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November 7, 1970: A Walk Through the Hills Above Seoul |
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Bob Hope came to Korea on December 27th, and Pete Cannon and I went out to RC 1 to see him and his show.
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The Bob Hope Show is an institution, and this was going to be my one chance to see it live somewhere, so I was happy that a few other soldier friends were up for going as well. Then the actual day dawned, and the weather, which had been fairly mild so far (as winters in Korea go), turned positively frigid- I think it was close to zero pretty much all day, with the only saving graces that the sun was out and I'd been issued a heavy winter parka.
We were pretty sure that even if we got there early, there would be soldiers from the nearer DMZ installations already there, so we didn't plan on trying to get spots near the stage- we intended to rely on Peter's long lenses to get some good pictures from way back. So we arrived only 45 minutes before the show was to start, which meant that we had to wait almost two hours as everything was late due to the cold.
We both took our cameras and Peter, who had already been to Japan, had some telephoto lenses and tele-converters. We set up one lens, a 200mm with a 3x converter, making it a 600mm lens, and one 135mm with a 2x, or 270mm. We also had a 35mm wide angle lens and a 52mm standard lens. I learned here that taking pictures with telephoto lenses requires a meticulous attention to focus, as the depth of field is extremely short. I did not know all this at the time, and since I was used to not having to worry a lot about focus with the 52mm, whose depth of field is quite deep, almost half of my shots were too out-of-focus to be worth much.
Anyway, we found a vantage point on some bleachers a fair distance from the stage, and we stooged around for a while. I tried a couple of telephoto shots of the tops of some adjacent hills that were being patrolled (the fear of NK infiltrators is always heightened when VIPs are present), but neither turned out.
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About 45 minutes later, another one arrived, and we could see (as the landing pad was close to the stage that had been set up) the show personalities pile out of it- Bob Hope himself, Johnny Bench of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, Miss World, the Ding-a-Lings, and a few others.
All couple thousand servicemen were happy to see the show personalities arrive, and it wasn't long before the actual show began. I suspect that even though the cast had a warming tent behind the stage, one that we'd seen them filling with warm air from huge blowers, they didn't want to wait around in the cold any more than we did. Peter and I had found a spot to stand at the back of the crowd, and we had a good view of the stage- small as it was in the distance. But we were planning on using our long lenses to get close-up views. The first thing I did, though, was to use my standard lens to take a few pictures of the crowd, the stage, and the mountainous backdrop. Here are those pictures:
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Note from the present:
When I was creating this album page, I noticed that these three pictures overlapped nicely- nicely enough that today, 52 years after they were taken, I can use computer software to stitch them together into a single widescreen image:
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During the show, Peter and I walked around in our area at the back of the crowd; we weren't the only photographers there; some of the Signal Corps folks were there with big cameras taking photos, and there were some Army and non-Army people there doing some filming. I've seen the Bob Hope "Entertain the Troops" specials on TV before, so I imagined that the footage might appear in one of those at some point.
Note from the present:
It is pretty amazing what's available at the time I am creating this page. I looked through my photo narratives that I wrote at the time, and although I mentioned some of the cast that I might have remembered (like Johnny Bench and Bob Hope himself), I never wrote down all the cast members that were in my pictures.
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I also found a video on YouTube of the TV Show that was eventually made from the footage that was filmed at these shows- including, I expected, the footage that I actually saw being shot on the day of the show here in Korea. I wish I had thought of getting into some crowd shots; it would have been a real trip to have found myself a half-century later in a video online. But this video was useful anyway in that it shows the entire cast (not all of whom were in the show at every stop it made). Anyway, if you are curious who all was in the show, use the player at left to have a look at an excerpt from the TV show that was shown in 1971.
Presently, the show began, and it began with a musical number by Les Brown's band. As you will see in all my pictures, almost all the performers were bundled up due to the cold; Les Brown himself was wearing a heavy camel-hair coat, and all the band members were bundled up in parkas. After that musical number, Brown introduced General Michaelis.
General Michaelis is a three-star general, and he is currently Commander in Chief, United Nations Command/Commander, United States Forces Korea/Commanding General, Eighth United States Army here in Korea. He talked for just a bit, and then he introduced Bob Hope, who came out on stage and launched into his monologue. I tried my hand with the long lens to photograph Michaelis and Hope, and I suppose for being so far away, the pictures aren't too bad:
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Note from the present:
Now for something interesting. You'll remember I said in my slide narratives written in 1970 that Peter and I were standing near a bunch of other photographers, or soldiers with cameras who thought they wouldn't get good pictures from being in the middle of the thousands of soldiers watching the show. I also noted that there were some professionals using movie cameras to capture the show.
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The clip of the show, which you can watch with the movie player at left, is the first part of the show- the end of Les Brown's musical introduction, General Michaelis' speech, and the first part of Bob Hope's monologue. Oddly, there is no sound- it would have been really neat had their been. But as this clip plays, you'll note a couple of interesting things. One is that the vantage point seems to be almost identical to where I was standing (meaning that we are watching footage that was filmed by one of those people near me, and while I was taking my own photographs. Amazing- I can find, online, a film made by someone standing close to me over a half century ago.
But there's more. When you start the video, I want you to be ready to hit the pause button. Do so at exactly :54, and then compare what you see to my picture above of the General. Hit pause again at exactly 3:47, and compare the frozen image to my picture above of Hope. Amazing. In case you have a hard time seeing what I'm talking about, here are enlarged extracts from the video at the two time indexes
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For the remainder of the show, Peter and I just watched or listened and of course took photos. I moved around a bit to try to get different vantage points. As I said, my expertise with the long lenses and extenders is lacking, this being the first time I've used them. So while I took quite a few photos, many of them aren't worth including here.
