[3] A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives and often barbed them on the air over the battles while developing routines whose style and substance influenced fellow comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan, and Johnny Carson; his avowed fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, humorist James Thurber, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Herman Wouk, who began his career writing for Allen.

Along with his father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother Robert, Allen was taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my aunt Lizzie", around whom he focused the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me.

His aunt suffered as well; her husband, Michael, was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, which left him mostly unable to work; Allen remembered that as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters.

He appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon took the stage name Fred St. James, and booked with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week (equal to $913 today), enough at the time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company.

In 1917, returning to the New York circuit, his stage name was changed to Fred Allen so that he would not be offered the same low salary that theater owners had been accustomed to paying him in his early career.

[7] In 1922, Allen commissioned comic-strip artist Martin Branner to cover a theater curtain with an elaborate mural painting depicting a cemetery with a punchline on each gravestone.

One recurring bit was to read a purported "letter from home" with material such as the following: Allen's wit was at times intended not for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business.

Many years later, when he and Oscar Hammerstein II appeared as mystery guests on What's My Line?, Rodgers recalled Allen's act of sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling down, playing a banjo, and telling jokes.

A salary dispute ended the column; Allen wanted only $60 a week (equal to $1,092 today) to give up his theater work to become a full-time columnist, but his editor tried a sleight of hand, based on the paper's ad rates, to deny him.

He spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills even further, worked in a "respectfully" received duo that billed themselves as Fink and Smith, and played a few of the dying vaudeville houses.

Also in that cast was a young Englishman named Archie Leach, who received as many good notices for his romantic appeal as Allen got for his comic work.

In 1939–40, however, sponsor Bristol-Myers, which advertised Ipana toothpaste as well as Sal Hepatica during the program, altered the title to The Fred Allen Show over his objections.

[11] Allen's sole leading role was as flea circus impresario Fred F. Trumble Floogle in the frenetic It's in the Bag!, a loose adaptation of Ilf and Petrov's novel The Twelve Chairs.

Standard Brands' Blue Bonnet Margarine and Tender Leaf Tea, and later, Ford Motor Company, were the sponsors for the rest of the show's run.

The inspiration for the mythical Main Street of "Allen's Alley" came from the small-town heartland folks who were often profiled in the newspaper columns written by O. O. McIntyre (1884–1938), one of the most popular columnists of the 1930s, with some seven million readers.

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.

"[15] 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.

The Alley sketches made only one further cast change, when Peter Donald's chipper Irishman Ajax Cassidy succeeded Reed's Falstaff.

"Interestingly enough," wrote Frank Buxton and Bill Owen in The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, "[Claghorn, Nussbaum, Moody, and Cassidy] were never criticized as being anti-Southern, anti-Semitic, anti-New England, or anti-Irish.

Allen was able to negotiate a lucrative new contract as a result not only of the show's success but also in large measure to NBC's anxiety to keep more of its stars from joining Jack Benny in a wholesale defection to CBS as well as to retain its services for its rapidly-expanding television programming.

The CBS talent raids broke up NBC's hit Sunday night, and Benny also convinced George Burns and Gracie Allen and Bing Crosby to join his move.

Steaming mad because of his long battles for recognition, Boasberg was said to have delivered a tirade that ended up (in slightly altered form) in an Allen-Benny feud routine: ALLEN: Why, you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon ...

"Television is a triumph of equipment over people," Allen later observed, "and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room beside them for a network vice president's heart."

"[21] Allen also spent his final years as a newspaper columnist/humorist and as a memoirist and rented a small New York office to work six hours a day without distractions.

[22] 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.

During the final ninety seconds of the program Steve Allen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf (whose eyes began to tear) gave brief but heartfelt tributes to Fred.

Allen's widow, Portland Hoffa, married bandleader Joe Rines in 1959 and celebrated a second silver wedding anniversary well before her own death of natural causes in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1990.

Frank Tashlin's The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (1937) features a Fred Allen fox screaming, "Why doesn't somebody tell me these things!"

Also, Tex Avery's Thugs with Dirty Mugs (1938) features the main character addressing the audience and showing them his Fred Allen impersonation in one scene.