99% Invisible - 581- It's Howdy Doody Time!
Episode Date: May 7, 2024The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 5pm, kids all across the country would si...t down in front of their parents’ tiny televisions and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick Howdy Doody.The show was disproportionately important in the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world of television was strange. In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild-west days of early TV. A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along. Starting with what to put on television in the first place.581- It's Howdy Doody Time!
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
Say kids, what time is it?
Howdy Doody Time!
It's Howdy Doody Time! It's Howdy Doody Time!
If your parents or grandparents grew up in the United States in the 1950s,
there's a decent chance that you have heard them sing this song.
And if you're the right age, you can probably sing it yourself.
In fact, if you're a boomer, it might be stuck in your head right now.
In which case, I am sorry.
For those who don't know, this nearly atonal chanting is the theme song to one of the very
first children's television programs, the Howdy Doody Show.
As reporter and long-time 99PI contributor, David Weinberg.
The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera, like the hula hoop,
that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood.
For over a decade, every weeknight at 5 p.m., kids all across the country
would sit down
in front of their parents' tiny television and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo
Bob and his Marionette puppet sidekick, Howdy Doody.
Howdy, what do you think we ought to do?
Well, I don't know, Mr. Smith, but I guess everybody likes movies. And now why don't we show a movie now?
Bet you the rabbit.
At the time, there wasn't anything quite like it.
Imagine a singing cowboy performing a puppet show for your birthday, only five nights a
week.
And now imagine nearly every other kid in America enjoying the same party at the same
time. For a lot of children, it was their first encounter with the concept of a TV star.
Which is why Bert Dubrow can remember exactly where he was when he first heard the rumor.
I was out on a playground in fifth or sixth grade, Trinity School in New Rochelle, New York,
and some kid said that Buffalo Bob bought a liquor School in New Rochelle, New York. And some kid said that Buffalo Bob bought a liquor store
in New Rochelle.
Now that would be like saying Mr. Rogers owned a liquor store.
It didn't make any sense.
This happened back around 1960.
And at the time, Bert loved all things TV,
especially live TV, and especially Howdy Doody.
So when he heard this rumor that the show's host,
Buffalo Bob, was selling liquor in New Rochelle,
he couldn't stop thinking about it.
And I literally found the route
from the south end to the north end,
and I did not tell my parents.
And I got in the M-Bus, and I got on the M-bus and I got off and those big signs
said, Lickers.
Ten years old, I walked into the liquor store.
My chin came up to the counter and I said, excuse me, is Buffalo Bob here?
And there was a man behind the counter who was wearing a check shirt, black cornroom
glasses and said, I'm Buffalo Bob. Well
that made no sense to me because he didn't look like Buffalo Bob, he didn't
did that second sound like Buffalo Bob, and he reached down below the counter and
he pulled out a color picture that went right over there in the red frame and
signed it to me.
And as he was talking,
he started to sound like Buffalo Bob.
That's when Burt realized that this was really happening.
He was standing in front of his hero,
the actual living, breathing Buffalo Bob, selling liquor.
So now I went home, my parents were ready to kill me.
Where were you?
So I was at Buffalo Bob's liquor store.
Well, they thought I was smoking something.
But every day, or many days after that, I went.
It reached a point that the people that worked for Bob at the liquor store, if they saw me
coming through the big glass windows, Bob would run in the back.
So he didn't have to see me. Bird Dubrow was not wrong to be starstruck. It's hard to overstate just how massive a
cultural juggernaut Howdy Doody was. The show was disproportionately important to the history
of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the
first shows to be broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children.
All of which, while I was talking to Burt, begged the question.
When I was doing the show on Saturday mornings and then running the liquor store the rest of the week, that's crazy.
It made sense for him to buy the liquor store, let's just say that. It was just an investment.
If it seems strange that the star of one of the most successful programs on television needed a side hustle.
Well, today it would be.
But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world
of television was strange.
It was a place where no one knew what anything or anyone was worth, not even Buffalo Bob.
And honestly, the fact that he ran a liquor store isn't even the strangest part.
In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody
is the story of the weird Wild West days of early TV.
