Don Ameche! - The epitome of a gentleman: handsome, a fine actor with a good voice. He was 45 here.

After watching a number of these reruns, I have concluded that this was the best game show ever on tv. VERY entertaining!

I once saw Don Ameche at a Los Angeles hospital when I was visiting my father there; it must have been around the early 1980s. I was walking down a corridor, and he was walking up from the opposite direction. Handsome, wearing sporty clothes and striding healthily, he gave me the kindest smile as he passed by. I’ve never forgotten the sweetness and genuine good spirits he exuded.

That was so funny when Dorothy asked the maker of dental chairs if this could bring pleasure and a member from the audience yelled no.

Some of the great things about watching these all in order are the running gags, such as the breadbox comment.

So Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and to think she's still the Queen. My father told me one of his earliest memories was his mother made him watch the coronation on TV.

Don Ameche was sure handsome, and he was a very smooth, crooner type singer, too. I have heard him sing before, and can't figure why he never made LPs. I like it when Steve Allen and Tony Randall are on the panel. Steve was cute, and wry humored.

This episode was such a joy. I mean, every one of them is, but in this one, everyone is so exceptionally cheerful and lively. Thank you very much for providing us with this incredible show!

So glad you enjoyed it. Many more episodes to come-- almost 500, in fact!

I love Don Ameche!! What a gentleman!!

Quite a gentleman & a very sweet guy ❤️

Seeing Don Ameche in Trading Places still cracks me up. He was too funny!

Excellent, Don Ameche one of my all time favorite actors, love him in “ Midnight” and “ Heaven Can Wait”

Don Ameche, one of my classic movie favorites!

Don Ameche seemed like such a sweet man

Brilliant show and Daly on top form with his clever convoluted replies.

Wow Don Amechie puts the old in old school wonderful guy!

Today is the funeral of the lady in whose coronation both Dorothy Kilgallen, and Arlene Francis was to attend, her body lies in state until September 19, 2022. It's wonderful to have programs as historic records that can tie the past to the presence. The world will never allow itself the grace that once was the standard .

I just love when they get excited when they discover the answer!

Love the way the ladies carried their purses with them onto the show!

Arlene's line at the end about Don Ameche being an inventor is a reference to Ameche's having played the title role in the film "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell".

It's amazing that this fresh show is 70 years old in 2023. The entire tone of the program is superior to comparable talk shows today. Nowadays no one assumes that the audience is intelligent.

These 4 are the perfect WML Panel combo

Don Ameche became an actor by chance. He went with a friend to an audition to give moral support, ended up getting hired himself. The hiring agent asked him where had he been?

Steve: "I don't believe your sex has been determined - by us, I mean."

I loved Don Ameche in the movie Cocoon.

I regret that I had no idea who he was until "Trading Places" (Ralph Bellamy as well) but glad they were introduced to newer generations that way

Arlene's comment at the end about asking Don Ameche if he was an inventor refers to his movie role as Alexander Graham Bell. It reminds me of Groucho's line in the Marx Brothers' movie Go West, "Telephone? This is 1879, Don Ameche hasn't invented the telephone yet." I enjoyed this episode, thanks for posting.

Don Ameche, of course, was a regular panelist on _To Tell the Truth_, another Goodson-Todman production. I remember that the announcer sometimes introduced him as "The inventor of the telephone, Don Ameche". Don Ameche starred -- in the title role -- of the 1939 biopic _The Story of Alexander Graham Bell_, and that was one of his best-known roles. Someone once told me that back in the day that a slang term meaning "the telephone" was "the Ameche". That's what Arlene was referring to when she said, "All I can say is, the one thing that didn't occur to us to ask was 'Are you an inventor?''" (TTTT wasn't yet on the air in 1953 -- it ran from 1956 to 1958, and Don Ameche was on its panel from 1957 to 1961.) He had a resurgence of popularity at age 77 when he appeared in the 1985 feature film _Cocoon_.

i loved Arlene's confidence as the water pistol came to mind, I also loved how the panel had to make quite sure that the dental chair was not an electric chair! I also love how deep they got into Don Ameche, before Steve realized that his gender had not been determined.

As a Baby Boomer we did not watch this show in the early years...we got our first Television around 1958 , but we only had two channels then to choose from. Later we saw this show, and these days I really enjoy watching. Also the panel and Mr Daley genuinely cared for one another and when Fred Allen and then Dorothy Kilgalon died, they couldn't hide their sadness and loss. Surprisingly, some celebrities are people that I have never heard of.

