Author: DOuG pRATt

WBZ’s Steve LeVeille announces retirement

Well, I sure don’t like this very much. In a surprise announcement on Facebook, one of my favorite radio guys, Steve LeVeille, who has the overnight shift on WBZ in Boston, is retiring at the end of the week.

Assuming this is entirely Steve’s decision, it comes only weeks after his friend Carl Beane, the Voice of Fenway Park, died of a heart attack while driving. Here’s a clip with Steve talking about Carl.

[audio:http://nyc.podcast.play.it/media/d0/d0/d1/d0/dI/dA/dR/10IAR_3.MP3|titles=Steve LeVeille on Carl Beane]

Why they fought

During World War II the English, minus Alfred Hitchcock who had left for America, somehow managed to not only make movies, they made some truly outstanding ones. I am particularly fond of the films that showed life on the home front. One of them is This Happy Breed, by Noel Coward and David Lean, and another is Millions Like Us, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. The latter film has a funny surprise in it for animation fans, because it uses Raymond Scott’s tune Powerhouse in a factory scene.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2012/Millions.flv 400 300]

That double turntable setup with a single tonearm is neat. Powerhouse became a fixture in the Warner Bros. cartoons starting with Porky’s Pig Feat, as seen in this post from about a year ago. Porky’s Pig Feat was released on July 17, 1943, and Millions Like Us was released in the UK on November 5, 1943, so it would seem likely that somebody involved with the making the film had seen the cartoon.

Schulz original on Antiques Roadshow

Antiques Roadshow is in Minneapolis, and a visitor has the original art to the December 4, 1949 installment of Li’l Folks by Charles Schulz.

Watch Appraisal: 1949 Charles Schulz “Li’l Folks” Original Cartoon on PBS. See more from Antiques Roadshow.

The owner says the art was found in his attic! The appraiser, Phillip Weiss, estimates the value of the piece at $18-24,000, and while it’s certainly a rarity I’m not sure a Li’l Folks original can get that much at auction. Ideally, it would go to the Charles M. Schulz Museum.

Note: the missing eyes were due to a printing error, which was a problem that also plagued the early installments of Peanuts in some newspapers.