A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists,
and money men were inventing everything as they went along.
Starting with what to put on television in the first place.
After all, the very first TV shows, including Howdy Doody, had no prior TV shows to build
on.
Instead, they had to steal their programming ideas from other, older mediums, including
the greatest medium of all.
This is music historian Stephen Davis being interviewed by Terry Gross in 1987.
His dad worked on Howdy Doody and he says that Buffalo Bob Smith got his name from his
hometown of Buffalo, New York and his life in entertainment started early.
By the time he was four years old, Bob could recreate any melody he heard by plinking away
on a piano with his two tiny fingers.
And by the time he was in his 30s, he was a popular radio DJ.
He hosted his shows sitting at a piano where he would sing along to records,
perform comedy sketches, and read the weather.
And originally, his sidekick's name was not Howdy Doody.
Howdy's original name was Elmer, and he appeared on a Saturday morning quiz show that Buffalo
Bob did in those days on the NBC radio network.
On the show, Bob developed the persona of Buffalo Bob, but he also voiced other characters,
including Elmer, who back then was a kind of country bumpkin.
And he had this really dumb kind of yokel voice,
which kept saying, Howdy Doody, boys and girls.
That was what the Elmer voice sounded like,
kind of a rub, a cowboy, you know, somebody from the frontier,
a rough dude, so to speak.
And eventually, that became his name, Howdy Doody.
And in a slightly alternate universe,
Howdy would have disappeared from cultural memory
when Bob's radio program went off the air.
But mass media, and Buffalo Bob's show in particular,
were about to undergo a huge change,
thanks to the failure of television.
After the first television sets became commercially available
in the 30s, for a long time, well into the 40s,
the medium actually had a hard time catching on.
For starters, unlike radio, which had a huge variety
of shows, there wasn't much to watch
on these small, grainy black and white screens.
So in the early days of television,
when they didn't have much programming,
basically what they often did was just
borrow the popular radio show of the time and move it to TV.
This is Stephen Stark.
I wrote a book about television and I'm a poet.
I write poetry now.
So yeah, that's what I do.
Did you ever write any poems about Howdy Doody?
No, I never wrote a poem about Howdy Doody, nor will I ever.
Stephen says that when televisions first were on the market, few people could afford one.
In 1948, very few people had televisions. We're talking fewer than a million people.
And it was not yet a nationwide medium.
Most of the early television stations were in New York, and those first broadcast signals
didn't reach all that far.
So nearly everyone who did own a TV lived in the New York area.
So what you tended to get in the early days of television were shows that were very New
York.
I mean, loud, in your face.
Take off your clothes, I wanna examine you.
Take off your clothes.
Oh, I couldn't take off my clothes.
A lot of slapstick, chaotic.
Some strange cameras here.
Milton, pull off your pants.
Sit down.
And the number one television show
in the early days of the medium
was Milton Berle's show, Texaco Star Theater,
which was essentially a New York Vaudeville show
transferred to television.
You wanna go on television every week?
Yeah.
Yes, but there's one important thing I must tell you,
must tell you Danny, you gotta have gimmicks.
What gimmicks?
A gimmick, running gags that you gotta do every week.
They not?
Like the Celts a bit.
Oh no, no Celts.
Yeah, the Celts a bit.
Oh please, no.
You take the Celts down.
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, let's go. Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah!
Ah!
Ah!
Ah!
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Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Lone Ranger and The Shadow couldn't be adapted for live television. Even if they could playback recorded video.
In the 1940s, no one in the industry was ready to invest those kinds of resources.
As a result, there was so little programming being made for television that for a long
while there wasn't anything on before dinnertime.
And I don't mean there wasn't anything on like it was boring.
I mean there was literally nothing on.
The TV networks only broadcast after 7 p.m.
But then, in 1947, NBC found something new
to put on the air by borrowing a different trick
from the Vaudevillian playbook, puppets.
Puppets were highly visual, they were live, they were cheap,
and perhaps most importantly,
kids loved them.
The plan was to do a one-hour kids' special at the ungodly early hour of 5 p.m.
