Jackie Gleason

format_quote The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it.

stars  Recorded a number of albums featuring instrumental "mood music" (what is now known today as "lounge music"). Gleason served as producer, band-leader, and (on occasion) vibraphone player, despite the fact that he couldn't read sheet music. Several of the albums included original compositions by Gleason. One album, "Lonesome Echo", topped the charts in 1955, and featured an album cover with original art by Salvador Dalí.

stars  His family background was, according to most accounts, almost Dickensian. It was marked by severe illness and grinding poverty, in any event. His father, Herb Gleason, was a henpecked insurance clerk who took his myriad disappointments in life out in drink. He deserted the family when Jackie was nine and died sometime in the late 1940s. His mother, the former Mae Kelly, was a superstitious, quarrelsome woman, overprotective of her younger son, who died when Jackie was in his teens. An older brother, Clemence, was a wan, sickly lad who died, probably of tuberculosis, at the age of fourteen, when Jackie was three.

stars  The Jackie Gleason Show (1961) helped propel the tourist industry in Miami Beach in the early & mid 1960s.

stars  Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 328-331. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

stars  The set of "The Honeymooners" (1955) show was based on Jackie's childhood home on Chauncey Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (originally Bushwick) area of Brooklyn, New York. The apartment building is still there and looks very much the same as in Jackie's time.