Thank you for uploading these episodes. So nice to watch people with class.

Don Ameche's voice, delivery, politeness, and even to a degree physical appearance are remarkably similar to the behavior of Tennessee Ernie Ford during his mystery guest performance. It's great to have this online; I don't think I ever saw Ameche's appearance before.

Bennett Cerf loved that question about whether anything has ever been alive. 😂

I like how Arlene suddenly got the water pistol answer.

Good definition of this show: "... and some good fun"

300 channels at my disposal, and nothing even half as enjoyable as these.

Don Ameche was great in Cocoon, i think he won an award

This feels so fresh and in the moment, but it was before the Coronation and I'm watching it two days ater the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral!

At last we got to see a photo of the much mentioned dr Jules Montenier during the opening commercial.

Hahaha, all these years I thought that "Don Ameche" was one word. 😅

Don Ameche was active into his later years. He played Father Clemente in the movie "Oscar'. He could do drama and comedy equally well.

My half-century supply of Stoppette is almost depleted.

In 1958, Ameche appeared as a memorable guest panelist on a WML that featured a guy who made ant farms. [ "On the whole, it is alive in part." ]

Steve Allen so funny 😂🤣💞💖💯

I was surprised at how quickly Don Ameche was hustled out. I would have liked to hear him speak in his normal voice.

Clean and wholesome entertainment.

Loved Don Amici (real name) all my life what a wonderful actor

Ameche's career was in a pretty bad slump at this time. I was happy for him when he was rediscovered and honored with an Oscar late in his career.

One thing about Don Ameche, he proved that an actor can be hilariously funny without being "blue". He was; bright, charming, funny, coy, hansom and so much more but never a swear word. He had dignity.

No question --this series would be just a boring panel show - without the Moderator and the fantastic panelists. And mostly amusing guests. It was serendipity that all of these came together on this classic series. ...Rowby.

Multiple anecdotes/stories have indicated the early TV studios were very hot due to the lighting; if so, it is surprising that people on the show are not obviously sweating.

Don Ameche was a handsome young man

The dental chair segment was 😂. Brilliant.

My mother was lucky enough to work at Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles from 1939-1942. She said the two nicest movie stars were Gary Cooper and Don Ameche. She said he had the most gorgeous smile and was dazzlingly friendly. Her favorite female movie star that she waited on was Myrna Loy and Carol Lombard.

Bennett Cerf's Al Capone joke is priceless!

The first time I was aware of Don Ameche, he was hosting a program entitled International Showtime, featuring (mostly) circus acts from all over Europe. It was only later that I saw him play Alexander Graham Bell in at least two movies.

Arlene Francis was a wonderful woman. What a personality.

9:50 Arlene and Dorothy had simultaneous "wienies" about the water pistol!

That's how I had to wake my sons up when they were young and going to school.. my two sons were the hardest people in the world to get up and sometimes they would yell "Ma it's Saturday" and I'd "OH sorry" and go back to bed and it was really like Tuesday.. I can't keep track of days.. anyway, I finally got a water pistol and a couple of squirts and they'd jump right up...

Steve Allen was a very handsome man in the late 1950s.

Still very entertaining today. I can never get over the seemingly embarrassing grand prize of $50. However, doing a search, that prize in the 1950s would be worth the value of over $500 in 2019.

I adored him in Heaven can wait by Lubitsch.

Made in the US! Love this era and show!!!

Bennett strikes again! Quote - "One of the longest sentences anybody's served since Al CAPONY". 😀😀😀

I saw Don Ameche on Broadway around 1970, and he was definitely a character actor at that point in his career. He was also so good I still remember some of his scenes...but I forget the name of the play!

As I'm watching this, Queen Elizabeth is in Buckingham Palace for the last time. Tomorrow she will be taken to Westminster Hall to lie in state until her funeral next Monday. Two members of the panel are going to her Coronation next week. What a coincidence!

I love the mustache

Don Ameche was the 3rd known MG who stumped the panel. At 12:13, Steve asked, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” This is the 10th time the term was used. At 14:32: Dorothy said, “You have said this is larger than a breadbox.” This was the 11th use. I love how Dorothy got more laughs when questioning the dental chair man than Steve did with his gambit questions to the same man.

Dorothy and Arlene off to Queen Elizabeth's coronation! TV was still in it's infancy!

Don Ameche was handsome, and he sure sang love songs good. He should have made several LPs, but he sang in some of his old movies. I always thought Steve Allen was funny, and he was cute, too. Some of those guests sure had obscure jobs.