They called it Puppet Playhouse, and they tapped Bob Smith to host it, along with his
country yokel sidekick, Howdy Doody. And it is important to remember it didn't have
any competition to speak of,
because it was kind of the first network kids show.
And just like Milton Berle,
it was going to be a vaudeville show made for television.
Howdy Doody, which premiered around the same time
on the same network, NBC,
was essentially the Milton
Burrell show for kids. The show was scheduled to air on December 27th, but
they didn't greenlight it until the week before Christmas. So the producers only
had two weeks to put together a live program. Bob Smith said that he didn't
find out he was hosting the show until four days before the broadcast date. And
the stakes were very high for Bob Smith's television debut.
He was about to have an unexpectedly huge audience.
The day before Puppet Playhouse went on the air,
it started snowing in New York,
and it didn't stop for 24 hours.
A record-breaking storm dumped mountains of snow on New York City. So, um, the day after the big snowstorm was the airing of the very first live public playoff show.
This is Chance Mitchell.
He runs the Duttyville Historical Society.
Basically, the Howdy Doody fan club.
Luckily, Bob had already been in the studio for a while.
So when everybody was snowed in, they were kind of snowed in too.
Chance says that the snowstorm closed down all the typical entertainment options.
There were no shows on Broadway, no music in the clubs, all the movie theaters shuttered.
Everyone was stuck at home.
And there were only three TV stations at the time.
Two of the stations were showing basketball games that night.
The third was debuting Puppet Playhouse.
So everybody was at home, so everybody tuned into this puppet show that was on the air.
The only problem was there was no puppet.
Remember, they'd only had two weeks to adapt material that had been designed for the radio
into highly visual entertainment, including designing a physical Howdy Doody, because up
until then, he had just been a voice. And the puppeteer didn't have enough time to finish the
puppet before the show went live. So they improvised. When the moment came for Howdy to
make his entrance, Buffalo Bob told the small handful
of kids that had made it to the studio that sadly poor old Howdy was too shy to appear
in front of the camera.
So he was hiding in Bob's desk drawer.
And he would go over to the desk drawer and say, are you in there Howdy?
And Howdy would say, oh yeah, but I'm too bashful to come out.
Well, he was too bashful for three weeks.
And in spite of the fact that no one could see the start of the show,
or who knows, maybe because they couldn't see him, the kids loved it.
NBC decided to give Bob Smith his own children's TV show five nights a week.
And mothers would take their kids,
plop them in front of the television set,
Howdy Doody would come on, and they could do something else.
So it was the first show in television history,
really, to see TV as a babysitter.
Suddenly, a new beautiful gift was given to parents
all around the country, a break beautiful gift was given to parents all around the country.
A break from their little monsters.
Every episode of this new show opened with a question.
Hey kids, what time is it?
It's time to eat!
It's time to eat!
It's time to eat!
And there was a live studio audience.
They all sat together and they were called the Peanut Gallery.
And if you watch any of the old shows, the boys and girls are still very dressed up.
The kids would all be wearing coats and ties and party dresses.
And there, less than 10 feet away on the stage, was Bob, along with Howdy, who did eventually
come out from that desk drawer.
Howdy, Doody, how did you like hearing that, little fella?
Well, Mr. Smith, that was, oh, it was just wonderful.
It's so thrilling when the boys and girls sing my song so loud.
Now I just want to pause right here and say that if you have any familiarity with Howdy
Doody, you probably have an image in your mind of what this puppet looks like.
But the Howdy that is currently prancing around in your brain is not the Howdy Doody that
first appeared on the show.
The original Howdy Doody was a different puppet, one that a lot of people thought was hideously
ugly.
And allegedly it was too scary for the kids.
I don't really believe that to be the case, but that's the story that Bob and people around
Bob would say about the puppet.
They eventually ended up calling him Ugly Duty.
He kind of looked like Beaker from The Muppets, in my opinion.
But it didn't matter.
In spite of him being ugly, or who knows, perhaps because he was so ugly, the kids loved Howdy.
Even more than when he was stuck in the drawer.
Though it's possible they would have loved a mop with googly eyes.
This was, after all, the first time that kids watched television.
