The Sid Tuchman Mystery Solved, 25 Years Later.

Sid Tuchman. For 25 years that name haunted me.

Sid was at the center of a moment which is, 2½ decades later, the funniest thing I have ever seen on television. It was also a moment (one among many) which inspired me to establish The Payphone Project web site in the early days of the World Wide Web.

Here is what happened: On July 31, 1990, David Letterman attempted to call his mother and talk to her on the air, as he often did on his programs.

It was a new phone number for his mother. He had not yet committed the number to memory. Reading the phone number off a card and clumsily poking the digits into an elephantine touch-tone PBX telephone Letterman unwittingly dialed the wrong number, entering into a feisty conversation with the person who answered. That person identified himself as Sid Tuchman.

Dave, mining the situation for as much comedy as possible, harangued Mr. Tuchman with questions like “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY MOTHER?” Sid sounded like a good sport about the misdirected call, and Dave politely said goodbye, hung up the phone, and tried again.

On the third attempt the connection is finally made! Mrs. Dorothy Mengering, better known as “Dave’s Mom”, answered the phone to a round of applause from the studio audience. Seemingly random cutaways to musicians Rick Derringer and Edgar Winter standing by with their instruments added to the growing lunacy of the moment.

A few seconds into the call Dave sharply asks “Mom, do you know a guy in Indianapolis named Sid Tuchman?”

After two seconds of silence Dave’s Mom quietly responds: “Yees.” The audience busts its collective gut laughing as Dave throws the phone. Dave takes several seconds to regain his composure after the shock of discovering a connection between his mother and a stranger who answered a random wrong number.

It was perfectly played. So perfect, in fact, that after it ended I questioned its genuineness. The main niggling observation I had was that Dave failed to ask Sid if it was okay to play his voice on the air. That’s a lawsuit-deflecting question Dave always asked people who he called at random, whether he intended to call them or not.

He acknowledged at the end of the YouTube video (below) that he neglected to ask, and that the following morning would be a good time for NBC’s lawyers to get their game on. More about the lawyers later.

Well let the truth be told. I now have it on no less authority than Sid Tuchman’s son that the famed wrong number call was genuine. Mitch Tuchman taped the segment in 1990 and wrote to me last week to advise that he had just posted the video to YouTube. This was done at the urging of Mitch’s 11-year-old daughter, who watched the tape and went straight to the Internet, presumably finding the original Payphone Project FAQ (which has not been updated in over 15 years, but which remains an accurate account of why this web site came to exist).

Mitch tells me the whole Tuchman family is “surprised that the episode had even been remembered by anyone.”

Mitch’s comments on the YouTube page answer all my questions about the genuineness of the encounter among David Letterman, Sid Tuchman, and Dave’s Mom.

“Tuchman Cleaners” was (and still is) a well-known business in Indianapolis, with dozens of locations around town. Dave’s mom knew *of* Sid Tuchman but, as she indicates toward the end of the call, she doesn’t really talk to him. Watch and listen:

Mitch Tuchman’s YouTube comments in full:

“On July 31, 1990, Dave Letterman called my dad by mistake when he was trying to call his mom in Indianapolis. I can assure you, this was a complete ad lib by Letterman. He woke my dad up from his daily 4PM afternoon nap (they were taping the show in the afternoon in New York). The reason his mom knew Sid, was that Sid had 40 dry cleaning stores around Indianapolis called “Tuchman Cleaners.” Everyone in town knows him! Letterman was right… the lawyers did call my dad the following day. But there was no way Sid was going to sue Dave. By the same token, I hope the network doesn’t threaten to sue me for putting this video up for the public as one of the funniest Letterman bits ever!

In our e-mail correspondence Mitch described hundreds of phone calls that came in from across the country that night after Dave announced the phone number on the air. Evidently I was not alone in questioning whether this encounter was real or staged. This is precisely what many of the callers wanted to know:

“…as it played from coast to coast – through the time zones – my parents got waves of calls from people trying to figure out if this was real. Finally, after the California show they got some sleep. And as Letterman predicted, my dad got a few calls from attorneys who wanted him to sue. No way he would have done that!”

