Naperville teacher sees important lessons in 'Tim & Tom' comedy act
It's logical to see Tim Reid, Tom Dreesen and their long-ago biracial comedy act as a lesson in race relations - how far we've come and what we still need to do.
But Richard Owings, a retired teacher living in Naperville, learned something else from helping his now-famous friends write for their fledgling show in the late 1960s and early '70s.
"It was a perfect illustration of having a passion for something," Owings said. "Those guys wanted to be in show business and were willing to do whatever necessary to make it."
When Reid and Dreesen went on stage as a black-and-white comedy duo during a time of racial turbulence, they drafted Owings to add material, which he did now and then over three or four years.
The three got together recently for celebrations of Reid and Dreesen's book "Tim & Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White" (University of Chicago Press, $24), which included promotions at Jilly's Piano Bar and Barnes & Noble in downtown Naperville.
"Listening to that CD (of a 1973 performance), some of it does hold up, and some was very amateurish," Owings said in an interview. "I don't think I could provide material they needed to go to the next stage. To be a funny person there's no formula. You can't go to school and become a funny person. We were never telling jokes, it was always skits."
Reid went on to play disc jockey Venus Flytrap on television's "WKRP in Cincinnati" then to star in other series before his current career of making documentaries. Dreesen - who still calls himself a stand-up comedian - spent 14 years opening for Frank Sinatra.
But the showbiz bug did not bite Owings.
"I never had any illusions of being anything other than what I was," he said.
And that was a junior high and middle school teacher in Markham and Elmhurst, as well as a husband and father.
While Reid and Dreesen never earned much money with their act, it was more than Owings made.
Once they called to ask for new material and gave him $100, if Owings' memory is accurate. Another time they got Owings and his wife a night in a Playboy Club hotel. Performing at the chain of Playboy Clubs was one of the high points of Reid and Dreesen's career together.
The performers turned to Owings because he had always made Dreesen laugh when the two were growing up in south suburban Harvey. And both Owings and Dreesen were comfortable working with black people at a time when not everyone was.
Owings thought being born without the lower portion of his right leg made him sensitive to Reid's position in the act.
"Tim's blackness was like my leg," he said in the book, which was written with Ron Rapoport, former Sun-Times sports columnist. "It could be an object of the humor - everything else was material, why not that? - but it couldn't be personal. Tim had to be above the stereotype. He could be laughed with, but not at."
So generally in the act Dreesen was the Jerry Lewis clown, Reid the sophisticated Dean Martin.
The duo's way of handling race was to poke fun at white America's attitude about blacks, said Owings.
And he realized that if Reid could take jokes about race Owings should not be so sensitive about his leg. He went from hiding his disability to wearing shorts.
Dreesen and Reid were a long way from show business when they met in the South suburban Jaycees. Dreesen was selling insurance, and Reid was the first graduate of a historically black college hired for DuPont's marketing management trainee program.
Both had survived rough childhoods, and when Dreesen announced a plan to teach young people to avoid drugs, Reid knew he should get involved. Eventually one of their school appearances inspired an eighth grade girl to say they were so funny they should have an act. And that was all it took.
The most dramatic moments in the book are about people who threatened and physically attacked them for staging a bi-racial act and the dangers faced when a black man and a white one traveled together in a rundown car.
Once Dreesen got beat up for fighting a very large man who had pushed a lighted cigarette into Reid's face.
Life on the road and the struggle for success took other tolls, too, costing each of them a marriage. And the act that started in 1969 never did make it big before they ended it in 1974. But the two are still friends and publicize the book together. They are scheduled to be on "The Tonight Show" on WMAQ-TV, Channel 5 Friday, Dec. 5, according to their Web site, timandtomcomedy.com.
Dreesen, who is appreciated for mentioning his ties to Harvey and Chicago when he appears on national television, said he always knew the act was historic.
And Reid put in a plug for the advantages a sense of humor brings to serious issues such as race relations.
"It starts the discourse," Reid said. "We would take anybody's stereotype and make a joke of it. Then on their way home they might say 'Why that's silly, isn't it?'"
But to Owings, their story offers yet another moral. "Find your talent," he said, "find what it is you're good at that makes you feel good and do it."
From the act
An anecdote from "Tim & Tom: An American comedy in Black and White":
When Tom Dreesen and Tim Reid were trying to write new material, Dreesen learned that turnabout isn't always fair play.
"When we're working in front of a white audience and we get interrupted by a heckler," Dreesen said, "what if I said, 'Hey, go get your own. He's mine. After all, you know how hard they are to train?'"
"Gee, Tom," Reid responded, "that's kind of on the racist side, don't you think?"
That night, however, someone in the black audience said "Hey, white boy, what are you doing here?"
Reid jumped in. "Hey, brother, go get your own. He's mine. After all, you know how hard they are to train."
Dreesen agreed later that Reid was right.
"It's a basic lesson in comedy Charlie Chaplin taught years ago," he said. "A pie in the face of a banker is funny. A pie in the face of a homeless man is not. There were things he could say to me that wouldn't be funny if I said them, and vice-versa."
Books and compact discs are available at timandtomcomedy.com.