But it's also the case that Howdy was just...nice.
He's always a positive, outgoing, happy 10-year-old.
He was 10 in 1947 and 75 years later he's still 10.
Everything that Howdy does is for the good of the whole community of Duttyville, not
just for himself.
Howdy was operated by a woman named Rhoda Mayan.
She stood on a platform above the set, holding Howdy's strings.
She was an especially gifted puppeteer who excelled at making Howdy move as much as possible
like a real human.
And Bob and Howdy would have all sorts of adventures together, usually designed to teach
the kids a valuable lesson.
And it's actually a magic word, friendship.
I hope all the kids know what friendship really is, Mr. Smith.
Although since his previous voice acting had been for the radio, Bob Smith never learned to throw his voice.
So anytime Howdy talked, Bob had to be off screen.
Well, I think they do. Matter of fact, I could go over and find out about it.
Do you all have a lot of friends, I hope?
Yes! fact I could go over and find out about it. Do you all have a lot of friends I hope? Yeah! Well now what do you think are some of the best ways that you could possibly
make a friend? There was also a rotating cast of other characters including live
actors like a mute clown named Clarabel who kept blasting everyone in the face
with a horn and a seltzer bottle, just like Milton Berle's old act.
Which apparently caused the same maniacal laughter in kids that it did in adults.
This being a 1950s show about cowboys, there were also some Native American characters that traded on racist stereotypes. They were played by white actors, including an Indian princess and an Indian chief named
Thunder Thud, who is mainly remembered for coining the term cowabunga.
But mainly there were puppets.
Wonderful, inventive, gloriously cost-saving puppets, including the Flubber Dove,
a creature that was eight animals in one,
and Phineas T. Bluster, the villainous mayor of Duttyville.
Here's Bert Dubrow again,
our 10-year-old Howdy Doody superfan.
He says Mayor Bluster often had some scheme he was cooking up.
There was an Easter egg episode
where Mr. Bluster bought all the Easter eggs in Duttyville,
all of them, so that they would have them buy them from him and he would overcharge
them.
So just to piss off everybody and upset the kids.
You get the point I'm making here?
Yes.
Okay.
The executives at NBC knew they had a quality television show on their hands.
But the problem was, there was no easy way of knowing just how many kids were actually
watching it.
Nielsen television ratings didn't exist yet, making it hard to sell the program to sponsors.
Not without data.
And without sponsors, there was no profit.
So in 1948, the suits at NBC and the writers at Howdy Doody devised a scheme worthy of
Phineas T. Bluster himself.
Eddie Keene, the absolute genius script writer and songwriter for the show, came up with
the idea that Howdy decided he would run for president of all the kids in the United States.
Howdy told the kids watching at home that if they mailed in a postcard with a write-in
vote for Howdy to the NBC office, he would send them their very own Howdy Doody campaign
button.
Now kids, I want you to all make sure of this.
Now this is the last chance that you have to vote.
Just the end of this week and all the votes must be in.
The more postcards that came in asking for buttons, the more kids must be watching the
show.
And that in turn would help NBC sell the program to potential sponsors.
"...and then it's box 333, box 333, and then it's New York 19 New York.
Now come on, all of you kids get in there and vote, will ya? And so they thought, you know, maybe we can print up, you know, probably 5,000 buttons or something.
Well, at the end of the entire run, they had reached a total of 60,000 buttons.
This was an insane number. We don't actually know how many postcards would have come in,
because NBC's mailroom got so overwhelmed they refused
to accept any more. By which point the number of postcards received was equal to one third
the total number of TV sets in America. That was more households than were technically
able to get Howdy Doody.
Which proved that kids and their families would go over to their neighbor's house that
did have a television set and sit down and watch the Howdy Ditty show.
And so this got them sold out completely.
Within months, some of the biggest brands in the country wanted to sponsor the show.
Colgate, Ovaltine, Kellogg's.
The department store Macy's wanted to sell Howdy dolls.
And NBC was more than happy to arrange a licensing
deal.
Money was pouring in.
But there was one person who was not getting a cent, Frank Parris, the man who had designed
the howdy duty puppet.
