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of what we said in front of Dorothy. We recognized her point of view and she was entitled to it, but we had to be very careful of what we said in front of her. When she came in, any intimate conversation ceased immediately.

But for the rest, it was a family. Fred was a welcome addition because we loved him. Then came that awful day when he dropped dead on a Sunday morning. He fell in the snow in New York and died very suddenly. We didn't even know it until that afternoon. We called Mark Goodson, who by this time had become a very close friend of mine and is today. We all liked Mark very much. We didn't see too much of Toddman, but Mark Goodson was at our show every Sunday night. It was his baby. We got to know him and like him very much. I'm grateful to him for my whole television career. We didn't know what to do about Fred Allen's death. We were heart-broken. The show was that very night.

There were all kinds of suggestions. That we call off the show all together--we couldn't. It was CBS time and there was a sponsor. By this time, we were being sponsored by Kellogg's Corn Flakes. This was one of the big programs in the United States. We couldn't get a substitute, we felt, at the last minute. Somebody suggested that we have an empty chair. That would have been macabre. At the height of the discussion, Portland Allen, Fred Allen's widow, called up and said, “Fred was a showman all of his life. Remember the old saying that 'the show must go on....' You do that show tonight as though Fred were there.” By