Fred Allen Show), was a game show incorporating musical acts. The idea was to allow Allen to ad-lib with guests à la Groucho Marx but, as author Alan Havig wrote, the star was "lost in the confusion of a half hour filled with too many people and too much activity." The complicated format had to be revamped in the middle of the run. The revised premise had Allen interviewing three panelists, who would listen to three new popular songs and vote for the one they thought had the most potential. Then came a comedy series, Fred Allen's Sketchbook, which did not catch on. Allen credited Goodson and Todman for "keeping me alive" in show business. He landed a two-year stint as a panelist on the CBS quiz show What's My Line? from 1954 until his death on March 17, 1956. In July 1955 he took a week off from the show to have an emergency appendectomy. Allen's seat on the panel was taken by radio and TV humorist Robert Q. Lewis. The following week, Allen returned to the program—as the mystery guest. After the blindfolded panelists asked several questions, Lewis smiled and said, "I know who it is. Thank you for letting me work tonight!" Allen joked about the operation: "It was an emergency. The doctor needed some money hurriedly." Allen also spent his final years as a newspaper columnist/humorist and as a memoirist, renting a small New York office to work six hours a day without distractions. He wrote Treadmill to Oblivion (1954, reviewing his radio and television years) and Much Ado About Me (1956, covering his childhood and his vaudeville and Broadway years, and detailing especially vaudeville at its height with surprising objectivity); the former—which included many of his vintage radio scripts—was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years. After the frustrations and failures of his attempts to succeed on television, the popularity of Treadmill revealed Allen's potential as a literary humorist. Death Taking one of his regular late night strolls up New York's West 57th Street on Saturday night, March 17, 1956, Allen suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 61. A popular myth repeated for many years, first published in The New York Times story appearing the day after Allen's death, was that he had died while walking his dog. However, biographer Robert Taylor later revealed that Allen had never