581- It's Howdy Doody Time!

Roman Mars

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Buffalo Bob Smith

It's Howdy Doody time. It's Howdy do. If your parents or grandparents grew up in the United States in the 1950s, there's a decent chance that you have heard them sing this song. And if youre the right age, you can probably sing it yourself. In fact, if youre a boomer, it might be stuck in your head right now.

Roman Mars

In which case im sorry, its time. To start the show. So kids, lets go. For those who dont know this nearly atonal chanting is the theme song to one of the very first childrens television programs, the Howdy Doody show. As reporter and longtime 99 PI contributor David Weinberg, the Howdy Doody show is.

David Weinberg

One of those pieces of 1950s ephemera, like the Hula Hoop, that has come to symbolize mid century american childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 05:00 p.m. Kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents tiny television and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his marionette puppet sidekick, howdy doody. Howdy. What do you think we ought to do?

Buffalo Bob Smith

Well, I don't know Mister Smith, but I guess everybody likes movies. And why don't we show a movie? And I'll bet you the rabbit, at. The time there wasn't anything quite like it. Imagine a singing cowboy performing a puppet show for your birthday only five nights a week.

Roman Mars

And now imagine nearly every other kid in America enjoying the same party. At the same time. For a lot of children, it was their first encounter with the concept of a tv star. Which is why Burt Dubrow can remember exactly where he was when he first heard the rumor. I was out on a playground in fifth or 6th grade Trinity School in New Rochelle, New York, and some kid said that Buffalo Bob bought a liquor store in Nourishon.

Burt Dubrow

Now that would be like saying Mister Rogers owned a liquor store. It didn't make any sense. This happened back around 1960. And at the time, Burt loved all things tv, especially live tv and especially howdy Doody. So when he heard this rumor that the show's host, Buffalo Bob, was selling liquor in New Rochelle, he couldn't stop thinking about it.

And I literally found the route from the south end to the north end. And I did not tell my parents. And I got in the MBus and I got off and those big signs said liquors. Ten years old. I walked into the liquor store, my chin came up to the counter and I said, excuse me, this buffalo Bob here?

And there was a man behind the counter who was wearing a check shirt, black horn rim glasses and said, I'm Buffalo Bob. Well, that made no sense to me because he didn't look like Buffalo Bob. He didn't. Did that second sound like Buffalo Bob? And he reached down below the counter and he pulled out a color picture, that one right over there in the red frame and signed it to me.

And as he was talking, he started to sound like Buffalo Bob. That's when Burt realized that this was really happening. He was standing in front of his hero, the actual living, breathing Buffalo Bob, selling liquor. So now I went home. My parents were ready to kill me.

Where were you? So I was at Buffalo Bob's liquor store. Well, they thought I was smoking something, but every day or many days after that, I went. It reached a point. The people that worked for Bob at the liquor store, if they saw me coming through the big glass windows, Bob would run in the back so he didn't have to see me.

Roman Mars

Bird Dubrow was not wrong to be starstruck. It's hard to overstate just how massive a cultural juggernaut howdy Doody was. The show was disproportionately important to the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1000 episodes, one of the first shows to be broadcast in color. And it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children.

David Weinberg

All of which, while I was talking to Burt, begged the question. I was doing the show on Saturday mornings and then running the liquor store. The rest of the week. That's crazy. It made sense for him to buy the liquor store.

Burt Dubrow

Let's just say that it was an investment. If it seems strange that the star of one of the most successful programs on television needed a side hustle, well, today it would be. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy duty first started the world of television, it was strange. It was a place where no one knew what anything or anyone was worth, not even Buffalo Bob. And honestly, the fact that he ran a liquor store isn't even the strangest part.

David Weinberg

In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild west days of early tv, a story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along, starting with what to put on television in the first place. After all, the very first tv shows, including Howdy Doody, had no prior tv shows to build on. Instead, they had to steal their programming ideas from other older mediums, including the greatest medium of all. Well, it really, you know, Howdy Doody was born on the radio. This is music historian Stephen Davis being interviewed by Terry Gross in 1987.

His dad worked on Howdy Doody, and he says that Buffalo Bob Smith got his name from his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and his life in entertainment started early. By the time he was four years old, Bob could recreate any melody he heard by plinking away on a piano with his two tiny fingers. And by the time he was in his thirties, he was a popular radio dj. He hosted his shows sitting at a piano, where he would sing along to records, perform comedy sketches and read the weather. And originally, his sidekick's name was not Howdy Doody.

