloner and remembered that I installed it on my OSX partition. I decided to give the utility program a go.

I launched Carbon Copy Cloner and selected my OSX partition as the source drive. I also selected everything on that volume that I wanted to clone.

My firewire drive is a recently acquired LaCie 120GB that I split into 4 partitions. Since my OSX partition is only 18GB out of which only 5GB are actually being used, I decided to clone it to a blank partition on the LaCie drive. I selected the drive as the destination, logged in with my super user password and let carbon copy cloner do its job.

It took less than 10 minutes for Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from my OSX partition to my new partition on the firewire drive.

Now let me tell you here, that I had always known you could boot a G4 Power Mac from an external firewire device as long as it was plugged into the Mac itself and not a hub. I had never done this before, so this would be the test.

After Carbon Copy was finished cloning OSX to my firewire, I did a rudimentary check to make sure all of my OSX files and apps were on the firewire.

I knew what I had to do now.

I had to erase my entire original OSX drive in order get rid of the Yellow Dog.

I proceeded to restart the Mac and selected the external drive with my newly cloned copy of OSX on it. The Power Mac rebooted as normal and everything down to my desktop picture and the handful of files I had strewn on the desktop showed up from its new firewire home. The external boot into OSX was a success. The clone of my drive worked!

”Go Away YDL, Go Away!”

Upon that action, I proceeded back to my utilities folder and launched the Disk Utility. I selected the 40GB internal drive where I had my original copy of OSX and YDL installed. The first thing I did was simply ERASE the entire drive so that the whole thing was back to a blank Mac OS Extended format slab.

This got rid of YDL and also my original OSX 10.2.6.

After that I partitioned the drive back into 2 Mac sectors as I originally had before the YDL installation.

The last thing I did was launch Carbon Copy Cloner again and recopied all of my OSX partition back from my firewire drive onto its familiar home on my ATA internal drive. OSX is now running normally from its original home. YDL, you’re gone for now.

”Lessons Learned”

This little but time consuming exercise has taught me several things.

*1. If you are going to play around with an alternate OS, do it on an alternate Mac or at least an alternate hard drive.

*2. This exercise has reinforced my belief that it is best to have 2 different operating systems on 2 different hard drives. Even if we are talking about Mac OS9 and OSX here, having each on their own drives can solve a lot of potential problems (earlier this year my OS9 drive crashed and burned, but the Mac could still function with OSX until I installed a new drive and put OS9 back on that). The same holds true for Linux.

The Yellow Dog Linux installer could also see my external SCSI Zip Drive. I am quite confident that if I installed a large (let’s say 18GB) SCSI hard drive to my Power Mac G4, whether it be internal (the Mac has an empty bay for another drive) or external, that I could install YDL or another Linux distro there. I hope.

*3. The third lesson is that I probably should have bought the latest distro of YDL. They are currently at version 3. However since I had a shipping issue with Terra Soft, the vendors for Yellow Dog Linux, I went the cheap route and bought the older distribution from another source.

I know for sure that YDL 2.3 is compatible with my Power Mac G4 as it did recognize most all of my devices during installation and during the text only boot process. It did have an option to choose my 15 inch flat panel 2001 Mac ADC display. So I know it was compatible.

Perhaps it was a bug or something that I did completely wrong that made YDL not see my OSX and OS9 partitions. I’ll never know since the dog is now completely out of the house.

I have not given up. I will face the Dog another day and when I do, you will read about it again.

”’Mel is a Macintosh user and consultant and runs a Mac Web site at:”’ https://www.headgap.com/~macstar

As you may not be aware, low back pain is the most expensive health problem in the United States.

It was deemed important enough that efforts were made by the government to get some guidelines for treating low back pain, but the medical profession would not provide any.

Therefore, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) was formed. This multidisciplinary panel formulated a Clinical Practice Guideline called Acute Low Back Problems in Adults: Assessment and Treatment, Dec. ’94. Significant in the recommendations was “manipulation” for “nonspecific low back symptoms.” That may sound like cautious praise for a chiropractic modality but it was sufficient to provoke a group of medical orthopedic surgeons to pressure their congress people to stop the AHCPR from doing any more clinical guidelines. That’s raw political power. The American Medical Association subsequently issued its own identical guidelines with one exception, no mention of “manipulation.” That’s audacity.

It’s a shame too. Another huge health problem is headaches and a panel was formed to investigate appropriate clinical practice. The M.D.s involved knew of this project and were in a big hurry to have it stopped. It was, but then the Duke University picked up the project with private funding and continued to publication. Incidentally, cervicogenic (meaning starts in the neck spine) headaches are the most common type.

”Chiropractic Highly Effective for Cervicogenic Headaches”

A multidisciplinary panel of 19 experts convened by Duke University Evidence-Based Practice Center in Durham, NC, has concluded that chiropractic adjustments are a highly effective solution to cervicogenic headache. The new report, which reviewed over 2,500 studies on headache treatments (including several on chiropractic), picked up where the never-published Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) investigation left off.

