Beginnings
Wayne and Shuster met as high school students at Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1930. They both studied at the University of Toronto, where they wrote and performed for the theatre there, and in 1941 they made their radio debut on CFRB in their own show, The Wife Preservers in which they dispensed household hints in a humorous fashion. This exposure resulted in the pair being given their own comedy show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Trans-Canada Network as Shuster & Wayne.
They enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1942, and performed for the troops in Europe during World War II as part of the Army Show (they would also later perform for the army in the Korean War). They returned to Canada to create the Wayne and Shuster Show for CBC Radio in 1946. They first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States in 1958, and set a record there by appearing 67 times over the next 11 years.
Wayne and Shuster turned down many offers to go to the U.S. permanently, preferring to remain in Toronto. (They did co-star in a CBS-TV sitcom, Holiday Lodge, which aired as a summer replacement for Jack Benny in 1961.)
In 1965 The Wayne & Shuster Hour won the Silver Rose at the Rose d'Or Television Festival.
In 1965, the duo made a series of six short documentaries about comedians such as W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, titled Wayne and Shuster Take an Affectionate Look At..., which were telecast on CBS in the summer of 1966. The programs were scored by the young composer "Johnny Williams". This series, incidentally, was the last US network prime time series to premiere in black and white (at least until the 1991 CBS retro-spoof Morton & Hayes, which also included full-colour sequences).
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Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
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“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
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“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
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