Funny Letters from Famous People

176 Pages·2004·0.69 MB·English

by  Charles Osgood

A C O
LSO BY HARLES SGOOD
Kilroy Was Here (edited by Charles Osgood) Nothing Could Be Finer Than
a Crisis That Is
Minor in the Morning
Osgood on Speaking: How to Think on Your Feet
Without Falling on Your Face
See You on the Radio
The Osgood Files
There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do If You
Would Be My POSSLQ

FUNNY LETTERS FROM FAMOUS PEOPLE. Copyright © 2003 by Charles Osgood. All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway
Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway
Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com
First edition published 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Funny letters from famous people / edited by
Charles Osgood.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Letters. 2. American wit and humor. I. Osgood, Charles.
PN6131 .F86 2003
826.008′017—dc21 2002034214
eISBN: 978-0-76791177-1
v3.1
This book is dedicated to
Those dauntless men and women who,
Sometimes by truck, sometimes by feet,
In spite of snow and rain and sleet,
And heat of day, and gloom of night,
And dogs that bark and sometimes bite,
And handwriting that’s hard to read,
Complete your rounds with all due speed,
Brave couriers, hats off to you
Who get those funny letters through!
—CHAS. OSGOOD
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
I. POLITICIANS
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B. Hayes
Benjamin Harrison
Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Winston Churchill
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Adlai Stevenson
Dwight D. Eisenhower
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
George Bush, Sr.
William Proxmire
Bob Dole
II. AUTHORS
Joseph Addison
Charles Lamb
Benjamin Franklin
Washington Irving
Gustave Flaubert
Charles Dickens
Lady Isabel Burton
Lewis Carroll
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Horace Greeley
Mark Twain
William Dean Howells and Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde and James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Oscar Wilde
Editors
Sherwood Anderson
James Joyce
George Bernard Shaw
William Dean Howells
H. L. Mencken
Carl Sandburg
P. G. Wodehouse
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Writers in Hollywood
Eugene O’Neill
Alexander Woollcott
Dorothy Parker
Carl Sandburg
Robert Benchley
James Thurber and Samuel Goldwyn
James Thurber
William Faulkner
E. B. White
John Cheever
Flannery O’Connor
Isaac Asimov
S. J. Perelman
Quentin Crisp
Andy Rooney
III. DENIZENS OF THE FINE ARTS AND SHOW BUSINESS
Mozart
Beethoven
Chopin
George M. Cohan
Groucho Marx
Fred Allen
Groucho Marx and Fred Allen
Hermione Gingold
Bob Hope
Eddie Cantor and Florenz Ziegfeld
Andy Rooney
Aaron Copland
Julia Child
Permission Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Letter writing is close to becoming a lost art in this day of e-mail, the
Internet, word processing, cell phones, and answering machines.
Many people today seldom if ever sit down and write actual letters
anymore. On those rare occasions when they do try to write a letter,
they often find that their letter-writing skills have atrophied. Besides,
they can’t find anything decent to write with.
If they find a ballpoint pen, it does not work. Somebody left the cap
off and it dried up. Even if they do find a pen that works, something to
write on is also a problem. Writing on a paper bag or the back of a junk-
mail ad is considered bad form.
They can’t remember where they put the stationery. No point in
looking in the stationery drawer. It was never kept there. If they do find
letter paper, they can’t find a proper envelope.
If they do find a suitable envelope, they can’t find the address book. If
they do find the address book, it turns out to have only the old address,
not the new one. Or, if it does have the current address, it doesn’t
include the Zip Code.
Even if all the foregoing somehow turn up, something else will be
missing; the half-roll of postage stamps that used to be in the middle
drawer over the desk. This drawer now contains nothing but old paper
clips, thumb tacks, four pennies, the cap that belongs to the dried-up
pen, a loose blazer button, etc. etc. No stamps.
In the unlikely event that a stamp of the correct denomination is
found (if, indeed, they know what a first-class stamp sells for these
days), and they remember what they wanted to say and manage to write
it down, and put it in an envelope and address and seal and put a stamp
on it, there is still one more crucial step, which is often overlooked.
To get a letter delivered, it is necessary to mail it—i.e., drop it in a
U.S. Postal Service mailbox. The stamped, addressed envelope is not
going to drop itself into a mailbox. You have to go out in the rain, sleet,
gloom of night, or whatever, and do it yourself. If you leave the letter on
the kitchen counter, assuming that somebody else in the family will mail
it for you, you will find it at least a year later with the stack of old
magazines you are throwing out.
All this is very time consuming, and everybody is so busy nowadays
watching television that we have neither the patience nor the inclination
to go through it. So we don’t exchange letters the way people used to,
once upon a time when every letter was answered by another, which in
turn required a response. This would go on and on for years, decades,
lifetimes. And these letters were carefully saved!
These saved letters, preserving thoughts, feelings, and experiences,
have been a gold mine for biographers of famous people over the
centuries. (Most biographies are about high achievers, aren’t they? Why
would anyone take all the time and go to all the trouble of researching
and writing a big thick book about somebody nobody ever heard of or
cares about?)
Where would David McCullough be without all those letters between
John and Abigail Adams? Pity the poor biographer two hundred years
from now having to rely on the collected e-mail exchanges of George W.
and Laura Bush, or of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not that it wouldn’t be
interesting, of course. Reading other people’s mail is always fascinating.
But is e-mail saved anywhere except on your own hard drive and in the
secret files of the National Security Agency?
Speaking of the NSA, which eavesdrops on the electronic
transmissions of the whole world, we now take it as given that Big
Brother has every e-mail ever sent—however frivolous—digitally stored,
probably in the same gray government facility at Fort Mead, Maryland,
that houses the grapes of wrath. But nobody will ever be allowed to see
it. It’s written to everybody.
STRICTLY OFF LIMITS
As far as e-mail humor is concerned, the only way you can tell
whether anything is supposed to be funny is via the punctuation .
But a real letter about a real situation from a real person, especially a
real politician, author, or show business celebrity? Now that can be
funny!
—C O
HARLES SGOOD