NBC had only paid him $500 to make it, but Buffalo Bob and NBC owned all the rights to
the character.
Well, Frank got very angry at this and one day barged into the office and said,
well, if you think it's your puppet, see how you do a show tonight.
Took the puppet and went home around two o'clock in the afternoon when the show had to be on at five.
Howdy Doody was supposed to go live in a matter of hours and the star of the show was missing.
Again, puppet-napped by its disgruntled creator.
And because the show's producers
were still learning how to run a television show,
they had only made the one puppet.
There were no backups.
They would need time to make a new one,
leaving Buffalo Bob and the writers
to come up with one of the most preposterous storylines
in the history of television.
Because when Frank Parris stormed out with Howdy Doody, aka Ugly Doody, they realized
that it might just provide the perfect excuse to give Howdy the visual upgrade they had
always wanted.
After the opening theme song, Buffalo Bob explained to the kids in the peanut gallery that Howdy would not be joining them today because he was out campaigning to be president
and while he was on the campaign trail, Howdy had met his opponent, a mysterious
man who went by the name Mr. X. And Eddie Keene came up with the idea, which sounds
so ridiculous now, that he ran into his running mate, Mr. X,
and Mr. X was very handsome
and getting all the votes from all the girls.
Buffalo Bob told the kids that after Howdy met
his insanely handsome opponent,
he had come to the sad realization
that he was too ugly to be president.
But fear not, because there was a solution.
Howdy was going to visit a plastic surgeon.
For a few weeks after that, from the neck down,
Howdy looked just like his old self.
But from the neck up,
he had bandages covering his head.
That way, none of the kids realize that it was
just some random puppet standing in for the star.
In the meantime, they fire Frank,
they get rid of the ugly puppet,
and now they got to find someone to make a new one, a good looking one.
NBC hired a woman named Velma Dawson to create a new Howdy Doody puppet, one that would not
allegedly frighten small children.
And on June 8, 1948, the new Howdy was ready.
And so then when the new one came in, they took that puppet, put bandages around him,
and then they unveiled him.
Slowly, Buffalo Bob unwrapped Howdy's bandaged head, and a freckled, bulbous-cheeked child
gazed out at the world with its unblinking blue eyes and a perpetually smiling face.
The surgery was a success. The future president of the kids of the United States
had arrived, and the kids went wild.
For the next decade,
Howdy Doody had an unprecedented run of success.
It was the first kids show to be broadcast nationally
and the first to regularly broadcast in color.
And as the show became more popular,
so too did television itself.
When Howdy Doody first went on the air in December of 1947,
there were fewer than 200,000 television sets in America.
By 1960, it was the longest running show on TV,
and America had nearly 50 million televisions.
Almost 90% of the country owned a TV.
This freckled 10-year-old boy
embedded himself into the minds of an entire generation of children in the
1950s. And the thing that Howdy fans dreamed of more than anything was to be
one of those lucky few kids who got to experience the show in person as a
member of the Peanut Gallery gallery to feel that fine mist
of seltzer on their face as it rained down from Claribel's bottle.
I do remember like it was yesterday walking into that studio.
Superfan Bert Dubrow says that back when he was a kid after he finally won Bob
over, Bob gave him a handful of tickets to a taping of the show and even though
he had seen Bob behind the counter of the liquor store dozens of times by then,
when he stepped into the studio, he was transported.
Up to that point, Burt had only ever experienced Howdy Doody on his black and white television.
And only I can compare it to is in The Wizard of Oz, you know, it starts out in black and white,
and then when they open the door and she's in Oz, you see the color, that's what this was like for me.
And there's everything.
I mean, there's the puppets and the, I mean everything that I knew.
Better than anybody knew it.
Then all of a sudden Bob, or I should say Buffalo Bob now, came through the cameras
and yelled out, where's Bert?
And my friends were on the Peanut gallery and they can't believe it.
And he said, they introduced me to your friends
and it was ridiculous.
When we come back, the story of how the medium
that Howdy Doody helped create would pass
Bob and Howdy by and never look back after this.
When we left, the Howdy Doody show appeared to be at the height of its popularity, its prestige and its profitability.
