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Show HOLLYWOOD HOTLINE Hope looks forward to young 76 By NANCY ANDERSON Copley News Service HOLLYWOOD - Bob Hope had just turned 75.5, but you never would have guessed it from listening to him talk about how much fun he was having and how many things he was going to do. "If you didn't remind me, I wouldn't know it myself," said Hope after he'd been asked if he hadn't completed the first half of his 76th year the day before. "I feel so good, I thought I was about 40." The Legend in His Lifetime was at his Toluca Lake home but only briefly. Within moments he was going to rush back to a studio where he and Lucille Ball were winding up a television special for airing the next Sunday, a show which had been somewhat delayed, because Ball had undergone oral surgery. Hope and Lucy work easily together, not only because they are both so professional but because they've done it before in a quartet of movies, "Sorrowful Jones," "Critic's Choice," "Fancy Pants" and "Facts of Life." While "Sorrowful Jones" and "Fancy Pants" were big hits, Hope's favorite of the four was "Facts of Life," because, "It was a human sort of picture." He was about to wrap up the show with Lucy, but almost immediately he was going to begin work on another, his 22nd Christmas special for NBC. The network had confessed that it knew almost nothing about Hope's plans for the show beyond the fact that Andy Gibb and the Associated Press All-American All-American football team would appear. Hope said this was because he wasn't sure what his plans were either. Ail-American football teams became regular features of Bob's Christmas show after he presented Look magazine's pick in 1950. "Granny Lansdale, the great quarterback, was on that team," Hope remembered, "and so was Harry Smith, the great tackle. We always had the Look team on the show until the magazine went out of business, and then the Associated Press took over." Though better known as a boxer, Hope was a football player himself in high school, doing very well as an end. But in all his pictures, including the campus comedies he used to make, he's never played a member of the varsity team. "Which is funny," he reflected, "since I've played everything else." Of all his Christmat specials, he thinks the best were done overseas, or they certainly meant more to him. Remembering Christmases in Vietnam, he spoke emotionally, "The media and Congress had a lot to do with our (the nation's) impression of Vietnam," Hope charged. "So we're all guilty for the way our men there were maligned. That was a sad chapter in our history," Hope will now begin looking forward to another big event, his 76th birthday. "The state of Kentucky is aleady planning a celebration," he said cheerily. "They're calling it 'The Spirit of 76.' "How do you like that? The Spirit of 76. "That's pretty good. "Still, I feel so damned good and am having such a good time I could swear that I'm 40." |