Say, Kids, What Time Is It? Alas, It’s Time to Say Goodbye

It’s been a cruel, cruel summer. The temperatures soared, the Dow plummeted, the presidency teetered and a trio of TV’s first childhood heroes--Roy Rogers, Buffalo Bob and Shari Lewis--left us for the great Green Room in the sky. Are these deaths amid the chaos coincidence? Unlikely. Synchronistic portent? Quite possibly.

After all, Roy Rogers, Buffalo Bob and Shari Lewis were more than just performers; they were the Pied Pipers of the original global village, drawing the first generation of television tots to the flickering depths of broadcast fantasy. Claimed by the soon-to-be omnipotent and ubiquitous members of the postwar baby boom, television and its early gods were accorded powerful juju. Especially children’s television.

It brought grown-ups into the living room who were neither sipping Manhattans and ignoring any child not holding a tray of cheese pinwheels, nor grilling them about homework. These were grown-ups who liked playing with children, children who weren’t even their own. And on TV, they were lit from within by shimmering shades of grays, beamed into millions and millions of homes. Magic.

So it’s no wonder that it was with these three and a few others that the boomers groomed one of their greatest talents: fandom. Before there were fainting girls to greet the plane from Liverpool, before there were opiate-dazed followers of Kerouac and Ginsberg, before there were Yippies, the SDS and the Weather Underground, there were the kids in the Peanut Gallery, the Little Buckaroos and assorted Lamb Chop lovers.

Every day, for a span of more than 30 years, American kids rushed into the living room to claim a good seat for at least one of these shows. Buffalo Bob presided over “The Howdy Doody Show” from 1947 to 1960, asking his 15 million viewers the iconic question “Say, kids, what time is it?” 2,543 times.

Roy Rogers jumped off the big screen and into the laps of his Buckaroos with “The Roy Rogers Show,” which ran from 1951 through 1957, and then again in 1962 with “The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show.” Shari Lewis lived every kid’s dream by winning a spot on Arthur Godfrey’s talent scout show, which segued into Lamb Chop’s debut on “Captain Kangaroo” in 1957. “The Shari Lewis Show” ran into the ‘60s, and since then she had never really left the air for long: “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along” on PBS won five consecutive Emmys in the 1990s.

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Although their formats and personality tics varied, they had one thing in common: They were all nice. They were not cynical, they were not sarcastic, they were not “ironic.” In other words, they could probably not even get a meeting with most TV execs these days. They inhabited a world in which kids still wanted to be cowboys instead of Power Rangers and to play with cute fuzzy animals, not collect them in hopes of cashing in after the model is discontinued.

And within this triumvirate were the archetypes every child requires. Roy Rogers (who, by the way, married his first wife in Roswell, N.M., and again we ask: Coincidence?) was the Hero, the uber White Hat lifted above the barbaric hordes by faithful steed Trigger. Benevolent despot of Doodyville and straight man to the irrepressibly squeaky Howdy, Buffalo Bob was the perfect Patriarch. And Shari Lewis, who seemed endlessly and genuinely interested in the opinions of her sock-drawer menagerie, was of course Mom (despite her eerie resemblance in later years to Miss Carol Channing).

Perhaps this is why Lewis’ death seems to have hit people the hardest. “Devastated,” “heartbroken,” “still reeling” are just a few of the mostly straight-faced reactions to the news of her death. But each of the obits has left many boomers shaken.

“It leaves a void,” said one former Buckaroo.

“First, Mother Teresa and now this,” said another. “All the nice people are dying.”

“I didn’t think they were allowed to die,” said a Peanut Gallery wannabe.

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And that is, perhaps, the key to the upheaval. As Arthur Conan Doyle discovered a hundred years ago, we don’t like our heroes to go dying on us. It’s not part of the deal. But this was the risk that the creators of the hot medium didn’t foresee: The creation of icons who would age and die before our very eyes.

Heroes in myth and literature, on the funny page and the radio, were creatures of imagination, guaranteed immortality. Television heroes may be characters, but they also are real people, complete with the average life span of threescore and ten (and a few other very human failings, as we would learn from later kid-TV stars).

The generation that hoped it would die before it got old is suddenly reconsidering, and the death of three childhood heroes is quite a blow. After all, these three were caught not by martyrdom or war or accidental overdose, but by the big one, the one no can outrun or outdiet or outmaneuver--death by natural causes, and time.

So is it any wonder that Wall Street’s jumpy, the weather’s lousy and Kenneth Starr is allowed to exist? For many of a certain age, it’s as if Santa Claus had died, or Peter Pan. And been replaced by Homer Simpson and Barney. No one wants to read an obit of an icon; we mere mortals are vulnerable enough.

But who knows? Maybe Roy was able to pull some strings with his Roswell connections, and he and Bob and Shari were all beamed to that island in the Bermuda Triangle with Marilyn, JFK and Elvis. In living color.