Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:30 — 2.9MB)
Audio is good, but draggy in spots.
Dick visits the Jot Em Down store to find calendars lined up on the floor instead of the rope. The gents aren’t on speaking terms, and now it’s Abner who is carrying the grudge, while Lum wants to make amends. Will there be a new name for each partners half of the store?
Lum tells about disgruntled Ezra Seastrunk, who wanted to buy shoes that were on Abner’s side of the store. Dick learns that Abner is busily counting the feed room, to be sure it is divided equally.
As Dick and Lum talk, the news that Miss Emiline was spotted leaving town on the bus upsets Lum. Is she leaving him because she found out he was broke? Abner enters and we learn the phone is on the line. Lum can talk into it, but it takes Abner to listen. Will the order from Miss Simpson go without a hitch?
Note: This episode marks a shift in the story arc. the romance of Miss Emiline gets dropped, but the feud in the store is cut short by the beginnings of a new story. both the romance, and the upcoming stories are rewritten from older stories from a few years earlier.
reusing old scripts is nothing new, and other shows did the same. sometimes it was a popular story, and the script is unchanged, and could appear in the same show, or in a different one, especially in something like an anthology series.
for others, like Lum and Abner, after a few years of a daily grind, some folks may have forgotten the earlier airing of the story, or new listeners may be tuned in who missed it before. Chet Lauck and Tuffy Goff always rewrote their repeated scripts, sometimes to punch it up a bit, or to account for character changes in the program. I think their rewritten scripts show better writing, and are funnier than the first go round,
