The Star Made Me Buy It

Today's star is Lionel Hampton, from a 1953 ad for Manischewitz wine...

These skinny ads are hard to deal with.

I've always confused Lionel Hampton with Count Basie.  When I was a kid, I remember one or the other would occasionally turn up on Merv Griffin or The Dinah Shore Show*, and The Mike Douglas Show.

Dinah would come on around 4:00 in the afternoon - this was her talk show, not the show she had in the 1950s, long before I was born.  One of my little friends and I would play this hilarious game.  Every day, she started her show with a song, and we would wait until the very last second before the very first word came out of her mouth to change the channel.  It was both fun and challenging. The key was to change the channel at that exact second.  No sooner, no later.  

Not that we had anything against Dinah.  As an uncle of mine remembered, she was a 'sweet gal.'  The uncle in question - who was really my father's cousin - not an uncle exactly, was a commercial pilot, and on one of his flights was Dinah, who during the flight busied herself in the plane's little kitchen, whipping up something yummy for the four or five other passengers.