Sherman Loudermilk, 92; Art Director Was Host of ‘Cowboy Slim’ TV Show

Sherman Loudermilk, a film and television art director who was known during the early days of live television in Los Angeles as “Cowboy Slim,” host of a Western children’s show on KTLA-TV, has died. He was 92.

Loudermilk died Saturday of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease at a convalescent home in Escondido, his family said.

A former Marine Corps combat artist who served in the Pacific during World War II, Loudermilk impressed KTLA’s pioneering station manager Klaus Landsberg with his work and was hired as an art director at fledgling Channel 5.

Loudermilk built and painted sets for early KTLA shows such as “Beanie and Cecil” and the ice-skating variety show “Frosty Frolics,” and proved to be ideal for those early days of live TV.

As longtime KTLA newsman and former “Frosty Frolics” emcee Stan Chambers put it in his book “News at Ten,” Loudermilk was able to “bend, twist and cut cardboard, spray it with fast-drying paint and create real-life settings that you could not tell from the real thing.”

“It’s true,” Chambers told The Times on Wednesday. “He was magic when it came to putting sets together and, boy, did we need that. A guy like Sherm was absolutely invaluable.”

In 1948, Loudermilk also found himself unexpectedly working in front of the camera.

Landsberg had decided to start airing a Western movie program for children, and he wanted a cowboy to host it. Various movie cowboys were suggested, but Landsberg wanted a “real” cowboy.

When someone asked him who was going to be the host, Landsberg reportedly said, “Slim is. He’s from Texas.”

So 6-foot, 2-inch Texas-born “Slim” Loudermilk assumed the persona of “Cowboy Slim” for the show of the same name, complete with white hat, neckerchief and holster and six-gun.

The primitive set for the late afternoon show included Western-themed props such as bales of hay, wagon wheels, a hitching post, a small chuck wagon and a backdrop with open fields painted on it. Half a dozen children would join him on the set for the lead-ins to the movie and commercial breaks.

Loudermilk’s son Hans and his older sister, Lydia, appeared in promotional stills with their father, who often used Lydia’s pony, Molly, on the show.

“The pony would ride in the well of the back seat of the station wagon,” Lydia Vogt recalled Wednesday. “The studio was on the second or third floor, so Dad would lead her in, and she’d go up the elevator with him to the studio.” The TV show lasted only a few years, but Cowboy Slim lived on. To promote the TV show, he became a rodeo rider, and he ultimately became a champion bulldogger.

During one promotional appearance on stage at the Hollywood Bowl in 1949, he was supposed to demonstrate how to bulldog a steer by grabbing the animal’s horns and wrestling it to the ground.

“It was this rubber-necked bull that we all used to practice on,” he once recalled.

But the steer had other ideas, dragging a laughing Loudermilk all over the stage before sending him crashing into the orchestra.

As Loudermilk told it, bandleader Tex Williams never spoke to him again.

Born in Leon, Texas, Loudermilk was 16 when he lied about his age to enter the Arizona National Guard, where he worked as a mapmaker.

After moving to California in 1934, he worked at Lockheed and as a bartender to pay for classes at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena).

As a combat artist during World War II, he documented Marine victories and did reconnaissance mapping for the invasions of the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal, among others.

In 1965, Loudermilk was recommissioned in the Marine Corps as a combat artist and spent four years covering the action in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Among his credits as a TV art director are “The Dating Game,” “The A-Team,” “Simon & Simon,” “Battlestar Galactica” and the 1978 miniseries “Centennial,” for which he shared an Emmy nomination.

In addition to Lydia and Hans, the three-times married and divorced Loudermilk is survived by his daughter Amelia Komlertkul, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His son Craig died in 1992.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Alzheimer’s Assn.