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I think every Bob Hope Show for the the troops needs pretty girls for the soldiers to look at:
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I was interested in that last picture, and thought I would do some investigation here in 2022 to learn more about the Ding-a-Lings, and what I found out was interesting enough to include here, interspersed with a couple of pictures I took of the group with one of our long lenses. Those pictures didn't turn out all that well, but they are worth showing here anyway.
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It was Dean Martin Show Music Director Lee Hale who, inspired by the chorines known as "The Gold Diggers" featured in the Busby Berkeley films of the 1930s and '40s, thought of the name The Golddiggers to dub the ensemble of attractive and talented women around which this new summer replacement show would revolve. The initial group, which numbered 12 performers, was introduced on The Dean Martin Show in the spring of 1968.
Audiences warmed to them, and they debuted their own weekly variety series that summer- a program that turned out to be the top-rated series of the 1968 summer season. They returned again in the summer of 1969 and again in 1970, although for their third summer outing they shifted their locale from Los Angeles to London.
In between their summer series, The Golddiggers made occasional appearances on The Dean Martin Show and other programs, and joined Bob Hope in 1968, 1969, and 1970 on his annual USO-sponsored Christmas tours of U.S. military bases around the globe. Highlights of these trips were broadcast annually as specials on NBC, and drew some of the highest ratings of any programs during the years that they were telecast.
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In fall 1971, The Golddiggers group was spun off from The Dean Martin Show to headline their own weekly half-hour syndicated series entitled Chevrolet Presents The Golddiggers. At the same time, a revamped version of The Dingaling Sisters succeeded The Golddiggers as the regular female singer/dancers on The Dean Martin Show.
For trivia buffs, two members of The Dingaling Sisters (1972-73) achieved later fame in their own right. 1972 Miss Arizona and Miss USA Lindsay Bloom appeared in many movies and TV shows, playing Jean Harlow in the movies and a hottie on The Dukes of Hazzard. Miss Ohio 1970 Jayne Kennedy (nee Harrison) also had numerous movie and TV roles, but was most famous as the groundbreaking female sportscaster on NFL Today.
The Golddiggers continued their own career, although members of the group changed frequently. Most of their appearances were in conjunction with Dean Martin, who remained their "patron". In the oddest turn of events, Golddiggers then-member Kalliope Zafiriou, former wife of the UFO religion leader Billy Meier, revealed in a 1997 interview that Meier had hoaxed his followers by claiming photographs that he had of members of The Golddiggers were photographs of human-like extraterrestrials that he met. Meier passed off the photographs he had of Golddiggers members Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund as photographs of the alien women "Asket" and "Nera". Further research showed that Zafiriou was correct and that the images were screenshots of a Golddiggers performance on The Dean Martin Show, proving that the photographs were of earthlings and not of aliens.
All this was, of course, quite unknown to me at the Bob Hope Show.
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Jennifer Hosten was born in St. George's, Grenada in 1947, so she was basically my age at the time. She studied in London and then worked for the BBC's Caribbean radio service before becoming a flight attendant. She was 23 when she won the Miss World contest in November 1970, representing Grenada. She was the first black woman and the first woman from her country to win the title. The whole contest had been controversial even before the result had been announced. Afterwards allegations were made about the influence of the Prime Minister of Grenada, who was on the judging panel.
But none of that controversy was probably known by anyone here in Korea- even Hope himself. All the soldiers knew that here was Miss World coming to see them.
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Hosten then worked with Air Canada in customer relations, and married David Craig, an IT Manager with IBM, moving with him to Canada. She earned a Masters degree in Political Science and International Relations and had two children.
She was High Commissioner to Canada from Grenada from 1978 to 1981. In 1998 she served as Technical Adviser on Trade to the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) while living on the island of Saint Lucia. Again living in Canada, she worked as a Canadian diplomat at the Canadian High Commission in Bangladesh before returning to the Caribbean.
In 1992 she published an academic study, The Effect of a North American Free Trade Agreement on the Caribbean Commonwealth. In late 2006, Hosten was appointed the National Director of the Miss Grenada World Contest, and she published her autobiography, Beyond Miss World, in 2008. At age 64, Hosten graduated from Yorkville University (New Brunswick, Canada) with a master's degree in Psychology, and she currently works as a registered psychotherapist in Oakville, Ontario.
The rest of my pictures today were of other performances during the show, and here they are in the order I took them:
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Johnny Lee Bench, also about my age, is a professional baseball player. He joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1967 and is currently their catcher. (From 2022: Bench led the team- "the Big Red Machine"- that dominated the National League in the mid-1970s, winning six division titles, four National League pennants and two World Series championships. Bench is widely regarded as the greatest catcher of all time.)
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Bobbi Martin was born in 1939, and has a singing career that has taken her from local venues in Minnesota to the national nightclub circuit. Recording for Coral Records Martin had several hits on national charts before her first appearance on the Dean Martin Show in 1965 (which is probably how she came to Bob Hope's attention.
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Finally, I took a couple of pictures as the whole cast of the show was out on stage with Bob Hope, letting the soldiers applaud all of them:
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After the show was over, I had Peter use my camera to take a few pictures of me that I could send back to you. The problem is that it was so cold, and so windy that not only was it tough to stand looking at Peter with my eyes open, but it was so raw that I had a pained expression on my face. I hope you'll forgive me, but I learned later that it was actually about six degrees below zero late in the afternoon.
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The Bob Hope Christmas Show was pretty amazing- even though it was bitterly cold (at least for a Southern boy like myself). It was also a fitting way to close out the year as far as events are concerned. I took a few more photographs, but these will appear in the Miscellaneous photographs for this year.
I am looking forward to next year, when I will take my R&R trip to Japan.
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
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November 7, 1970: A Walk Through the Hills Above Seoul |
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Return to Index for 1970 |