My favorite Don Ameche role was relatively late in his career when he had a key role in "Trading Places" playing the skeptical Mortimer Duke of the commodities firm Duke and Duke opposite Ralph Bellamy as his more optimistic brother, Randolph. Don's brother Jim, seven years younger but very similar in voice and appearance, did most of his work on radio. He was the original "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy" and then played mountie Jim West on the ABC Radio program "Silver Eagle" from 1951-55. He also took over for Don as the host of "The Chase and Sanborn Hour" on radio in the early 1940's. He also had a number of shows on WGN in the 1940's and was a popular disk jockey in NYC for a number of years later in his career on stations like WHN and WQXR. He wasn't a spinner of rock and roll records to be sure. The one time Jim appeared on screen, it was to make use of the similarities between him and Don. He played Alexander Graham Bell in a 1957 movie titled "The Story of Mankind". That movie had quite an illustrious cast, with Ronald Colman as "The Spirit of Man", Vincent Price as The Devil, Groucho Marx as Peter Minuit, Hedy Lemarr as Joan of Arc, Harpo Marx as Sir Isaac Newton, Chico Marx as a monk, Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra, Agnes Moorehead as Queen Elizabeth I, Peter Lorre as Nero, Dennis Hopper as Napoleon, and Marie Wilson as Marie Antoinette. The Ameche family hailed from Kenosha (WI). A little over 4½ years after this show aired, a young cousin to the Ameche brothers (1933 vs. 1908 and 1915) would make a huge impact on the sports world in NYC and beyond. The 1954 Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Wisconsin, Alan "The Horse" Ameche, was a first round draft pick of the Baltimore Colts in the 1955 draft and made a big splash as a fullback in the NFL for six seasons until an Achilles tendon injury cut his career short. Alan's most memorable moment came at Yankee Stadium in December 1958, the NFL Championship Game between the Colts and the New York Giants. With Johnny Unitas engineering a drive in the last two minutes of regulation time to lead to a game tying field goal, the stage was set for the first overtime game in NFL Championship history. After the Giants went three and out and punted, Unitas engineered another drive, helped by a number of key runs by Ameche. The biggest was when "The Horse" punched the ball across on 3 and goal from the one yard line. All the Giants could do is holler in vain, "Turn those machines back on!" The last 22 secs. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gah3p7iml6_ddH0.html See the first fan to reach Ameche? He got the chin strap of the Colts' hero. A teenager then, he became my colleague for many years in the financial services industry. Even with the game blacked out in NYC, it was still watched by ~45 million fans, lured in part by the rags to riches story of Unitas who had captured the imagination of American sports fans of that era similar to how Arnold Palmer had done in golf: both known for their youthful confidence and the ability to come from behind to victory. The NFL couldn't have asked for a better, more dramatic showcase. Prior to this game, the NFL took a back seat to college football and baseball in the minds of sports fans. The 1958 NFL Championship, still widely known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played", marked a sea change that saw the pros first vault over the college game in popularity and then surge past baseball, too. One could argue that Alan Ameche's TD had as big an impact on the American sports world as the invention by the man portrayed by two of his older cousins had on the world of communications.

Just something I’ve thought about MANY times while watching MANY MANY episodes... One would think they would fix the fact that Dorothy can’t hear the contestant from her fist chair position. This episode is from 1953 and the problem exists in almost every episode thereafter.

Well there you go, if they haven't had dinner with Bennett in the past week it's not such an easy game for the panel!

LOVED Don Ameche...responsible for the "get me on the Ameche"(telephone)

45 dollars back then was a weeks wage for many people

Dorothy always claims she can’t hear the MG to make them repeat themselves so she can hear their voice again

Miss Frances is genius. I let my children user old spray bottles to squirt each other with. There father didn't like to get them toy guns. Try they still had a lot of fun. Lol!

I am surprised Frank Fay was never on the show. His far right views were in tune with McCarthy who was prominent at that time. Plus would have been really interesting to hear some of the abrasive answers he sure would have given due to probably nobody on the panel would have liked him. Frank Fay is the one actor that I would really liked to have seen on the show because he certainly would have been a unique mystery guest very different than anyone else they ever had on the show.

Dorothy Kilgallen stares directly down the barrel of the camera at 15:11. I was mildly surprised.

Steve is so quick-witted.

