PROSPER'S OLD MOTHER by BRET HARTE
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
In the Bret Harte gold camp tale a young miner who strikes it rich hires an older lady to assume the role of his and the other boy's mother. Her donuts and cheating at poker disappoint but the camp falls in love with her. anyway. Then she tells her "son" prosper that his long lost sister will be arriving the next day..... Ronald Reagan stars as Prosper in a 1955 episode of GE Theater if you're handy with the internet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales this is your host and |
| 0:34.2 | storyte teller John Hagenorn and I've got a new Brett Hart story for you today |
| 0:38.8 | as most of you know Brett Hart wrote many of his stories based on his experiences in a California mining camp. |
| 0:45.9 | And what you might not know is that many of his stories were turned into movies, |
| 0:49.9 | TV show episodes, or stage plays. |
| 0:55.4 | Brett Hart was a great storyteller. He also kept a thesaurus handy. |
| 0:57.8 | And in some of the episodes I narrate, you can really tell. |
| 1:01.6 | Many times when I'm sending up a short story I'll check into its history and |
| 1:05.3 | this one came up a winner with family ties. I grew up in the Los Angeles area. My |
| 1:11.1 | dad was a manager with GE, meaning General Electric for you youngsters. |
| 1:15.7 | GE Large Lamp Division wanted to host a TV show so they produced GE Theater and |
| 1:22.2 | it was my dad who hired Ronald Reagan as the host. |
| 1:25.0 | This was before he became governor of California and later president of the US. |
| 1:29.0 | They ended up becoming good friends. |
| 1:32.0 | Mr Reagan was also a becoming good friends. |
| 1:37.1 | Mr Reagan was also a pretty good actor and he played the character of Prosper who you will soon meet in today's story in the GE theater episode called |
| 1:41.7 | Prosper's Old Mother, which aired November 20th, 1955. Ethel |
| 1:47.1 | Barramore plays Mother, Edgar Buchanan plays Colonel Starbucks, and a newcomer called Charles Bronson played Pike. I hope you enjoy this great |
| 1:57.6 | Brethart story and now Prosper's old mother. |
| 2:08.0 | It's all very well, said Joe Winbrook. For us to be sitting here, slinging lies, easy and comfortable, |
| 2:12.0 | with the wind whistling in the pines outside and the |
| 2:14.8 | rain just flipped in the ditches to fill our sluice boxes with gold as we're |
... |
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