Howdy's original name was Elmer, and he appeared on a Saturday morning quiz show that Buffalo Bob did in those days on the NBC radio network. On the show, Bob developed the Persona of Buffalo Bob, but he also voiced other characters, including Elmer, who back then was a kind of country bumpkin. And he had this really dumb kind of yokel voice which kept saying, howdy doody, boys and girls. That was what the Elmer voice sounded like, kind of a rube, a cowboy, you know, somebody from the frontier, a rough dude, so to speak. And eventually that became his howdy doody.

Roman Mars

And in a slightly alternate universe, Howdy would have disappeared from cultural memory when Bob's radio program went off the air. But mass media and Buffalo Bob's show in particular, were about to undergo a huge change thanks to the failure of television. After the first television sets became commercially available in the thirties. For a long time, well into the forties, the medium actually had a hard time catching on. For starters, unlike radio, which had a huge variety of shows, there wasn't much to watch on these small, grainy black and white screens.

Steven Stark

So in the early days of television, when they didn't have much programming, basically what they often did was just borrow the popular radio show of the time and move it to tv. This is Steven Stark. I wrote a book about television, and I'm a poet. I write poetry now, so, yeah, it's what I do. Did you ever write any poems about howdy Doody?

No, I never wrote a poem about Howdy Doody. Nor will I ever. Steven says that when televisions first went on the market, few people could afford one. In 1948, very few people had televisions. We're talking fewer than a million people.

Roman Mars

And it was not yet a nationwide medium. Most of the early television stations were in New York, and those first broadcast signals didn't reach all that far. So nearly everyone who did own a tv lived in the New York area. So what you tended to get in the early days of television were shows that were very New York. I mean, loud, in your face.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Take off your clothes. I want to examine it. Take off your clothes. Oh, I couldn't take it. A lot of slapstick.

Steven Stark

Chaotic. Some strange cameras. Here, Milton, go off your pants. Sit down. And the number one television show in the early days of the medium was Milton Berle Show.

Texaco Star theater, which was essentially a New York vaudeville show, transferred to television. You want to go on television every week? Yes, yes. But there's one important thing I must tell you. Must tell you, Danny, you gotta have gimmicks.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Oh, gimmicks. Gimmicks. Running gags that you gotta do every week, Danny. Like the Seltzer bit? Oh, no, no.

Seltz. Yeah, the Seltzer. Oh, please, Meltzer, take the seltzer.

Roman Mars

One reason vaudeville worked so well was because of another big hurdle. Video playback didnt exist yet, meaning television shows in the early days had to go out live. Meanwhile, plenty of shows that worked on the radio dramas like the Lone Ranger and the Shadow couldnt be adapted for live television. Even if they could playback recorded video in the 1940s, no one in the industry was ready to invest those kinds of resources. As a result, there was so little programming being made for television that for a long while, there wasn't anything on before dinner time.

And I don't mean there wasn't anything on. Like it was boring. I mean, there was literally nothing on the tv. Networks only broadcast after 07:00 p.m. But then, in 1947, NBC found something new to put on the air by borrowing a different trick from the vaudevillian playbook.

David Weinberg

Puppets. Puppets were highly visual. They were live, they were cheap, and perhaps most importantly, kids loved them. The plan was to do a 1 hour kids special at the ungodly early hour of 05:00 p.m. They called it Puppet Playhouse, and they tapped Bob Smith to host it, along with his country yokel sidekick, Howdy Doody.

Steven Stark

And it is important to remember, it didn't have any competition to speak of because it was kind of the first network kids show. And just like Milton Berle, it was going to be a vaudeville show made for television. Howdy Doody, which premiered around the same time on the same network. NBC, was essentially the Milton Berle show for kids. The show was scheduled to air on December 27, but they didn't greenlight it until the week before Christmas.

David Weinberg

So the producers only had two weeks to put together a live program. Bob Smith said that he didn't find out he was hosting the show until four days before the broadcast date, and the stakes were very high for Bob Smith's television debut. He was about to have an unexpectedly huge audience. The day before puppet Playhouse went on the air, it started snowing in New York, and it didn't stop for 24 hours. A record breaking storm dumped mountains of snow on New York City.

Chance Mitchell

So the day after the big snowstorm was the airing of the very first live public playoff show. This is Chance Mitchell. He runs the Doodyville Historical Society, basically the Howdy Doody fan club. Luckily, Bob had already been in the studio for a while, so when everybody was snowed in, they were kind of snowed in, too. Chance says that the snowstorm closed down all the typical entertainment options.

David Weinberg

There were no shows on Broadway, no music in the clubs. All the movie theaters shuttered. Everyone was stuck at home. And there were only three tv stations at the time. Two of the stations were showing basketball games that night.