Even with the korean war on this,time was more healthy and normal than today...timemashine please

Imagine living in Brooklyn and manufacturing something! Nowadays there’s almost nobody in that situation.

He played the lead in this wonderful movie later in his career i don't recall the name of it but it was based in Chicago he worked in a shoe store i believe and he was really exceptional in it

Great show which ran for a great many years, still they never got the sound right; the panel and the guests could often not hear each other.

This is the first show (at least of the ones posted on this KZfaq Channel) that Jon Daly's desk is no longer open at the end. The previous show posted here with Jackie Gleason the desk was still open on the end. Although there is a couple of months between the two shows so not sure when the desk first appeared with the closed end.

There was a touch of black comedy when Steve Allen clearly thought that the 2nd challenger made electric chairs for killing people who were given the death penalty. In fact the man made dental chairs.

Steve Allen was always a hoot. Acoustics in that studio must have been awful.

It's great and funny even though it's 2020

the dental chairs segment was very amusing hahaha

The question of whether Don Ameche made records. Either he thought it referred to as a singer, which had just been established, or it was filmed before he teamed with Frances Langford as John and Blanche Bickerson, because they did most certainly make records - I own one, or I used to.

Mrs. Falek was married to a gent named Romeo, and had (at least) one son, name of Sheldon, as well as some grand-children and great-grandchildren. She died in 1997, at age 82.

All the show members probably had thought the next week coronation would be yet one more they are gonna hear about, But the queen has had the last laugh.

I think the water pistol packin' Mama got more yeses than most people.

Even more awesome with the captions on! (If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the first four minutes with the captions on, and you'll see)

Don was a good looking young man

Today's KZfaq Rerun for 10/13/15: Watch along and join the discussion! ----------------------------- Join our Facebook group for WML-- great discussions, photos, etc, and great people! facebook.com/groups/728471287199862/ Please click here to subscribe to the WML channel if you haven't already-- you'll find the complete CBS series already posted, and you'll be able to follow along the discussions on the weekday "rerun" videos: kzfaq.info/love/hPE75Fvvl1HmdAsO7Nzb8w

I am surprised that no one commented on the interesting item in John Daly's left lapel. For the sake of those from countries where this is not familiar and those who simply didn't ask, it was because this was the last episode of WML prior to Memorial Day. It was still celebrated on May 30 every year, regardless of what day of the week it landed on (although if it landed on a Sunday, the legal holiday would still be on Monday). In 1953, Memorial Day was the following Saturday. The item in John's lapel is a "remembrance poppy", an artificial poppy that was worn in part as recognition of the original name of Memorial Day being Decoration Day (a term I still heard often in my youth and it was still the legal name in 1953) because it was when a date was established in 1868 to decorate the graves of Union war dead with flowers (and a similar tradition had started for Confederate soldiers as well by this time) and in part because of the opening lines of a poem, "In Flanders Fields", that was written by a Canadian physician and commissioned officer during World War I. The poem noted that the first flowers to rise up in the churned up earth of the soldiers graves in Flanders was a multitude of poppies. In 1918 inspired by the poem, a professor on leave from the University of Georgia and a YWCA volunteer wrote a poem of her own and pledged to always wear a silk poppy. Soon after, she campaigned to make the poppy the national symbol of remembrance connected with Decoration Day. (The first known use of Memorial Day occurred in 1882, but it didn't become the more common name until after WWII and it wasn't made the official legal name until 1967.) The Veterans of Foreign Wars began distributing remembrance poppies in 1922. Today they are distributed by the American Legion Auxiliary and they are made of crepe paper, not silk. You can see a piece of paper attached to the stem of the poppy just below the flower. I believe that was where the distributor of that particular poppy identified themselves (i.e. which American Legion Post they were). The poppies are not sold, but a donation is asked in exchange for the poppy. In my area, I rarely see them these days. In my younger days, the vast majority of adults wore them. My dad always made sure he got one and continued to do so well into his 80's. Because he had polio as a child, he was 4F, but he was proud of our military. Later in life, he provided the sound system for the Memorial Day public observance in our little suburban town for many years. And in the last few months of his life when he was flat on his back, on one of my visits to him in the hospital, the first thing he wanted to know was how "our boys" were doing. It was shortly after 9/11/2001 and our troops had just been deployed overseas.

Where has that polite curteous America gone? Lovely hearing these people speak.

I have enjoyed these programs since childhood in the 50s, but it is rather sad that none of Dorothy's friends ever questioned her death or the bogus coroner's report, which was controlled at the time by the mafia.