Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541535
14 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Winter 2026 Ric Rambles by Ric Teller The Autumn Demarcation Happy holidays to all of my fellow 695 members, families, guests, and other assorted readers. I hope each of you will find joyful things to celebrate, especially family. Of all the holidays, my favorite is Thanksgiving, but today as I write this, it is Labor Day. It's our day. Since 1894, when President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a national legal holiday (more than half the states were already officially celebrating it). The day has been popular for parades, picnics, and exuberant rallies. It always falls on the first Monday of September, a couple of months after July 4th, and a couple of months before Thanksgiving. Growing up in Hastings, Nebraska, by the end of August, Little League baseball games were finished, the Adams County Fair had presented all its blue ribbons, Wayne Huntley had taken the checkered flag at the fairgrounds quarter-mile dirt track in the final stock car race of the season, and Dad closed the drive-in theater until spring. When I started playing in popular bands around the Midwest, that holiday weekend was our last chance to play a three-er (one more than a two-er), before moving on to homecoming dances. In the background of whatever Labor Day weekend chazerai was trying to attract my attention, the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon was always on our television. Many of Jerry's films played in Dad's theaters (IATSE projectionists, of course). I turned 9 years old in 1961, the perfect demographic for those wonderful, ground-breaking comedies. Jerry Lewis taught a lot of us about funny. Under his tutelage, we attempted a pratfall, or a double take, or mimicked dialogue from one of his wonderful movies like these lines from Scared Stiff with Dean Martin. Jerry: I can't go in there and fight that whole mob. They got guns. Dean: You can get a gun. Jerry: They got blackjacks. Dean: You can get a blackjack. Jerry: They got big strong muscles. Dean: You can get a blackjack. That picture was filmed in my birth year, actually around my birthday (a union holiday). It features the last movie appearance of Carmen Miranda, the first Hollywood writing credit for Norman Lear, and a role played by George Dolenz, whose son became a Monkee. As a small- town kid in the '50s and '60s, my access to this humor came from the wealth of films, both first-run and matinee double features (including a cartoon and a Three Stooges comedy). And of course, once a year, we were treated to Jerry running amok on live television, as the host of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. When I was young and trying to perfect my spit-take, I couldn't have imagined that someday I would enjoy the privilege of working on that amazing show. In trade for giving him the autonomy to make pictures his way, Jerry provided Paramount with a lot of revenue. Over the years, my Labor Days have been celebrated by working in Dad's theaters, playing gigs, and eventually, joining the crew on Jerry Lewis's Telethon. We did local MDA Telethon cut-ins while I was at KTLA, but in 1990, I received a call from the much admired Packy Brown of Las Vegas, asking me to work on the national show, which would take place that year at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles. I did the show and became a regular part of the crew for more than twenty years. The Telethon moved to The Sahara in Las Vegas the next year, where for the price of a beer or two, I could sit in the lounge with Joe Kendall and listen to Sam Butera and the Witnesses. For years, Sam played tenor sax with the legendary Louis Prima. In 1995, the show went to CBS Television City. Fortunately, I was left off the crew list. Wait. What? By that time, I considered myself to be a regular member of the Telethon crew, but when the call Jerry Lewis and Paul Sandweiss Sunday music rehearsal Telethon 2007