And to the overhead announcement in the terminal: “Welcome to John Wayne Airport.” And to the 9-foot John Wayne statue in the baggage claim area.
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It looks far nicer in pictures than it does at 5.30 AM. Lots of glass and stone.
Note that pictures can only hint at the acoustics.
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On the upside, playing the racism card sure got a post about an airport name-change a lot more comments than it normally would. Anything for traffic.
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Still a shitty thing to do
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we should probably just cut to the chase and rename the airport the “Cory Doctorow Airport,” haha
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Last year a petition was circulated online calling for Calgary International Airport to be renamed after outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
In response a change.org petition called for Stephen Harper’s name to be changed to “Calgary International Airport.”
You can guess which petition got the most votes.
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Theater critic Richard Zoglin on Bob Hope:
Interviewer:
Was he anti-Semitic, or racist in any way?
Zoglin:
I don’t think so. He had a lot of Jewish writers who worked for him. I think he had the kind of generic attitude about Jews that most suburban Wasps of the 1950’s had. His attitude toward race and religion was: if you are talented, I will have you on my show. Pearl Bailey was one of his favorites. Here is a story that is not in my book. Billie Holliday in her autobiography said in the early ‘40’s there was a heckler making racist remarks during one of her performances. Hope was in the audience: he stood up, and shut the guy up. She forever remembered that. When it came to talent, he was open-minded.
So, Doctrow, what’s your basis for calling Hope a racist?
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Yeah, that was covered on BoingBoing.
And there was a reason (besides Harper’s unpopularity) that many people took exception to the airport-renaming proposal; no other Canadian airport had been named after a living ex-PM.
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“whose name has been judged not to resonate with the modern traveller.”
Because people regularly book their travel based on the name of the airport, not the location they’re trying to reach? I call shenanigans.
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In the UK, East Midlands Airport renamed itself to “Nottingham East Midlands Airport”, allegedly to attract tourists who wanted to visit Nottingham (Robin Hood fans who were unable to look up the closest airport already)?
Since it’s actually in Leicestershire and closer to Derby, residents of those counties complained and it was again renamed “East Midlands Airport - Nottingham, Leicester, Derby”
Nottingham councillors claimed at the time of the second renaming that the first one had contributed to a 23% increase in tourism.
I think it’s back to just plain East Midlands Airport now.
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I’m having a hard time imagining an airport authority meeting with this dialogue:
“After speaking with city leaders and the tourism council, we’ve decided to drop Bob Hope’s name from our airport.”
“But why?”
“Simple: tourism dollars. For decades, Burbank’s attracted millions of dollars from Bob Hope fans flocking to the airport from all over the world, flying in just to experience an airport with his name on it, to buy Bob Hope Airport t-shirts, and take picture with the big photo of Bob Hope in the lobby. But his fanbase is aging and dying off, and with it, that sweet sweet tourist cash.”
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That’s just an English expat thing. They punch down at anything that moves.
Try to find some of his really early movies; I recommend The Cat and The Canary. He was brilliant. (The Ghost Breakers, another comedy-horror also with Paulette Goddard, was also quite good, though it also had Willie Best in it playing a stereotypical/cringeworthily racist quaking manservant role, perhaps that’s where the accusation comes from.)
In related news, LAX will be known as Abandon All Hope Los Angeles International Airport
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We just call it Hell-A-X, but yours works as well.
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Well, I came across “Saint Bob” mentioned in a rather hysterical (in the original sense of the word) book called: “Thanks for the Memories: The Memoirs of Bob Hope’s and Henry Kissinger’s Mind-Controlled Sex Slave” by someone called Brice Taylor. That’s enough detail for good googling- and if you have a tinfoil hat, please put it on before delving deeper into this “Monarch/Oz” rabid rabbit hole!
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This is classic “he may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole” stuff from Doctorow.
See: “I’m a huge Groucho fan.”
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That’s a very powerful counter-argument. He has always creeped me out (and I don’t think his jokes are funny), but if he really stood up for Billie Holiday I might have to rethink my opinion of him.
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Comedy doesn’t age well in general. Humor is all about deftly straddling the line between something acceptable and something unacceptable, and saying something clever about it.
When you look at performances from two or three generations ago, those lines are going to be in completely different places, and the humor won’t work any more.
Even comics who were trying to do something progressive at the time, like Lenny Bruce, aren’t funny any more, to modern audiences. And Bob Hope was not one of those comics, either.
There are exceptions, like Lucille Ball. But maybe that says something about how the gender lines she was straddling haven’t moved all that much.
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I never cared for his TV shows (or his radio shows, not that I’m old enough to have heard them originally). But many of his movies still hold up, particularly the “Road To …” pictures. He did have a real sweetheart deal with NBC over the broadcast rights to his USO shows. But that was between him and NBC (which he made a fortune for), and had nothing to do with the military.
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