Oregon Armories

Bob Hope’s Military Shows: The Air Force Academy and West Point

In May 1980, we packed up our survival gear and trekked to the rarefied air of Colorado Springs, Colorado for our first Hope birthday special at the United States Air Force Academy where he greeted 4,000 cadets:

*Thank you, cadets. I’m so happy to be here at the Air Force Academy. . . or, as it’s referred to by the other service academies — “Rocky Mountain Disneyland.

*We had a great flight in, and I wanna thank the Air Force for providing the transportation. It’s the first time I’ve ever flown in a cruise missile.

*It must have been an experimental flight. Our stewardess was a chimp.

*When we arrived, the pilot landed on the football field. We made it, but next time I wish he’d try it lengthwise.”

For our centerpiece sketch, we were lucky to book the talented character actor Kenneth Mars who had been hilarious as the Nazi playwright in Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” We cast him as the academy commandant who discovers a cadet who has somehow fallen through the administrative cracks and has been attending classes for twenty-six years.

An intelligence officer (Loni Anderson) has been dispatched from Washington to head off the potential scandal:

LONI: Our report says that Cadet Hope entered the academy in 1959 and didn’t surface again until 1966.

KEN: That’s right. When he ran for Homecoming Queen.

LONI: Homecoming Queen? That’s disgusting.

KEN: It’s worse than that — he won.

Former Supreme Diana Ross and Dolores Hope filled out the musical guest list and Olympic ice-skaters Randy Gardner and Tai Babalonia demonstrated their Gold Medal talent. Former astronaut Alan Shepard delivered a USO tribute honoring Hope, a tribute that would become a permanent fixture on all subsequent birthday specials.

At West Point, which we visited in the spring of 1981, Hope greeted the plebes:

*Thank you, cadets. You can relax. I have a directive from the Superintendent authorizing you to laugh until further notice.

*I’ve never seen so much gold braid. This looks like a direct hit on Sammy Davis’s jewelry case.

*And what discipline. Yesterday, I saw a porcupine chewing out a raccoon for having his hands in his pouch.

*One cadet commander yelled, “Suck in that stomach!” and three pine trees inhaled.

*And these military regulations are strictly enforced. As soon as taps sounded last night, all the lights went out, and the Hudson River stopped flowing.”

We wanted to give the plebes an opportunity to meet a real movie general, so we invited George C. Scott who had recently captured an Oscar nomination for his spellbinding performance as General George Patton, the Paderewski of the pearl-handled pistols.

In real life, George was a certified pussycat, about as warlike as a battalion of Quakers. Despite his well-known objections to the war in Vietnam, he had become so identified with the gruff, private-slapping Patton, when he walked across the quadrangle, the cadets would salute him — in civilian clothes yet.

Since females had only recently been admitted to the Point, we cast guest stars Brooke Shields and Marie Osmond as new cadets mistakenly assigned a room with a local rube named Luke Swampwater (Hope) who’s been trying to sneak into West Point for years.

BROOKE: I’m sorry, Luke, but this would never work. We could walk in on one another while showering.

HOPE: I guess that’s just the chance I’ll have to take.

MARIE: Be reasonable. You wouldn’t want to have stockings hanging all over the place to dry, would you?

HOPE: Hey, no problem. If it bothers you, I’ll hang my stockings someplace else.

West Point is located about forty-five minutes from Broadway and that year the musical “42nd Street” was doing SRO business on the Great White Way. The entire 45-member cast had the cadets on their feet with a performance of the show’s finale “We’re In the Money.” It was the most stirring number I would witness on all 85 Hope specials I that co-wrote.

In addition to George C. Scott, guest stars Mickey Rooney and Robert Urich appeared in a takeoff of the Point’s first class with Rooney as its first commandant.

Rooney to Scott playing the chief of the tribe who had sold the U.S. the land West Point is built on: “Chief, what did you people call this place before we came along?”

George: “Ours.”

After guest appearances by Sugar Ray Leonard, Mary Martin, and Leslie Neilsen, George H.W. Bush, then vice-president, delivered the tribute to Hope. The previous year at the Air Force Academy, astronaut Alan Shepard did the honors and now we had a vice-president; we were coming up in the world.

Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope’s Incredible Gag Writers (c) 2009 by Robert L. Mills and published by Bear Manor Media.  To order:  http://bobhopeslaughmakers.weebly.com

About the Author

A native of San Francisco, Bob Mills served in the Navy after high school, graduating from San Francisco State University in 1962 and the University of California Hastings Law in 1965.  He practiced in Palo Alto, CA for ten years before moving to Hollywood to write for television.  He worked on the Dinah Shore Show, the Steve Allen Show and the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts before joining Bob Hope as a staff writer  in 1977. He traveled the world with Hope for the next seventeen years. In 2009, his book The Laugh Makers: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope’s Incredible Gag Writers was published by Bear Manor Media and was named one of Leonard Maltin’s “Top 20 Year-End Picks.”  To order:  http://bobhopeslaughmakers.weebly.com

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