Roman Mars

The third was debuting puppet Playhouse. And so everybody was at home. So everybody tuned in to this puppet show that was on the air. The only problem was there was no puppet. Remember, they'd only had two weeks to adapt material that had been designed for the radio into highly visual entertainment, including designing a physical howdy doody.

David Weinberg

Because up until then, he had just been a voice, and the puppeteer didn't have enough time to finish the puppet before the show went live, so they. Improvised when the moment came for Howdy to make his entrance. Buffalo Bob told the small handful of kids that had made it to the studio that sadly, poor old, old Howdy was too shy to appear in front of the camera. So he was hiding in Bob's desk. Drawer, and he would go over to the desk drawer and say, are you in there?

Chance Mitchell

Howdy? And Howdy would say, oh, yeah, but I want two bashful to come out. Well, he was too bashful for three weeks. And in spite of the fact that no one could see the star of the show, or who knows, maybe because they couldn't see him, the kids loved it. NBC decided to give Bob Smith his own children's tv show five nights a.

Steven Stark

Week, and mothers would take their kids, plop them in front of the television set. Howdy Doody would come on, and they could do something else. So it was the first show in television history, really, to see tv as a babysitter. Suddenly, a new, beautiful gift was given to parents all around the country, a break from their little monsters. Every episode of this new show opened with a question.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Drinkage. What time is it, peanut?

Steven Stark

And there was a live studio audience. They all sat together and they were called the Peanut Gallery. And if you watch any of the old shows, the boys and girls are still very dressed up. The kids would all be wearing coats and ties and party dresses. And there, less than 10ft away on the stage, was Bob, along with Howdy, who did eventually come out from that desk drawer.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Howdy Doody. How did you like hearing that, little fella? Well, Mister Smith, that was. Oh, it was just wonderful. It's so thrilling when the boys and girls sing my songs so loud.

David Weinberg

Now I just want to pause right here and say that if you have any familiarity with Howdy Doody, you probably have an image in your mind of what this puppet looks like. But the howdy that is currently prancing around in your brain is not the Howdy Doody that first appeared on the show. The original Howdy Doody was a different puppet, one that a lot of people thought was hideously ugly. And allegedly, it was too scary for the kids. I don't really believe that to be the case, but that's a story that Bob and people around Bob would say about the puppet.

Chance Mitchell

They eventually ended up calling him ugly duty. He kind of looked like Beaker from the Muppets, in my opinion. But it didnt matter. In spite of him being ugly, or who knows? Perhaps because he was so ugly, the kids loved Howdy even more than when he was stuck in the drawer, though.

David Weinberg

Its possible they would have loved a mop with googly eyes. This was, after all, the first time that kids watched television. But it's also the case that Howdy was just nice. He's always a positive, outgoing, happy ten year old. He was ten in 1947, and 75 years later he's still ten.

Chance Mitchell

Everything that Howdy does is for the good of the whole community of Dutyville, not just for himself. Howdy was operated by a woman named Rhoda Mann. She stood on a platform above the set holding Howdy's strings. She was an especially gifted puppeteer who excelled at making Howdy move as much as possible, like a real human. And Bob and Howdy would have all sorts of adventures together, usually designed to teach the kids a valuable lesson.

Buffalo Bob Smith

And it's actually a magic word, friendship. I hope all the kids know what friendship really is, Mister Smith. Although since his previous voice acting had been for the radio, Bob Smith never learned to throw his voice. So anytime Howdy talked, Bob had to be off screen. Well, I think they do.

Matter of fact, I could go over and find out about it. Do you all have a lot of friends, I hope? Yes, we do. Well, now, what do you think are some of the best ways that you could possibly make a friend? There was also a rotating cast of other characters, including live actors, like a mute clown named Clarabel who kept blasting everyone in the face with a horn and a seltzer bottle, just like Milton Berle's old act.

Clarabelle, would you bring that rope there? Which apparently caused the same maniacal laughter in kids that it did in adults.

David Weinberg

This being a 1950s show about cowboys, there were also some native american characters that traded on racist stereotypes. They were played by white actors, including an indian princess and an indian chief named Thunder Thud, who is mainly remembered for coining the term cowabunga. Oh, cowabunga. Doggone, I should have guessed that. But mainly there were puppets.

Roman Mars

Wonderful, inventive, gloriously cost saving puppets, including the Flubber dove, a creature that was eight animals in one, and Phineas T. Bluster, the villainous mayor of Dutyville. Here's Burt Dubrow again, our ten year old howdy Doody super fan. He says Mayor bluster often had some scheme he was cooking up. There was an Easter egg episode where Mister Bluster bought all the Easter eggs in Dutyville, all of them, so that they would have to then buy them from him and he would overcharge them.

