Lew Anderson, 84; Jazz Performer, Bandleader Was Clarabell the Clown in ‘The Howdy Doody Show.’

Lew Anderson, whose antics as Clarabell the Clown alongside Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody on one of television’s first children’s shows made an indelible impression on baby boomers, has died. He was 84.

Anderson, a musician and bandleader who regularly played in New York clubs, died Sunday of complications of prostate cancer at a hospice in Hawthorne, N.Y., said his son, Chris Anderson.

In the final moments of “The Howdy Doody Show” on Sept. 24, 1960, Anderson as the long-mute clown broke Clarabell’s silence by turning to the camera with a tear in his eye and saying, “Goodbye, kids.”

His first and last words on the show became a staple of television highlight reels.

Children related to the mischievous, seltzer-squirting clown with the Harpo Marx bent -- he communicated by honking a horn -- because “he got away with things they couldn’t,” Anderson told the Westchester County Journal News in 2000.

Though Anderson’s six years as Smith’s sidekick were an interlude to his long career as a jazz musician, the TV role brought him years of enjoyment and enduring fame.

“It was one of those seminal moments that carried into the rest of his life. There are pictures of him still in the costume in his late ‘70s when he appeared at autograph shows,” his son told The Times. “He really dug it.”

Although Anderson was the third actor to portray Clarabell, he was the best, Smith recalled in his 1990 memoir “Howdy and Me.”

Bob Keeshan, who became famous as TV’s Captain Kangaroo, originated the role of the prank-pulling clown in 1947 when the show was called “Puppet Playhouse.” The second, Bobby Nicholson, decided to play another character on the show: J. Cornelius Cobb.

Producers were looking for someone who shared Smith’s Midwestern sense of humor when they met Anderson, his son recalled.

“Do you juggle?” the show’s producers inquired. “No,” Anderson answered. “Dance?” “No.” “Magic tricks?” “No.”

“What can you do?” they asked. “Nothing,” he said.

“Perfect. You start tomorrow,” they replied.

He had never worn greasepaint or seen the show, but he knew how to make the character his own.

“Clarabell wasn’t really a clown,” Anderson said in 2000, but “a prankster and trickster. He was made for TV.”

At the start of each episode, Smith would shout to the Peanut Gallery of 30 to 50 children, “Say, kids, what time is it?”

“It’s Howdy Doody time!” they gleefully replied. Another episode would be off and running in Doodyville, with a cast populated by its namesake marionette, a baggy-suited Clarabell and such friends as Princess Summerfallwinterspring and Chief Thunderthud.

It was the first nationally broadcast weekday children’s show, and an estimated 15 million preschoolers tuned in on their tiny, black-and-white television sets. Anderson often recalled that it seemed everyone had seen it.

“They come up and say, ‘You don’t know what it meant to us to grow up with you,’ ” he said.

The show, which ran for 13 years, became NBC’s first regularly scheduled show broadcast in color and the first to last more than 1,000 episodes with a tally of more than 2,200.

When the show was canceled, Anderson said, it was “tough” to say goodbye but he was ready to return to his music.

Born May 7, 1922, in Kirkman, Iowa, Anderson was the son of a railroad telegrapher and a homemaker.

Like clowning, music fell into his life -- when he picked up his sister’s abandoned clarinet. By high school, he had his own dance band.

For two years, he attended Drake University in Des Moines on a music scholarship but dropped out to become a professional musician. By then an alto saxophonist, he joined Lee Barron’s band, toured the West in a series of mostly one-nighters and refined his music-arranging skills.

When a colleague asked where he had studied arranging, Anderson answered: “On the bandstand, watching and listening.”

During World War II, he served in the Navy on a submarine tender and put together a big band that performed in the Pacific theater. After leaving the service, he played in a series of bands that toured the Midwest.

In the late 1940s, he joined a singing group out of Chicago called the Honey Dreamers that appeared on radio and early television programs such as “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Through that group, he crossed paths with Howdy Doody in 1954.

The popularity of the show surprised him, and he told of being mobbed by children while making personal appearances in the 1950s.

After the program ended, he spent the 1960s composing and arranging advertising jingles. He also played in Broadway orchestras and recording sessions.

Missing the music he grew up with, he formed the All-American Big Band, a well-reviewed group filled with musicians from recording studios and Broadway shows who played a book of 300 songs, a quarter of which Anderson had written.

The band had two successive, long-term gigs in New York City, including playing Friday nights at Birdland since the late 1990s.

In addition to his son, Chris, Anderson is survived by his wife, Peggy of South Salem, N.Y.; another son, Lewis Jr.; a stepdaughter, Lorie George; and five grandchildren.

Since Smith died in 1998, Anderson had mostly put away his striped Clarabell costume with the floppy shoes.

“Howdy Doody” had been Smith’s “whole world,” Anderson once said.

Anderson considered himself lucky to have had something else.