At the time, it would have been hard for kids and adults alike to imagine the show ever
ending.
But incredible as it was for fans like the young Burt Dubrow to sit in the peanut gallery.
The truth was that for a long time, just behind the scenes, the Howdy Doody show had been
having problems.
One of which was money.
In 1950, Buffalo Bob agreed to sell Howdy Doody to a new company created by NBC and
the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers.
The name of this new company was Kagran, which in my humble opinion sounds like the name
a TV writer would come up with for a soulless corporation that buys a beloved children's
television show with the singular focus on squeezing as much money from the pockets of
children's parents as possible.
Which coincidentally is exactly what happened.
When Cagrin took over, sponsors became increasingly involved
both onscreen and off.
More and more companies started to see the potential
of marketing their products to kids, or through kids.
As Buffalo Bob told children to get their parents
to buy this or that product,
Howdy became a marketing bonanza.
Kids, look here.
Clarabel has this whole lunchbox just filled with Hostess Twinkies.
So kids, you ask mom to buy some Hostess Twinkies the next time she goes to the store.
Howdy's face began staring at people from bread packaging and juice bottles.
And eventually, there was a backlash to the show.
It provided an early window into how television would be criticized by intellectuals.
And they could make the argument that how can you show this crud to children?
It's going to have this terrible effect on them.
Leaving out for a second that Milton Berle was the same show so
adults were consuming the crud just as much as the children were.
At the same time TV was evolving as a medium.
New children shows were popping up. Howdy
had competition including perhaps the biggest development
in children's television, the cartoon. Here I come to save the day.
That means that mighty mouth.
The other networks realized that airing cartoons
was cheaper than filming a bunch of actors
on a soundstage every week, and kids loved them.
And of course, puppets, compared to a cartoon character,
they can't possibly compete
because they fit the style of the medium.
And the competing live action shows didn't go away.
They just got more visually sophisticated,
including the show that perhaps would prove to be the perfect marriage of live action and cartoon IP. Who's the leader of the front that's made for you and me?
N.Y.C. J.G. Watt, N.O.U.S.C.
Mickey Mouse, ha ha ha! Mickey Mouse, ha ha ha!
The Mickey Mouse Club featured a cast of singing and dancing kids
alongside serials often involving Disney characters.
Meanwhile, Howdy Doody, the show that never met a problem it couldn't innovate its way
out of, had stopped innovating.
It was just the same old vaudeville puppet show.
As programs like the Mickey Mouse Club evolved around it, Howdy looked increasingly old-fashioned
and threadbare.
So, by 1960, when it left the air, I mean basically the air had left them,
because the other shows were better.
In 1956, the executives at NBC cut the show back from
five days a week to just one on Saturday afternoon.
Suddenly, everyone on the show was only
making a fraction of the money they had before.
Bert says that's one of the reasons
Bob purchased the liquor store. It was his way of giving some of the money they had before. Burt says that's one of the reasons Bob purchased the liquor store.
It was his way of giving some of the show's staff a job.
He wanted something for the guys at work for him to do after the show was off the air.
He knew the show was going to go away.
The last episode of Howdy Doody aired in 1960.
Bob Smith had not planned on being just a children's entertainer, but he didn't have
a second act after he hung up his Buffalo Bob outfit.
And it was during this Twilight period that our intrepid superfan, Burt Dubrow, actually
becomes part of the story.
When he grew up, he went to college in Boston, but he never stopped being fascinated with
the entertainment industry.
What was the dream at that point?
What did you want?
Just to be in television.
To be a producer, to be in television. I'm not even sure producer just to be in it, but it was because it was
live and it was real. So once it became cartoons, I didn't have an interest in it anymore, but
I always did with talk, always, always. Then in 1970, he heard that Buffalo Bob was coming
to town to perform. He had been doing a Howdy Doody revival tour.
So I go to the auditorium, I sit down, big place,
probably 1,500 people, and it's like there's Buffalo Bob.
And in spite of the fact that Bob was effectively putting
on a show designed for toddlers in front of a bunch
of grown men, or who knows, perhaps because he was putting
on a show for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men,
the audience loved it. And he was putting on a show for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men, the audience loved it.
