How Did ‘Howdy Doody’ Do So Well?

Roger Muir had been a young producer in the nascent NBC television department for a year when he convinced himself that the network should have a kiddie show. The problem was, he had to convince his boss, Warren Wade, the head of programming, an old-time vaudeville man.

“After several times hearing me badgering him about it, he said, ‘All right, we’re going to do it, but I want a show with live people and puppets,’ ” Muir said recently. “It was to be vaudeville for kids on TV.”

Wade sent Muir to see a guy named Bob Smith, who was doing a Saturday morning kids show on WNBC radio called “The Triple B Ranch”--the triple Bs standing for “Big Brother Bob.” Smith did a voice on the show for an unseen goofy friend named Elmer. Whenever Elmer was introduced to the kids, he’d say, “Well, howdy doody!”

“The kids didn’t remember Elmer’s name. They would just ask to see ‘howdy doody,’ ” said Smith, now 80 and retired in North Carolina. He knew what that first TV puppet would have to be called. “That’s the simple way an era started.”

That primitive TV concept became a TV classic as “Howdy Doody”--the first popular TV kids’ show, long before there was “Sesame Street”--began 50 years ago with a Saturday 5 p.m. show on Dec. 27, 1947.

It stayed on the air, often five days a week, until Sept. 30, 1960, giving toddling baby boomers a fine mix of slapstick, education, puppeteering and music.

In reality, that first “Howdy Doody” was a quick-toss casserole. Even Howdy wasn’t ready for it.

“They told us on Dec. 23 that we were going to do an hour show four days later,” said Smith. “The puppet wasn’t even built yet.”

Muir and Smith vamped. Smith was already a top morning radio host in New York, doing a daily 6-9 a.m. musical variety show on the local NBC station. He was able to get the Godsmith Brothers dog act and a road puppet show called “The Adventures of Toby” to come on that first show. Muir found some old Mack Sennett silent film shorts and, of course, there were the kids.

“We called where they were seated the Peanut Gallery,” said Muir. “I ushered at symphonies when I was a student and they would send the students up to the 50-cent seats in the third balcony, which they called the Peanut Gallery.”

Clamoring for a spot in the “Howdy Doody” Peanut Gallery became a childhood staple for the 13 years the show was on.

In the absence of a Howdy puppet, Muir had Smith talk into a desk drawer where the “shy” Howdy was hiding. The ruse didn’t deter Variety from effusing.

“NBC need no longer look for a baby-sitter. They have the answer in Bob Smith,” Smith read from the following Monday’s edition. “This will be a great vehicle for RCA to sell TV sets.”

Smith and Muir’s show became so hot that NBC extended it to two, then three, then five times a week. But there was a problem with the original Howdy.

“We called him the Ugly Howdy. He was sort of a Mortimer Snerd, goofy-looking cowboy,” said Muir.

Even so, the show’s early popularity convinced Macy’s to want to make a deal to market a Howdy doll. But Howdy’s sculptor, Frank Paris, wouldn’t give up the rights.

“He said, ‘No, this is my baby,’ and one day he walked off and we had no puppet at all,” said Muir.

Though the NBC network in mid-1948 was a mere six stations--and there were only about 50,000 sets in the cities served by them--losing its most popular kid personality was still enough to cause a panic. What would “Seinfeld,” say, be without Seinfeld? Scrambling, Muir and Smith and their bosses finally got a design from a Disney puppeteer for a new Howdy. He was smiling, had red hair and freckles, and wore a cowboy outfit.

For the intervening weeks, Howdy appeared on the show only as Smith’s recorded voice. But head writer Eddie Keene had given Howdy an assignment: to follow the presidential campaign of 1948 and eventually run for “president of all the boys and girls.” Muir said NBC was flooded with more than 200,000 requests for “I’m for Howdy Doody” campaign buttons.

“There were only 50,000 sets that could watch, so we thought, but what obviously happened was that people with sets had the whole neighborhood of kids over to watch the show,” said Muir.

Soon after the new Howdy appeared, the show changed from a circus theme to a western one. Smith became “Buffalo Bob” and started wearing a fringed shirt. The villain Phineas T. Bluster no longer tried to take the circus away from Howdy, but now was the sly mayor of Doodyville, a mock-western town.

Princess Summerfallwinter-spring and Chief Thunderthud--two humans--acted juxtaposed to puppets like the hair-brained Dilly Dally and Flub-a-Dub, a creature made of parts of eight animals.

Then there was the notorious Clarabell.

A young NBC page named Bob Keeshan was looking for full-time work and hired on as a go-for boy for Smith on his radio and TV gigs. On “Howdy Doody,” Keeshan would hand prizes to the kids in the Peanut Gallery or run for something Smith needed for a skit. Wade, the NBC executive, wanted something different.

“ ‘Put him in a circus outfit!’ Warren told me,” said Muir. “Costume had two clown suits--a zebra stripe and a polka-dot. The engineers said that polka dots gave them problems, so that’s why Clarabell appeared in zebra stripes.”

Since Keeshan had no acting experience, Muir and Smith decided they would borrow a line, so to speak, from Harpo Marx and have him be mute.

Keeshan left after a few years to become “Captain Kangaroo.” For a short time, one of the puppeteers, Bob Nicholson, took on the role, but for the last six years of the show, it fell to a musician, Lew Anderson, on Smith’s radio show.

“I had never seen the show. It was a kid’s show, after all,” said Anderson, who today has Lew Anderson’s All-American Big Band, with a standing gig at Birdland, a jazz club in Manhattan.

In June 1956, NBC pushed “Howdy Doody” back to Saturdays.

It had been the first regularly scheduled weekday color TV show and the first series to have 1,000 episodes. But game shows, talk shows and soap operas had become bigger business in late weekday afternoons. In addition, ABC put on “The Mickey Mouse Club” opposite the freckled cowboy.

“Howdy Doody” stayed on for four more years on Saturdays. On the 2,343rd show, the most anyone had produced up until that time, Clarabell spoke his only words, “Goodbye, kids.” And that was it--almost.

Muir went on to produce documentaries and create “The Newlywed Game.” Anderson became a top jingle arranger and singer. In 1970, Smith, then semi-retired, got a call from a University of Pennsylvania grad student asking if he would like to perform at the school.

“I thought he was kidding and put him off,” said Smith. “But 1970 was a tough year for college students--Vietnam, Kent State, no jobs, too much dope. And this fellow told me, ‘We just want to relive our happy, carefree childhood days.’ ”

From 1970 to 1976, Smith toured more than 400 colleges. After that, when the college kids were no longer “Howdy” babies, he and Anderson, as Clarabell, did dozens of shows in malls. Now, a few times a year, they appear at TV memorabilia shows. Smith and Howdy are said to be up for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next year.

“It has been wonderful to hear adults say how we affected them so positively when they were young,” said Smith. “It was such a fun time for us and it’s nice to know it was the same for them.”