she implored him, "Shall we go?" Allen would reply with cracks like, "As the two drumsticks said when they spotted the tympani, let's beat it!'"; or "As one strapless gown said to the other strapless gown, 'What's holding us up?'" A small host of stereotypical characters greeted Allen and Hoffa down the Alley, discussing Allen's question of the week, usually drawing on news items or popular happenings around town, whether gas rationing, traffic congestion, the Pulitzer Prizes, postwar holiday travel, or the annual Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus visit. The Alley went through a few changes in the first installments. Early denizens included sarcastic John Doe (John Brown), self-possessed Senator Bloat and town drunk Sampson Souse (Jack Smart), dimwitted Socrates Mulligan (Charlie Cantor), pompous poet Falstaff Openshaw (Alan Reed), and wry Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious). By 1945, Pious and Reed were joined by two new Alley denizens: Parker Fennelly as stoic New England farmer Titus Moody, and Kenny Delmar, the new show's announcer, as bellowing Southern senator Beauregard Claghorn. Pious is credited with bringing Delmar to Allen's attention. Delmar based the blowhard character on a real-life person he had encountered while hitchhiking in 1928; Delmar had originally named the voice characterization "Dynamite Gus." Within weeks, Claghorn became one of the leading comedy characters of radio as listeners across the country began quoting his catchphrases: "Somebody, Ah say, somebody knocked"; "I'm from the South, Suh"; "That's a joke, son"; and "Pay attention, boy!" Claghorn served as the model for the Warner Bros. cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, who first appeared the following August in the Oscar-nominated Walky Talky Hawky. Other characters had catchphrases that were almost as famous as Claghorn's, such as Titus Moody's "Howdy, Bub", and Falstaff Openshaw's "That is precisely why I am here." Mrs. Nussbaum always greeted Allen by saying, "You were expecting maybe...", and then she would mispronounce the name of a glamorous film star, such as "Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra Bankhead?" The Alley sketches made only one further cast change, when Peter Donald's chipper Irishman Ajax Cassidy succeeded Reed's Falstaff. Despite the ethnic diversity, the Alley characters seemed less citified and more akin with O. O. McIntyre's small-town America. Allen's topical humor is sometimes thought an acquired taste for audiences curious about his generation of radio stars; Dunning has written that when he "went into topical humor, he may have forfeited his only opportunity to be