And he was effing amazing.
All the songs, sang all the songs,
did everything, everybody knew the words to every song.
Like an idiot, I'm singing the songs too.
And when the show was over, Burt went to see Bob
and his brother Vic backstage.
He knew that Bob had had a heart attack several years earlier.
And he figured that Bob's health
was as good a reason as any
to get his foot into the door of show business.
So I said to Vic, listen, he needs me on the road.
He'll drop dead.
He's gonna get another heart attack.
Anyway, Bob called me and said, let's do it.
You'll travel with me and all that.
And it was rough.
He was rough. He was not
easy.
What do you mean?
He was very demanding and I'd say Moody, I didn't get my own room on the road, so I
didn't sleep in the same room as Hamlet. So I think I got $25 or $50 a show. That was
it. But I couldn't have been happier.
Burt's decision to drop out of college and pursue a career in television paid off. He
went on to create the Sally Jesse Raphael Show. And then after it became a hit, he came across
a local news anchor in Cincinnati and he thought this guy should have his own talk show.
That anchor's name was Jerry Springer.
Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
It started out as a straight show and ended up with throwing chairs.
But...
I interviewed Burt at his home in Denver, Colorado.
He told me we would be doing the interview in his basement.
And I was not prepared for what was down there.
Get ready. Go ahead, I'll meet you down there.
Okay, alright, sounds good.
When we descended the stairs, I was greeted by the smiling faces of so many puppets.
It was like a museum.
Let me put the lights on.
Wow, this is amazing.
Yeah, feel free to look around.
Yeah, I'd love you to give me a little tour and try to...
Sure, sure, sure.
There's a buffalo bod suit.
Oh, wow.
And there's Clarabelle's.
That's the real stuff.
Oh, yeah.
That's the...
This is the last seltzer bottle he used.
The last one.
All around me, everywhere I looked,
was something from the original Howdy Doody show.
All the costumes and props and photographs and puppets.
I felt kind of like how Bert must have felt
when he first went to that taping
and finally got to see everything in color.
That's the original Princess Summerform
Winter Spring puppet.
One of the hats they used to give away at the peanut gallery.
There I am in the peanut gallery that day.
That's me.
Right there, yeah.
When I asked Bert how he got all this stuff,
he says that when the revival tour was winding down,
he asked Bob if he could keep a few things.
And Bob couldn't understand why he would want any of it.
This was before collectibles really took off.
So when the show wrapped, he gave Burt everything that happened to be left.
And so here I am sitting with, you know, Claribel's box and the horns and hold on here, hold on.
Everybody will recognize that, that knows how to do, will recognize that.
And that's the actual horn.
It's one of them.
There's Bob and Springer in me.
Burt led me around his basement,
glass of ice water in his hand,
pointing out various pieces of memorabilia
from his long career in show business.
And there, in a corner,
standing upright was the star of the show,
Howdy Doody himself.
One of the very few puppets made from the original mold that was used of the show, Howdy Doody himself. One of the very few puppets made from the
original mold that was used on the show when Howdy first came out of plastic surgery.
There's the boy in the corner over there. Wow.
I know, this is sort of my freaking life. It's crazy.
99% Invisible was reported this week by David Weinberg, produced by Jacob Maldonado Medina
and edited by Joe Rosenberg.
Mix and sound design by Dara Hirsch, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Hayesha.
Special thanks to Roberta Chirac and Fresh Air for the use of the Steven Davis interview.
Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our
senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher
Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lasha Madon, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Nina Potuck, Sarah Bake,
and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
I strongly recommend you go check out David Weinberg's
experimental podcast, Random Tape.
It's sort of a cabinet of auditory wonders and curiosities
that David started in the form of,
and I am not joking here,
a physical audio zine on compact disc in 2006.
And it's been a favorite of us radio and podcast nerds
ever since.
Check it out. It's worth your time.
99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered
six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.
You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server,
which I highly recommend you check out. That's where I'm spending most of my time these days. You can find a link to it and every past episode of 99PI
at 99PI.org.