According to the report, “Manipulation appeared to result in immediate improvement in headache severity when used to treat episodes of cervicogenic headache when compared with an attention-placebo control.

“Furthermore, when compared to soft-tissue therapies (massage), a course of manipulation treatments resulted in sustained improvement in headache frequency and severity.”

“Compared to other physical treatment methods (including physiotherapy, acupuncture, and electrical stimulation), the evidence supporting chiropractic appears to be more robust,” noted the Federation of Chiropractic Education and Research’s news release on the study.

Duke University Evidence-based Practice Center – March 6, 2001. https://www.fcer.org

Do you remember not reading about this huge revelation on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal or seeing it on 20/20? Exactly. What do you think would have happened to those huge primetime pill popper P.R. campaigns if this kind of information were to make it to the light of day?

Oh, another detail. About a decade ago, it was projected that in a decade or so, Degenerative Osteoarthritis would be the #1 cause of disability in the United States. That day is here and it is so. Can you see the connection between not taking care of spinal problems that cause low back pain, headaches and other common maladies; and subsequent deterioration into a crippling Arthritic condition after a few years?

Good gracious folks, this is the 21st century. How long will so many of you put up with antiquated, inappropriate, even dangerous healthcare? All choices are yours.

”’Rik Cederstrom, a licensed Chiropractor in Hawaii, has a Bachelors in Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Doctorate in Chiropractic from Western States Chiropractic College in Portland, Oregon. He approaches his patients’ health from a wholistic point of view, including nutrition, exercise and lifestyle, focusing on spinal correction. Send questions and comments to him at:”’ mailto:Dr_Rik_DC@juno.com

As you may not be aware, low back pain is the most expensive health problem in the United States.

It was deemed important enough that efforts were made by the government to get some guidelines for treating low back pain, but the medical profession would not provide any.

Therefore, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) was formed. This multidisciplinary panel formulated a Clinical Practice Guideline called Acute Low Back Problems in Adults: Assessment and Treatment, Dec. ’94. Significant in the recommendations was “manipulation” for “nonspecific low back symptoms.” That may sound like cautious praise for a chiropractic modality but it was sufficient to provoke a group of medical orthopedic surgeons to pressure their congress people to stop the AHCPR from doing any more clinical guidelines. That’s raw political power. The American Medical Association subsequently issued its own identical guidelines with one exception, no mention of “manipulation.” That’s audacity.

It’s a shame too. Another huge health problem is headaches and a panel was formed to investigate appropriate clinical practice. The M.D.s involved knew of this project and were in a big hurry to have it stopped. It was, but then the Duke University picked up the project with private funding and continued to publication. Incidentally, cervicogenic (meaning starts in the neck spine) headaches are the most common type.

”Chiropractic Highly Effective for Cervicogenic Headaches”

A multidisciplinary panel of 19 experts convened by Duke University Evidence-Based Practice Center in Durham, NC, has concluded that chiropractic adjustments are a highly effective solution to cervicogenic headache. The new report, which reviewed over 2,500 studies on headache treatments (including several on chiropractic), picked up where the never-published Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) investigation left off.

According to the report, “Manipulation appeared to result in immediate improvement in headache severity when used to treat episodes of cervicogenic headache when compared with an attention-placebo control.

“Furthermore, when compared to soft-tissue therapies (massage), a course of manipulation treatments resulted in sustained improvement in headache frequency and severity.”

“Compared to other physical treatment methods (including physiotherapy, acupuncture, and electrical stimulation), the evidence supporting chiropractic appears to be more robust,” noted the Federation of Chiropractic Education and Research’s news release on the study.

Duke University Evidence-based Practice Center – March 6, 2001. https://www.fcer.org

Do you remember not reading about this huge revelation on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal or seeing it on 20/20? Exactly. What do you think would have happened to those huge primetime pill popper P.R. campaigns if this kind of information were to make it to the light of day?

Oh, another detail. About a decade ago, it was projected that in a decade or so, Degenerative Osteoarthritis would be the #1 cause of disability in the United States. That day is here and it is so. Can you see the connection between not taking care of spinal problems that cause low back pain, headaches and other common maladies; and subsequent deterioration into a crippling Arthritic condition after a few years?

Good gracious folks, this is the 21st century. How long will so many of you put up with antiquated, inappropriate, even dangerous healthcare? All choices are yours.

