It turns out that during the summers Don worked in the Borscht Belt as a social director at the Avon Lodge. The Borscht Belt was an affectionate term for the area of the Catskill Mountains about ninety miles north of New York City, which was replete with Jewish summer resorts. It was the starting point for the careers of a lot of Jewish comics. Social directors in the Catskills resorts were responsible for the summer’s entertainment. Together with their staff, they’d put on plays, musicals, arrange for afternoon games on the lawn, and make the guests feel like stars when they participated in various talent shows. So in the summer of 1941 Don used his influence to get me a job as a busboy at the Butler Lodge in Hurleyville, New York, with a chance to step in and act as an understudy if somebody in the dramatic society got sick. Wow!
The busboy job was not easy. I was assigned to the sour cream station. I would take a huge stainless steel bowl filled to the brim with sour cream （which weighed about as much as I did） from the kitchen to the dining room and the minute it was empty I’d rush back to the kitchen to fill it up and bring it out again. For some reason, the Jews in the Borscht Belt had this strange affinity for sour cream. They loved it on their blintzes. They loved it on their potato pancakes. They loved it on their chopped crunchy vegetables like radishes, celery, carrots, etc. And if nobody was looking, they gobbled it down all by itself with nothing but a huge tablespoon. Sour cream, unfortunately, was loaded with cholesterol. The normal cholesterol levels for healthy people should be between 150 and 200. I would say the average cholesterol of the sour-cream-loving Jews who came to the Borscht Belt was probably 1500–2000.
Strangely enough that wasn’t what killed them. And now—from straight out of my stand-up act—I’ll tell you what killed them…it was a song called “Dancing in the Dark.”
After lunch they would sit and rock on the porch, which for some of the guests was the closest they would get to the “outdoors.” They would rock and start singing. The most dangerous thing a Jew could do in the mountains was to sing “Dancing in the Dark.” Why “Dancing in the Dark”？ Because they never understood the range of that song and would invariably start in the wrong key. The only person capable of really singing that song safely was Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby got it right—but the Jews didn’t. For some strange reason the Jews would start singing it in a very high key and never made it to the end of the song.
They would start with:
“Dancing in the dark
Till the tune ends
We’re dancing in the dark
And it soon ends…
And we can face the music
Together…”
When they hit the word “together” it was too high for human ears! If you could reach it only dogs would be able to hear you. And that’s what did it—Bam! Stroke! They fell right out of their rocking chairs. That’s why “Dancing in the Dark” wreaked such havoc on the porch of the Butler Lodge.
（Sorry about slipping back into my act—but I love that bit!）
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I loved being in the mountains. When I finished my tour of duty as a busboy I would run to other hotels like Browns, the Nevele, and the most famous of them all, Grossinger’s （which I later worked at for one summer）， to see their comics perform. Comedians like Henny Youngman, Jan Murray, Mickey Katz, Jackie Vernon, etc. One of my favorites was Myron Cohen. Later in life I stole one of his best jokes （but of course gave him credit!）。 It goes like this:
A guy walks into a grocery store and says to the grocer, “I’d like a half a pound of lox, a pint of cream cheese, and…”
Then he stops because he’s puzzled by the store shelves filled with just boxes and boxes of salt.
He says to the grocer, “You’ve got so many boxes of salt on your shelves. I’ve never seen so much salt! Excuse me for asking but…do you sell a lot of salt?”
The grocer replies, “Meh…to tell you the truth if I sell a box of salt a week I’m lucky. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt…BOY! CAN HE SELL SALT!”
It always gets a big laugh.
One day while working in the mountains I got really lucky. Fate was with me because I found out that one of the actors in the play Uncle Harry that was slated to be on that night had stepped into a gopher hole and sprained his ankle and couldn’t perform. He was to play the district attorney who questions Uncle Harry. So they called me in to replace him!
When they saw me, the social director said, “He’s just a kid! He’s much too young looking to be the district attorney.”