He’s Still Chugging Along

“Red light, green light.”

For baby boomers who grew up watching Los Angeles television in the 1950s and ‘60s, those words are enough to spur a mad dash to the fridge for a glass of milk.

For the uninitiated, “red light, green light” was the signature viewer-participation, milk-drinking game of a children’s television pioneer: Engineer Bill--the alter ego of veteran broadcaster Bill Stulla, who did more to get Southern California children to drink their milk than Nestle’s Quik, Bosco or Ovaltine.

“Cartoon Express” with Engineer Bill, originally seen weekdays at 6:30 p.m., was a fixture on KHJ-TV (now KCAL) from 1954 to 1966 and earned Stulla two Emmy Awards.

Stulla, who hasn’t had to worry about having a milk mustache for more than 35 years, became a stockbroker after retiring from broadcasting in 1966. “TV’s Casey Jones,” as one 1950s Los Angeles newspaper headline called him, lives in a waterfront home in Westlake Village. He turns 91 next Friday.

His hourlong show opened with a shot of a model train traveling around an elaborate layout, accompanied by the catchy Engineer Bill theme song:

“Who’s that coming down the track?

“Who’s that puffing smoke so black?

“Who’s at the throttle?

“That’s Engineer Bill.”

As host, the genial Stulla wore a blue-striped engineer’s cap and overalls, a red kerchief and his usual horn-rimmed glasses. He’d sit behind a smaller model train layout with his two in-studio guests for the day--always a boy and a girl from local schools.

Between cartoons, Stulla would chat with his guests, read names from a get-well list and talk to his home audience about breaking bad habits such as not eating everything on their plate. He’d give them one week to break a bad habit. To illustrate how difficult that can be, Little Mo, the Bad Habit Buster--a model train with a determined face painted on the engine--would be shown chugging up a steep incline and huffing, “I hope I can, I hope I can.”

But the highlight of the show came when Stulla played “red light, green light.” The game, with his audience at home joining in, was simple.

As Stulla and his two guests sat with their milk glasses poised at the ready, an off-screen announcer, usually “Freight Train Wayne” Thomas, would cry out, “Green light”--the signal to start drinking.

When Thomas abruptly yelled, “Red light,” they had to immediately stop drinking. The goal was to finish their milk without drinking on the red light. If Stulla and his two guests played the game perfectly, they would get a clang on a locomotive bell; if they goofed up, they got the lead bell (a dull metallic thud caused by striking a section of pipe with a piece of wood).

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because Freight Train Wayne would try to trick Engineer Bill and his viewers by substituting “green eyes” or “green grass” for “green light” and “red car” or “red pants” for “red light.”

“The guys in the studio calling the signal would try to screw me up as best they could,” recalls Stulla, “and they did it fairly often and I’d have to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’” as he dabbed his wet face with a napkin.

Stulla has slowed down a bit. But the familiar voice is as strong as the day he first greeted his TV audience with a hearty, “Happy highball, engineers!”

“Cartoon Express”--most kids simply called it the Engineer Bill show--was KHJ’s answer to the popular “Lunch Brigade” with Sheriff John on KTTV.

Stulla had been the host of “Parlor Party,” an afternoon show for women on KHJ, when he discovered in late 1954 that the station was holding auditions to find the host for a new show.

“I said, ‘What are you auditioning for?’” Stulla recalled. “They said, ‘We’re looking for a Ranger Ed.’ I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Well, that Sheriff John show is so good.’ I said, ‘You guys are unbelievable. In a month, that show will die because it’s a lousy imitation of Sheriff John.’”

The Host Came Up With the Premise

Stulla pitched them his own show, where he would be an engineer and run some cartoons that he knew the station had bought. “I said, ‘With those cartoons and trains, I can do a good show,’ and they stopped all the auditions and I went into the office and we talked it over.”

Baby boomers’ parents had Stulla’s wife to thank for motivating their children to drink milk with “red light, green light.”

Ruth Stulla had created the milk-drinking game to induce their young daughter, Kathy, to drink her milk. She had borrowed the idea from Kathy’s nursery school teacher, who had yelled “green light” to get the children to begin picking up their play equipment and “red light” to stop.

A week after starting “Cartoon Express,” Stulla came home from the studio and asked his wife how she liked the show.

“She said, ‘I like it very much, but it needs a little something that will attract the attention of the kids--some sort of game.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to buy Kathy a little engineer’s uniform and you take her down [to the TV station] and tell the kids how we play “red light, green light” at home.’

“I did, and all of a sudden it’s magic: Everybody wanted to play ‘red light, green light.’”

Kids who were lucky enough to appear on the show had their names drawn from a mailbag, which would be thrown to Engineer Bill by an off-camera crew member as viewers heard the sound of a passing train roaring by.

“The crew would try to hit me in the head with the mailbag,” Stulla recalled. “Sometimes I’d almost fall off my chair.”

Each child whose name was drawn would be sent a model kit of a freight car. They would let Stulla know when they had assembled it, and then he’d schedule them for an appearance.

Stulla was among a handful of local children’s show hosts on L.A. television at the time, a roster that not only included him and “Sheriff John” Rovick, but also “Skipper Frank” Herman, Tom Hatten, Chucko the Clown (Chuck Runyon), Bozo the Clown (Vance Colvig) and others. “I knew them all,” Stulla said. “We’d pass each other on Saturdays going to markets.”

Stulla would visit three or four supermarkets every Saturday, drawing as many as 1,500 children at each appearance. “In those years I was on, I must have met 5 million California kids,” he said.

Today, those “kids” have begun receiving invitations to join AARP.

Stulla’s daughter, Kathryn Mackensen, has already received hers. Now 53, she’s a retired executive training consultant and a former international banker living in McLean, Va.

And yes, she says, she still drinks milk.