”’Rik Cederstrom, a licensed Chiropractor in Hawaii, has a Bachelors in Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Doctorate in Chiropractic from Western States Chiropractic College in Portland, Oregon. He approaches his patients’ health from a wholistic point of view, including nutrition, exercise and lifestyle, focusing on spinal correction. Send questions and comments to him at:”’ mailto:Dr_Rik_DC@juno.com

WASHINGTON (UPI) — In the England that little, 4-year-old Leslie Towns Hope left with his family for the promise of America in 1907, there was no greater sporting achievement than to score a century at the national game of cricket. When Bob Hope, this nation’s most beloved entertainer, died Sunday night, he had made that century, and it was one of the most beloved in the history of the nation that he made his own.

Bob Hope did not just live an incredibly long and successful life, he lived an incredibly worthwhile one as well. For an entire century, he did immense good, raising the spirits of millions of people, and he did it so gracefully and self-deprecatingly that he made it look easy and routine, a tribute to his amazing craftsmanship.

When the 32-year-old Hope and his wife Dolores were sailing back to America on board the ocean liner Queen Mary at the beginning of September 1939, they found the mood on the great ship somewhat subdued. After all, World War II had just broken out.

Hope was not about to take this lying down. He went to the ship’s captain and got permission to put on a special show that night. He rush-wrote the new material for it himself. The anecdote was emblematic of everything he was to do to keep the American people — and his native Brits — laughing for the next six and more decades.

Success came gradually but not too easily to Hope, and he was just starting to make his name as a major Hollywood star when the global war engulfed the United States in December 1941. His national radio show had launched three years earlier and it was doing well, but not that well. It was the war that made him, not merely as one of the biggest stars in American show business history, but as a human being, too.

The late Otto Friedrich, in his classic history of Hollywood in the 1940s, “City of Nets,” caught the essence of Hope’s appeal. He was no comedic “natural” like Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin or Jack Benny. On the radio, he leaned heavily on his team of scriptwriters. And even on the road, the nature of his comedy routines was broad, obvious, and endlessly predictable: he had a ridiculous nose, he couldn’t get the girls, he was more jealous of his friend Bing Crosby than Daffy Duck was of Bugs Bunny. Most of all, he was a coward. It was as popular a routine — and as opposite from the truth — as the warm-hearted and generous Jack Benny’s lifelong masquerade as a skinflint.

But none of that mattered. As Friedrich wrote, “Crowds of lonely soldiers greeted every one of his vaudeville turns with wild applause. They loved Hope for coming to see them, and he loved them for loving him.” For an extraordinary six decades, he went on to spend Christmas on the road in the most remote and war-torn corners of the earth. Wherever U.S. soldiers were doing dirty thankless jobs — from Korea to Vietnam to Beirut to the 1991 Gulf War — he was already 88 by then — you would find Bob Hope, cackling about his own cowardice.

He stumbled into his lifelong vacation by accident, as so often happens in life. He started out in April 1942, as just a supporting comedian to the Hollywood Big Guns — Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney and others — on a three hour touring show in April 1942, five months after the United States was pulled into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Groucho Marx was the super-star movie comic on the three month tour. Hope wasn’t even a top-biller. He had the usually thankless job of just introducing everyone else.
The tour lasted three months and was a huge hit wherever it went in the continental United States. All the other stars, satisfied with doing their patriotic duty, then happily went home to Hollywood. All except Hope. As Friedrich wrote, he “couldn’t stop.” In a single month, he entertained at 65 different military bases, an average of more than two shows a day, not to mention all the grueling travel in between.

When the American Army went off to fight in Europe, Hope trooped off after them. Again Friedrich: “Hope became a man possessed. He did three or four shows a day, all across Western England, through Wales, in Northern Ireland, then back to London. He made a special effort at hospitals, clowning through ward after ward. Another favorite theme was how terrible his own jokes and performances were. He liked to ask patients, “Did you see our show — or were you sick before?”

The British people, who had seen their own previously beloved entertainer Gracie Fields hightail it out of the country for the duration of the war, took their native-born but now-all-American Hope to their hearts too, and they kept him there forever after.

Friedrich quoted actor Burgess Meredith — younger generations of Americans remember him as The Penguin in the 1960s “Batman” comedy TV series — writing to movie star Paulette Goddard of how the millions of young American soldiers preparing to fight and die on and after D-Day regarded Hope: “The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can’t breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility too, although he carries it gaily and lightly.”

Sophisticated literary figures shared this assessment. The great Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck concluded, “He has caught the soldier’s imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter.”

When the GIs went into North Africa and then into Sicily, Hope went in there after them. He survived being dive-bombed by Luftwaffe Junkers-87 Stukas during a show in Palermo.

It was during a three-month tour during which he entertained in 250 army bases — a killing average of usually three shows a day in different locations — and covered 20,000 miles. At one of them, Friedrich relates, a heckler shouted at the 40-year-old entertainer,
“Stung, hurt, Hope remained the consummate professional. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ he shouted back. ‘A guy could get hurt.'”

Well played, Mr. Hope.

