STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK AND JOHN BOYDSTON

The air raid sirens wailed and smoke filled the rafters of The Argyros Performing Arts Center as black and white footage of bombs dropping and fire raging during the London Blitz filled the screen behind Winston Churchill.

The nearly full house sitting in the theater’s red seats had been transported back to September 1940 as the British prime minister played by Randy Otto climbed to the roof and shook his fist at the Nazis during a few long uncomfortable moments depicting how 42,000 London residents died.

“You can’t lead from a bunker,” he said.

Randy Otto brought a powerful one-man presentation of Churchill—the “Man of the Century”--to The Argyros on Saturday as the culmination of a three-part Winston Churchill Festival designed to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end, according to the theater’s artistic director Casey Mott.

The presentation filled with accompanying slides and video, seemed remarkably relevant to what’s going on in the world today.

The show opened with Lee Pollock, a Sun Valley resident who has served as director of the International Churchill Society, popping open a bottle of champagne as Churchill disclosed that his wife Clementine’s pet nickname for him was “Pig.”

“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals,” he said.

Churchill told how his father Lord Randolph Churchill proposed to his mother Jennie Jerome, the daughter of an American businessman, three days after meeting her in 1874. Lord Randolph helped create the National Union of the Conservative Party, but he made a mistake when he resigned over a simple issue—tariffs--and he was not reappointed as he had expected.

His father did not think young Winston bright enough to go to Oxford and so sent him to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.

“I wanted to serve with him in Parliament, but he died in 1895 at the age of 46, just as I was graduating from Sandhurst,” Churchill added.

Needing to be where the action is, Churchill headed to India where he rode a white horse into battle because he wanted to be noticed.

“I was noticed all right—shot at,” he said.

Churchill sent pictures and excerpts about the campaign against Afghan tribes to the Daily Telegraph, and the campaign eventually became the topic of his first book, beginning his literary career.

Captured by Boer forces in South Africa, he went over the wall and made it through 300 miles of enemy lines to freedom.

“Newspapers called me a hero so I ran for office in 1899,” he said, adding that he served Her Majesty from 1900 to 1964.

When his party did nothing to help the widows and orphans in the streets, he switched parties.

“And we made changes.”

As First Lord of the Admiralty in Gallipoli in 1914, he watched as 31,000 British soldiers died in what was the worst military disaster in British history.

“Clementine wrote in her diary that Winston might take his own life,” he said.

But he found therapy in painting, a hobby that eventually led to 550 paintings over his lifetime. He returned to the Army to serve in the trenches of No Man’s Land.

In 1929, Churchill said, he read “Mein Kampf,” which outlined many of Hitler’s political beliefs and his plans for Germany and the world. He tried to warn others about how dangerous its author might become. But, he said, he may have been the only person to read the English version because no one listened.

When he became Prime Minister in 1940 as Germany was invading Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, he placed some of his most ardent opponents in his cabinet.

“I needed men who would challenge me, not ‘yes men,’ ” he said. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

Adolph Hitler, he said, had told nothing but insidious lies.

“I had nothing to do but tell the British people the truth—the perfect antidote. I told them, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Even though Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t back Britain when first asked, Churchill told the audience: “FDR was my greatest friend. Meeting him was like opening your first bottle of champagne; spending time with him was like drinking it. When Adolph Hitler declared war on the United States two days after Pearl Harbor, I knew then that we would prevail.”

Churchill added that he was one of the few voices who believed in magnanimity for Germany at the end of World War I. But, hurting as they were, the German people fell “in lockstep with this maniac.”

Otto, who grew up in Milwaukee, Wis., said he watched tears roll down his father’s face as they watched Churchill’s funeral together. And when he offered a short impression of Churchill, Hal Holbrook, who was famed for his impersonation of Mark Twain, told him, ‘If you don’t do that, they’ll forget Winston Churchill.”

At first, Otto said, he took his one-man play to Rotary Clubs and nursing homes, working for tapioca pudding. But, when he learned that none of his son’s classmates knew who Winston Churchill was, he took it to the next level.

“Hal Holbrook gave me the best advice: All you need to do is tell stories and string them together.”

Today, Otto, a financial analyst by trade, drives a restored 1938 Austin Cambridge like Churchill rode in that he calls Clemmie.

And he has kept Churchill’s spirit alive with four presentations: Winston Churchill: CEO, Winston Churchill: The Blitz, Winston Churchill: Man of the Century and Painting as a Pastime: Banishing the Black Dog.

“Randy does not attempt to be Winston Churchill, Randy Otto IS Winston Churchill,” praised Jonathan Sandys, great-grandson of Churchill.