Mark Kausler’s CatBlog

Duane Crowther Letters Pt. 5

WHY THE HELL AIN’T YOU BACK IN NEW YORK?

Duane Crowther was quite a droll comedian in his letters to Bob and Cima Balser of 5-11 and 6-25-1953. He makes a lot of teasing remarks to Cima and alludes to Bob’s employment status being affected by his draft status (Korean war era). He again tries to get a print of Flora Mock’s film out of the UCLA film department. (He refers to her as “unbalanced”.) Bill Shull was one of Duane’s instructors at UCLA, in the 6-26 letter, Duane refers to him as the “world’s number one shrewdie when it comes to matters financial.” Duane often spoke of Bill Shull fondly in later years, evidently Shull had a lot of influence in both Duane’s and Bob Balser’s lives. It’s funny to read Duane’s opinions of the stuff he was working on at UPA New York, such as the Howdy (ugh) Doody film. In the 6-26 letter, Duane reports that Steve Bosustow took a great interest in the Howdy Doody project, mostly because it would cost half the usual price, due to it’s being a glorified “pose reel”. Duane really tried hard to find a print of “Howdy Doody and the Magic Hat” in the years I knew him, mostly to see if it was as bad as he remembered. It finally turned up in the Library of Congress, alas, too late for Duane to see. I think it is still around the ‘Net somewhere. I love Duane’s tips on getting a job at UPA, which he lists as “What Every Young Man Named Balser Who Would Like to Get a Lot of Money Out of UPA Should Know….”.  I wonder what Duane meant by stating that “Poor Gene (Deitch) ran into his brother’s head…and had to stay away for a week or so.” While Gene was away, Duane had to turn out an Ivory Soap commercial practically single handed, including all the ink and paint! He put in 40 hours of overtime in two weeks making the commercial. No wonder Duane didn’t think a lot of late nights and weekends weren’t unusual when we used to work on commercials together.

    These are great letters that shed a lot of light on Duane’s life in New York, and what the atmosphere in the business was like at the time. Thanks again to Bob Balser and Cathy Karol-Crowther for letting me publish them.

 Here’s some more stuff that Duane would have called “moldy fig”, Harvey Eisenberg’s Yogi Bear Sunday pages from December, 1962. I am missing Dec. 16th’s strip, which you can find if you click on Yowp’s website link over to your right. I like the Christmas strip, and the science-fiction 12-30 strip with the bubble gum machine from outer space. This idea would have made an interesting TV cartoon, but Yogi seldom ventured into outer space except when he stowed away on Army rocket ships. At any rate, Yogi and Huck worked better with robots and aliens than the FLINTSTONES did! “Great Gazoo”, anyone?