| Steve Blow: Groan man still shoots from the lip 01/26/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News The postcards almost always make me groan.
Tex-Mex heartburn remedy: Alka Salsa.
Yet I also groan at the thought that one day the postcards will stop coming.
Cross a cat with a Xerox, you have a copycat.
Shelby Friedman's postcard quips have been a journalistic tradition in this city for most of a century.
Some might call them a curse.
Now there's a laxative candy – BM&Ms.
In the daily tide of mail from PR folks and irate readers, columnists can often count on a single white postcard with a line or two typed on the back.
Japanese corporation with funny name: Yamaha-ha-ha.
Finely aged lines
Mr. Friedman is 89 years old now. He's frail and unsteady. His eyesight is failing. He's recovering from surgery last week to implant a pacemaker.
But while his health may be puny, his mind is still pun-y.
The owl saw a QUIET sign and didn't give a hoot.
I was shocked when I first met Mr. Friedman several years ago. Based on his postcards, I expected a big, boisterous jokester.
Instead, I found myself shaking hands with a scrawny fellow with hangdog eyes and a shy smile. I couldn't believe this was the Shelby Friedman.
I guess I expected Shecky Friedman.
2,000 pounds of Japanese cuisine = Won Ton.
When I visited Mr. Friedman in his North Dallas home this week, he seemed even more frail, more downcast.
It has been a tough time. He has had his health problems. And his beloved wife of 50 years, Rebecca, died in May 1999. Even the puns dried up then.
"For a while there, I just couldn't think funny. I missed her so," he said. "Gradually they began to pop into my mind again."
He talks about the puns almost as a force unto themselves. "They just come," he said helplessly.
Dizzy spells gradually vertigo away.
But the market for puns is nearing collapse. Once there were four newspapers in Dallas, and Mr. Friedman sent postcards to them all. He still mentions reporters by name from the Dallas Dispatch. It closed in 1942.
Calling it quips
More recently, Reader's Digest discontinued its wordplay page, "Toward More Picturesque Speech." It had been Mr. Friedman's mainstay. Only Mark Twain has been quoted in that magazine as often as Shelby Friedman.
And now, he says, even Blackie Sherrod is using fewer of Mr. Friedman's "postal pest" submissions.
Still, he carries a notepad and pen in his shirt pocket at all times. A steno pad stays at his bedside. "I wake up about 3 o'clock most mornings and start writing things down," he said.
Day after Thanksgiving: Cold Turkey
Mr. Friedman got serious about his quips when he was named class poet in high school. That was in Texarkana, about 1925. "And I've been at it ever since."
Although he tried a few times to break into full-time comedy writing, he never got far. He made his living as owner of Friedman's Pharmacy in South Dallas – "near the end of the Harwood car line."
Buck to doe: "Let's have a little fawn, baby!"
The Friedmans had no children. He doesn't drive. And fewer friends are around to call.
So he's feeling especially fond these days of the companionship his puns always provided. "It occupied my mind, gave me something to do besides brood," he said.
"It's been a pleasure."
Likewise, Mr. Friedman.
Steve Blow can be reached at 214-977-8374 and at .
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