Harry Silleck Grannatt was born in Colorado Springs, CO in 1898.He

rarely used his middle name (which was mother's maiden name), and in

more formal settings referred to himself as HarryS. Grannatt or more

commonly Harry Grannatt. In fact, heappears to have been sufficiently

uncomfortable with his middle name that he variously spelled it as

Selleck or as Silleck.Ultimately, he often just used HSG to identify

himself and thatwas the author's name he used in several

publications.Grannatt was REALLY tall. Grannatt discovered Mel Blanc,

who later became the voice of countless cartoon characters. Blancwas

just 16 at the time and in his autobiographical accounting ofthat

discovery, he claimed that Grannatt was nearly seven feet tall. In

fact,Grannatt’s medical records indicate that he was 6 feet 4 inches tall but, as he

wasextremely thin, he seemed even taller than his considerable stature as the

photo(above) suggests.The Grannatt family moved to Los Angeles when Harry was a toddler

where Harry enrolled in the Normal Training School which was a private institution, funded

with charitable donations, and seems to have sought to train young people for possible

careers in teaching. Following a highly selective admission process, Grannatt quickly

distinguished himself. As a 13 and 14-year old student, he won several debates onsuffrage

and the Los Angeles Times headlined an account of one of his speeches“Youth’s Logic

Charms Women”. A columnist mentioned “the boy orator’s burrning eloquence firing

suffrage audiences”. The Grannatt family moved to San Francisco shortly after Harry’s

graduation from the Normal Training School and the 15-year old Grannatt went to work as a

clerk in an insurance agency. He was drafted in 1917 and following World War One he

remained in San Francisco while working as an agent for the Firemen’s Fund Insurance

Company.

Apart from his insurance work, the world of literature andentertainment seemingly

called to the young man and hereportedly began sporadic participation in San

Franciscoradio stations just as that industry was being founded. A talented pianist, it’s

likely his radio activity focused onmusic. However, in San Francisco he drew attention

as anincredibly prolific writer of both words and music with akeen wit in addition to

being a fine performer.Grannatt moved briefly to Seattle around 1924, still working as

an insurance agent,and perhaps engaged in some radio work there as well. But it was

his move toPortland, Oregon, in 1925 that opened his entertainment/radio

career.Arriving in Portland, Grannatt quickly encountered a program formally known as

KeepGrowing Wiser Order of Hoot Owls (more popularly Hoot Owls) broadcast weekly

byone of the city’s most prominent stations, KGW. While the program’s style evolved

over time, the Hoot Owls always used a somewhat formal program structure arising

from its founding concept as a radio“club” or mythical lodge whose offices had

outlandish names. The Hoot Owls head owl, Charles F. Berg, was the Grand Screech.

The program‘s music director was the Grand Piano and the Episcopal Bishop of Oregon

was the Grand Sermon. Given his huge height, Grannatt was inducted as the Grand

String Bean (Broadcast Weekly referred to him as “the elongated lightning streak”).

The program opened with a roll call of Hoot Owl officers—known as the Degree

Team—followed by a “business meeting,” during which typical club business was

handled including the reading of correspondence,

answering listeners’questions, acknowledging gifts

and consideration of listeners’ membership

applications. The Hoot Owls’ “rites” at each

meeting included singing ofthe official Hoot Owl

song to Owlorgan (a circuscalliope) accompaniment

and the riding of the group’s imaginary mascot, a

goat named Sweet William, by newly initiated members. Sunset Magazine dubbed the

Hoot Owls the “Laughter Lodge of the Air”.The Hoot Owls was the first scripted

variety radio program in the U.S. With songs, doggerel/poetry and skits, its weekly

romp on the air required considerablewriting and, gradually, Grannatt began providing

increasing amounts of fullyscripted material for the program in addition to performing.

