B. U. G. S.

As Jeb Clampett, Buddy Ebsen would often say, “PITY.. ful,” Just PITY…ful!”

When I would say that, people owuld think I was repeating the line from “The Beverley Hillbillies.”

Actually, this was an old Southern expression. Buddy Ebsen knew it and used it.

That amazed me. What people seldom know about Buddy Ebsen is that long before he was a star practically his whole life. He was part of a famous dancing duo when Fred Astaire made his first appearance. I believe most people think they know Buddy Ebsen from his appearance in a movie with Shirley Temple.

But he was star long before THAT.

So how in the HELL did he know how Southerners talk?

I think he was Old California and he knew the Okies.

Notice how Lon Chaney, Junior talks in his Wolfman movies. He was the son of silent movie great Lon Chaney. His name was NOT Lon Chaney, Junior, but when the Depression hit, he was a plumber and his business collapsed, so he went into the movies and Lon Chaney, Junior was a draw.

Listen to him talk. He sounds Southern.

By the way, when an actress on The Beverley Hillbillies ran for office, Ebsen used his Jed Clampett voice to denounce her as a runaway liberal.

Harrison Ford is a journeyman carpenter. He was doing carpentry work when he started as an actor.

At the beginning of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn desribes how he was arrested when he was an officer onthe Eastern Front:

“Either we had the Germans surrounded or they had us surrounded, depending on how you look at it.”

I remember reading about a New York Jew who went to Alabama with a major star on a Yuppie TV program who played an Ivy League New Yorker.

Suddenly the man transformed right before his eyes. He met his family and started saying, “How y’all doing. How is cousin Fred?” and so forth.

The New York Jew had honestly believed that Deep Southers, aliens, existed only in Hollywood scripts and nightmares. He wrote, “This man is REALLY one of THEM!”

My JOB, meaning what I got PAID for, was to put myself in the place of the other side.

You won’t believe it, but THEY feel surrounded, too.

By the way, Ebsen also once appeared on the cover of the Communist Daily Worker, when he was picketing.