I was among those hundreds, even thousands of Americans who attempted to call Sid Tuchman the night of July 31, 1990. On the east coast at the time I would have been part of the first wave of callers. I repeatedly dialed the number (edited out of the YouTube video) but heard nothing but busy signals for a couple of hours.

Regarding the lawyers, Mitch comments:

“The lawyers weren’t from NBC – they were bottom-fishers who wanted to get my dad to sue.   Here’s the thing.  When you are from Indianapolis, you likely feel a ‘hoosier” spirit, it’s really uncool to start suing fellow hoosiers.  People from Indy are so proud that Dave Letterman is from there.  In fact, in Indianapolis, there are no fences between people’s properties.  I’m sure Dave knew the name Tuchman and he probably made a split-second instinctive bet that he wouldn’t get sued by a fellow hoosier – particularly a Tuchman.”

Mitch’s mother, Charlene Tuchman, added:

“Actually, we did get more than one call from lawyers. So many calls and most such fun!  Questioning how we felt about our privacy being infringed upon. We laughed at how the lawyers were gathering for a kill after we realized what was happening.”

Now I do not want to make too big a deal out of all this, but the Sid Tuchman/David Letterman encounter has maintained its place in my memory as an iconic moment of comedy and randomness. I was sore inside the next day from laughing so hard. Randomness is everything. Everything is random.

Dave’s telephone routines were, in my opinion, among the funniest, most electric bits he ever did. He called New York City payphones and engaged whoever answered in conversation, sometimes inviting them into the studio where an audience of hundreds awaited to give this random payphone-answerer an unexpected standing ovation.

Such incidents got me thinking about creating my own sort of randomness.

In late 1995 I posted phone numbers and locations for several dozen Manhattan payphones, hoping to promote random contacts among complete strangers who would call these numbers and engage whoever answered in conversation — Letterman style, or perhaps more poetical.

You can read more about those early days of the site at the original Payphone Project FAQ. You can can also see what media and press attention The Payphone Project and my other web sites have garnered over the years at my Sorabji.com landing page.

Another memorable (if slightly weird) anecdote adds to the Sid Tuchman lore. In May, 2004, the NPR radio show Whad’Ya Know? did a segment which used content from The Payphone Project. The producers had contacted me before the show aired but I did not have time to get back to them. That’s too bad. What the Whad’Ya Know? team came up with that day was, to me, an uncomfortable bit of radio that could have benefited mightily from a small amount of planning.

All they did was have the show’s host dial payphone numbers directly from reading them from my web site. A lot of busy signals, a lot of ringringring no answer, a lot of nothing, as I recall.

Alas, that’s not why I refer to this particular radio show from 11 years ago, a show which lives on only through this snapshot at archive.org (no audio available).

I mention this show because it revived the Sid Tuchman mystique, if only for me. Evidently someone at Whad’Ya Know? had read my account of the Sid Tuchman incident and how it was the single funniest, most spontaneously hilarious thing I had ever seen on TV.

As the host of Whad’Ya Know? show pursued the futile endeavor of dialing numbers of payphones he was reading off my web site he incongruously blurted out the name “Sid Tuchman,” followed by some mumbling about “the funniest thing I ever saw on television.” Evidently the host or his producers took my raving about Letterman’s wrong number to heart, and hoped to ride the coattails of this comic gold by calling random payphones. They didn’t have much luck.

Sid Tuchman will turn 91 in July. Thanks to his son Mitch for filling me in on one of the great unanswered questions of my life. All my best to Sid, Mitch & Charlene, their daughter, and of course David Letterman, whose instincts had the guts to go through with airing that segment, lawyers-be-damned.

Here is a picture of Mitch and Sid Tuchman, from about 2 months ago, both lookin’ good: