Here's another episode of The Red Skelton Hour, this one from October 26, 1965. The musical guest is Johnny Mathis, an entertainer I've always kinda liked. I once saw him in Las Vegas and he put on a very good show — nothing flashy, nothing high-pressure. His opening act was Norm Crosby and then Mathis came out and…well, he was never a huge star but he had a long, long career making audiences happy.
Starting around the eight-minute mark, there's a snazzy little number with Mathis and the Tom Hansen Dancers, which was the house dance troupe on Skelton's show for years. He also had the Alan Copeland Singers and I was never quite sure where the Tom Hansen Dancers stopped and the Alan Copeland Singers began. I think sometimes they had the singers dancing or the dancers singing…or maybe the dancers lip-syncing to the singers.
One of the dancers you'll see in this — don't ask me which one he is or what his name is — is probably the guy who did a beautiful job fixing my front door. When I moved into my house in 1980, a rather magnificent door had some bad patches in it. Someone had assaulted the door with a hammer and chisel but according to the lady who sold me the place, they still were not able to break in. She'd had a temporary patch installed but never got around to bringing in someone who could do a better job. A few years after I took up residency, I decided it was time.
I had a contractor doing upgrades on my home and he brought in a finish carpenter he said was a genius. He was right. The gent cut out the patch, installed new wood, then painted it to perfectly match the color and grain of the rest of the door. Making it good as new took a lot of his time and my money…and as he worked, we talked a lot about his career. Woodwork was what he did when he couldn't get dancing jobs and in 1982 or '83 — whenever this was — he longed for the days when he was a Tom Hansen Dancer, working every week for about half the year.
He said they had almost no contact with Skelton. Red was only around once or twice when they'd fold him into a musical number just for a gag. I had also talked about the series with one of Skelton's longtime writers, Martin A. Ragaway, and he told me Red never had the slightest interest in those segments of his show. He liked that they were there but didn't even watch them. "All he cared about was telling jokes," Ragaway said. In my several encounters with Red, that was my impression too.
Here's the episode. There's a large cast in the big San Fernando Red sketch and one of the supporting players is Walker Edmiston again. Also in there — and in a lot of Skelton's shows — is Dave Sharpe, an actor and stuntman whose career dated back to movie serials and even stunt-doubling, though not for the stars, in Laurel & Hardy films. Any time on a Red Skelton Hour you see someone crash through a wall or window, it's probably Dave Sharpe.