I invited myself to lunch recently with Cincinnati's show-business greats. That was enough to get them started.

        “You would bring down the median age,” Walt Harrell quipped. “You are alive, aren't you?”

        So it goes with the Lunch Bunch, a wise-cracking group of retirees from the golden age of live TV and radio in Cincinnati. Once a month, about 20 of them meet in Springdale for lunch.

        They're getting old the same way they entertained us for years: by cracking jokes, belting out songs, thinking fast and speaking with perfect diction.

        “This is the most interesting bunch of old people you'll ever meet,” said Len Goorian, 82, who still sounds like a broadcaster.

Loosely scripted

        In his prime, Mr. Goorian produced six live shows a day, including Lilias, Yoga and You, a staple of public television in the 1970s.

        Other Lunch Bunchers include Rosemary (Kelly) Conrad, who starred in commercials and TV shows, and Jack Gifford, who wrote television scripts alongside Rod Serling and Earl Hamner.

        Bill Nimmo worked in New York in the 1950s, announcing for Jackie Gleason, Johnny Carson and others. Before that, he served in World War II.

        “In Indonesia, after I was wounded, I guarded Eisenhower,” he was telling someone the other day.

        “We went from Tunisia to Algiers ...”

        I didn't catch the rest of that story, because Mr. Gifford and Mrs. Conrad were telling one of their own.

        They once did a kids' show together in which Mr. Gifford dressed up as a clown named Tooney.

        “It was very loosely scripted. Like, hardly at all,” Mrs. Conrad said, laughing.

A gift for riff

        Cincinnati stations don't do much live programming anymore.

        Everything is canned and shipped from someplace else. The Lunch Bunchers get together because they remember when television was personal.

        They had to be versatile to keep their jobs, and they had to be funny without cursing.

        They still have a gift for riffing.

        Mr. Goorian mentions that he once danced for Arthur Murray, whose daughter married Henry Heimlich, the famous Cincinnati doctor.

        “The Heimlich Maneuver,” Mrs. Conrad said.

        “What was that about manure?” Mr. Goorian asked, feigning a hearing problem.

        “There's so much of it,” Mr. Nimmo answered.

        You can't help but laugh. That's the whole idea.

        The Lunch Bunch began 16 years ago in honor of Bob Shreve, famous for the cheesy humor of his late-night movie show on WKRC. Shortly after he lost a lung to cancer, his show-business friends took him to lunch.

        “We spent about two or three hours together, with all the old gags and all the old jokes,” Mr. Goorian recalled. “By the time we were finished, his face had a red glow to it. It was wonderful.”

        They kept the lunches going even after he passed away.

        Today, conversation bounces from crossword puzzles to Britney Spears to the autographed g-string of a burlesque dancer named Rose La Rose. Irreverence and affection abound.

        “We hold hands and talk and make believe we're not dying,” Mr. Goorian says.

        It's not a bad way to live.

        E-mail ksamples@enquirer.com. Past columns at www.enquirer.com/columns/samples.

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