By 1929, Grannatt had become the program’s principal script writer (although script for

individual bits were still contributed by other members of the Degree Team for which

Grannatt simply left “holes” in his full program script). Mel Blanc, whose comicvoices

and dialects were an important element of the program, was one Hoot Owl who either

wrote or improvised his own program segments. To say the program was spontaneous

would be an understatement. For example, in May 1931 Oregon governor Julius Meier

appointed Harry Grannatt and another Hoot Owl Degree Team member, Ted Baum, to

the State Fair Committee with the assignment of assisting in the Fair’s publicity

planning. During the Hoot Owls’ May 8, 1931 broadcast Portland chief of police Jenkins

interrupted the Hoot Owls’ live show to arrest Grannatt and Baum on air “for stealing

police badges in the state capitol”.The pair had apparently purloined them as a prank,

while attending a meeting of the State Fair Committee, in a pre-arranged stunt to

promote the Fair. Another Degree Team member, Dean Collins, was also arrested on air

“for making anuisance of himself” when he interfered with Jenkins’ efforts to arrest

Grannatt and Baum. Following the arrests, the remaining cast members were left to

finish the programon their own. The badges “weren’t worth 39¢” according to

Governor Meier, who nevertheless stated that he believed the badges were an

emblem deserving respect. Meier appointed a special prosecutor, Multnomah County

Judge William A.Ekwall (himself an occasional performer on programs like the Hoot

Owls), while the arrested trio retained defense counsel. On the premise that they

were arrested in the hearing of thousands of radio listeners, it was decided that the

preliminary hearing should also be broadcast live during the following week’s Hoot

Owls program. In succeeding weeks, various on-air “trials” carried on the prank,

although no records exist on the outcome of this good-natured stunt. Because KGW was

owned by the state’s largest newspaper, the Morning Oregonian, the newspaper’s

cartoonist, Tige Reynolds, was both a Degree Team member and frequent program

participant. Called the Grand Sketch, Reynolds cartoons were used to promote the

program in printed literature including for events such as a large public dinner which

the Hoot Owls called a Hungari. Grannatt’s scripted contributions to the Hoot Owls

consisted of skits (such as The Cheese Opera – which was set in Tillamook, Oregon,

home of the Tillamook Cheese Factory). Program skits also centered on holidays or

events (such as a salute toValentine’s Day and a holiday show edition called “Christmas

and Prunes”) or whatwas essentially an annual roasting of city fathers during Portland’s

Rose Festival week.

Grannatt also specialized in doggerel and funny songs. His Dill Pickle ballads were

favorites (where the last line of each stanza involved Dill Pickles floating on water).

Two of his most popular were “Methuselah” and “Noah”. [Click on the handwritten

lyrics to hear Grannatt perform Methuselah] One appearance by Broadway and film

comedy duo Ole Olson and Chic Johnson led to an association between them and

Harry Grannatt, which resulted in the Broadway team’s negotiating the use of some

of Grannatt’s funny songs in their vaudeville act. Grannatt’s radio work in Portland

wasn’t necessarily limited to the Hoot Owls, however. Radio Digest Illustrated

reported that he was a pianist for Portland’s KOIN in 1929. KGW also owned Portland

station KEX for a time and Grannatt wrote satirical and zany humorous material for

Circus Court of the Air (heard on KEX), Powers Pied Piper (a vehicle created for

Blanc) and programs such as The Christmas Bazaar. KGW was a member of an early

regional radio network (consisting of KGW, Seattle’s KOMO and Spokane’s KHQ)

called the Triangle Network. Among the many things Grannatt wrote for the Triangle

Network was “A Review of a Review” in which he poked satiric fun at Harriet

Clinton Howe’s review of Marcel Proust). And he wrote numerous songs such as “Pass

the Pills”. Two volumes of material written for the Hoot Owls were published in

Hoot Owl Classics Vols. 1 & 2, in 1928 and 1929. The first, subtitled “Bed-Time

Stories,”contained material penned by Dean Collins; the second, by Harry Grannatt,

included poems, jingles and short stories. The volumes also contained unattributed

cartoon art by Tige Reynolds. Grannatt continued to write and perform when the

Hoot Owls left the air in January, 1933 including “The Fizzies of 1935” for the

Oregon Historical Society fundraiser of that year and a 1937 fundraiser for the

Portland Symphony (now the Oregon Symphony). In 1941, the Oregonian reported

that insurance man Harry Grannatt, who had a fine background in classical music and

occasionally gave lectures for the Portland Symphony, was the announcer/host for

KXL’s weeknight Concert Hour program. Following the Hoot Owls' last regular

broadcast surviving Hoot Owls occasionally performed on KGW and other stations,

usually as a charity fundraiser for the March of Dimes or other causes. While

Grannatt remained in the insurance business for many decades, it is clear that his

heart had been given to the pen, the piano and the microphone. Grannatt passed

away in Portland in 1976.