Fibber McGee Drawer

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rita O’Connell in Taos, New Mexico.

Welcome to the program, Rita. How can we help you?

Well, I was listening to your show a couple weeks ago, and somebody called in with a weird thing their mom used to say. So I, of course, started racking my brains for my mom’s weird sayings, and I came up with what I think is a pretty good one that I had never thought to look up.

Great.

And it occurred to me recently when my boyfriend was looking for a pencil or a spool of thread or a hammer or any of the various things we keep in the one mysterious drawer in the kitchen. And I told him to go look in the Fibber McGee drawer.

And what did he say?

He said, what? He had absolutely never heard it before, and I had been saying it my whole life and never thought to wonder why.

Very good. Very interesting. This is a great question. Do you know where this comes from?

I don’t. I don’t. I thought that you were the perfect people to ask, so I’ve been holding out.

I’ll tell you. This is something I don’t talk about very much, but when I was a boy, and this is on topic, believe it or not, Martha knows this story. I listened to old-time radio. I was 13 in Missouri in the middle of nowhere, and at night you can hear radio from faraway cities. Like I was in the middle of Missouri, but I could hear radio from Chicago and New York, you know? And they would air rebroadcasts of old-time radio shows. And one of those shows, Rita, was the Fibber McGee and Molly show.

Fibber McGee was, it’s two words. His first name is Fibber because he often told tall tales. His last name McGee, the Irish name. Fibber McGee was on for 20 years. It was a hugely successful radio show. It’s funny. Here I am talking about old-time radio again. This is so meta, talking about radio on the radio.

Yeah.

It starred Jim and Mary and Jordan. So this was a show that I listened to when I was a boy, and many people who are much older than me also listened to when they were children. And one of the running gags in the show was that he had a closet filled with junk. And so it was a chance for the sound effects man just to go crazy. So Fibber’s wife would say, McGee, can you get me the garden shears? And he’d go, oh, yeah, I think they’re in the closet right here. And she’d go, no, and it’d be too late. He’d open the door, and, like, you’d hear, like, a typewriter clacking and bowling balls falling out and, like, a safe door shutting, and it sounded like, you know, tons of shoes and marbles and the whole, like, everything. It was crazy, and it would be different every time. It was, like, chains clanking and engines starting. It was just an incredible sound. And he’d be like, oh, let me just put all this back in here. And it’d, like, take him a second to do what took, like, 30 seconds to, like, unravel.

Yeah, and it was a running joke, so people knew as soon as she said, can you get me whatever? Yeah, that he was going to go to the closet.

That’s so interesting. It never occurred to me that it was a person’s name.

Yeah, and so the Fibber McGee closet or the Fibber McGee drawer became a thing, and it’s ensconced in dictionaries because it’s still got a little bit of currency to it. You will still occasionally find it in fiction and nonfiction, and newspaper columnists, of course, love it because it’s colorful and it calls back to a different age. And for me, I think of 79 Wistful Vista, which was their address, because I remember listening to the reruns of that show when I was a kid. I loved it.

That was so evocative. What’s in your favorite McGee drawer? What do you got? You got a bear trap in there?

Oh, yeah, pretty much. You name it. Crate paper, you know, birthday candles.

Oh, yeah, sure. Anything you could ever think of. There are a lot of different names for junk drawers. We called it the work drawer when I was growing up.

Like in the work drawer.

Yeah, in the cult drawer. We talked about that on the show.

Coach Pile, yeah.

Coach Pile.

Yep, in Maine. So there you go. Fibber McGee drawer, Fibber McGee closet comes from the old radio show.

Rita, you gave Grant a chance to talk about Fibber McGee.

I’m all teaming.

Thank you so much.

I’m all teaming.

It was my pleasure.

Our pleasure, too. Thanks for calling, Rita. Take care. Best of luck. Take care. Bye-bye.

One of the first things Rita said was that our moms are weird.

Yes, they are. Call us with the weird things that your mom or your dad had to say or your grandparents, 877-929-9673. Or send the weirdness in email to words@waywordradio.org.