Copyright 2003 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

WASHINGTON (UPI) — In the England that little, 4-year-old Leslie Towns Hope left with his family for the promise of America in 1907, there was no greater sporting achievement than to score a century at the national game of cricket. When Bob Hope, this nation’s most beloved entertainer, died Sunday night, he had made that century, and it was one of the most beloved in the history of the nation that he made his own.

Bob Hope did not just live an incredibly long and successful life, he lived an incredibly worthwhile one as well. For an entire century, he did immense good, raising the spirits of millions of people, and he did it so gracefully and self-deprecatingly that he made it look easy and routine, a tribute to his amazing craftsmanship.

When the 32-year-old Hope and his wife Dolores were sailing back to America on board the ocean liner Queen Mary at the beginning of September 1939, they found the mood on the great ship somewhat subdued. After all, World War II had just broken out.

Hope was not about to take this lying down. He went to the ship’s captain and got permission to put on a special show that night. He rush-wrote the new material for it himself. The anecdote was emblematic of everything he was to do to keep the American people — and his native Brits — laughing for the next six and more decades.

Success came gradually but not too easily to Hope, and he was just starting to make his name as a major Hollywood star when the global war engulfed the United States in December 1941. His national radio show had launched three years earlier and it was doing well, but not that well. It was the war that made him, not merely as one of the biggest stars in American show business history, but as a human being, too.

The late Otto Friedrich, in his classic history of Hollywood in the 1940s, “City of Nets,” caught the essence of Hope’s appeal. He was no comedic “natural” like Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin or Jack Benny. On the radio, he leaned heavily on his team of scriptwriters. And even on the road, the nature of his comedy routines was broad, obvious, and endlessly predictable: he had a ridiculous nose, he couldn’t get the girls, he was more jealous of his friend Bing Crosby than Daffy Duck was of Bugs Bunny. Most of all, he was a coward. It was as popular a routine — and as opposite from the truth — as the warm-hearted and generous Jack Benny’s lifelong masquerade as a skinflint.

But none of that mattered. As Friedrich wrote, “Crowds of lonely soldiers greeted every one of his vaudeville turns with wild applause. They loved Hope for coming to see them, and he loved them for loving him.” For an extraordinary six decades, he went on to spend Christmas on the road in the most remote and war-torn corners of the earth. Wherever U.S. soldiers were doing dirty thankless jobs — from Korea to Vietnam to Beirut to the 1991 Gulf War — he was already 88 by then — you would find Bob Hope, cackling about his own cowardice.

He stumbled into his lifelong vacation by accident, as so often happens in life. He started out in April 1942, as just a supporting comedian to the Hollywood Big Guns — Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney and others — on a three hour touring show in April 1942, five months after the United States was pulled into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Groucho Marx was the super-star movie comic on the three month tour. Hope wasn’t even a top-biller. He had the usually thankless job of just introducing everyone else.
The tour lasted three months and was a huge hit wherever it went in the continental United States. All the other stars, satisfied with doing their patriotic duty, then happily went home to Hollywood. All except Hope. As Friedrich wrote, he “couldn’t stop.” In a single month, he entertained at 65 different military bases, an average of more than two shows a day, not to mention all the grueling travel in between.

When the American Army went off to fight in Europe, Hope trooped off after them. Again Friedrich: “Hope became a man possessed. He did three or four shows a day, all across Western England, through Wales, in Northern Ireland, then back to London. He made a special effort at hospitals, clowning through ward after ward. Another favorite theme was how terrible his own jokes and performances were. He liked to ask patients, “Did you see our show — or were you sick before?”

The British people, who had seen their own previously beloved entertainer Gracie Fields hightail it out of the country for the duration of the war, took their native-born but now-all-American Hope to their hearts too, and they kept him there forever after.

Friedrich quoted actor Burgess Meredith — younger generations of Americans remember him as The Penguin in the 1960s “Batman” comedy TV series — writing to movie star Paulette Goddard of how the millions of young American soldiers preparing to fight and die on and after D-Day regarded Hope: “The boys in camp stand in rain, they crowd into halls so close you can’t breathe, just to see him. He is tireless and funny, and full of responsibility too, although he carries it gaily and lightly.”

Sophisticated literary figures shared this assessment. The great Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck concluded, “He has caught the soldier’s imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter.”

When the GIs went into North Africa and then into Sicily, Hope went in there after them. He survived being dive-bombed by Luftwaffe Junkers-87 Stukas during a show in Palermo.

It was during a three-month tour during which he entertained in 250 army bases — a killing average of usually three shows a day in different locations — and covered 20,000 miles. At one of them, Friedrich relates, a heckler shouted at the 40-year-old entertainer,
“Stung, hurt, Hope remained the consummate professional. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ he shouted back. ‘A guy could get hurt.'”

Well played, Mr. Hope.

Copyright 2003 by United Press International. All rights reserved.