Burt Dubrow

So just to piss off everybody and upset the kids. You get the point I'm making here. Yes. Okay. The executives at NBC knew they had a quality television show on their hands, but the problem was there was no easy way of knowing just how many kids were actually watching it.

Roman Mars

Nielsen Television ratings didn't exist yet, making it hard to sell the program to sponsors. Not without data. And without sponsors, there was no profit. So in 1948, the suits at NBC and the writers at Howdy Doody devised a scheme worthy of Phineas T. Bluster himself.

Chance Mitchell

Eddie Keene, the absolute genius scriptwriter and songwriter for the show, came up with the idea that Howdy decided he would run for president of all the kids in the United States. Howdy told the kids watching at home that if they mailed in a postcard with a write in vote for Howdy to the NBC office, he would send them their very own howdy duty campaign button. Now, kids, I want you to all make sure of this. Now, this is the last chance that you have to vote just the end of this week. And all the votes must be in.

Roman Mars

The more postcards that came in asking for buttons, the more kids must be watching the show. And that, in turn, would help NBC sell the program to potential sponsors. And then it's box 333. Box 333. And then it's New York, New York, 19, New York.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Now, come on, all of you kids, get in there and vote, will you? And so they thought, you know, maybe we can print up, you know, probably 5000 buttons or something. Well, at the end of the entire run, they had reached a total of 60,000 buttons. This was an insane number. We don't actually know how many postcards would have come in because NBC's mail room got so overwhelmed, they refused to accept any more, by which point the number of postcards received was equal to one third the total number of tv sets in America.

David Weinberg

That was more households than were technically able to get Howdy duty, which proved. That kids and their families would go over to their neighbor's house that did have a television set and sit down and watch the Howie duty show. And so this got them sold out completely. Within months, some of the biggest brands in the country wanted to sponsor the Colgate Ovaltine. Kellogg's, the department store.

Macy's wanted to sell Howdy dolls. And NBC was more than happy to arrange a licensing deal. Money was pouring in. But there was one person who was not getting a cent. Frank Parris, the man who had designed the Howdy Doody puppet.

Roman Mars

NBC had only paid him $500 to make it, but Buffalo Bob and NBC owned all the rights to the character. Well, Frank got very angry at this, and one day barged into the office and said, well, if you think it's your puppet, see how you do a show tonight. Took the puppet and went home around 02:00 in the afternoon, when the show had to be on at five. Howdy Doody was supposed to go live in a matter of hours, and the star of the show was missing again. Puppet napped by its disgruntled creator.

David Weinberg

And because the shows producers were still learning how to run a television show, they had only made the one puppet. There were no backups. They would need time to make a new one, leaving Buffalo Bob and the writers to come up with one of the most preposterous storylines in the history of television. Because when Frank Perris stormed out with Howdy Doody, aka ugly duty, they realized that it might just provide the perfect excuse to give Howdy the visual upgrade they had always wanted. After the opening theme song, Buffalo Bob explained to the kids in the peanut gallery that Howdy would not be joining them today because he was out campaigning to be president.

And while he was on the campaign trail, Howdy had met his opponent, a mysterious man who went by the name Mister X. And Eddie Keane came up with the idea, which sounds so ridiculous now, that he ran into his running mate, Mister X. And Mister X was very handsome and getting all the votes from all the girls. Buffalo Bob told the kids that after Howdy met his insanely handsome opponent, he had come to the sad realization that he was too ugly to be president. But fear not, because there was a solution.

Howdy was going to visit a plastic. Surgeon for a few weeks after that. From the neck down, Howdy looked just like his old self. But from the neck up, he had bandages covering his head. That way, none of the kids realized that it was just some random puppet standing in for the star.

Burt Dubrow

In the meantime, they fire frank, they get rid of the ugly puppet, and now they got to find someone to make a new one. A good looking one. NBC hired a woman named Velma Dawson to create a new Howdy duty puppet, one that would not allegedly frighten small children. And on June 8, 1948, the new Howdy was ready. And so then when the new one came in, they took that puppet, put bandages around him, and then they unveiled them.

David Weinberg

Slowly, Buffalo Bob unwrapped Howdy's bandaged head, and a freckled, bulbous cheeked child gazed out at the world with its unblinking blue eyes and a perpetually smiling face. The surgery was a success. The future president of the kids of the United States had arrived, and the kids went wild. For the next decade, Howdy Doody had an unprecedented run of success. It was the first kids show to be broadcast nationally and the first to regularly broadcast in Colorado.

Roman Mars

And as the show became more popular, so too did television itself. When Howdy Doody first went on the air in December of 1947, there were fewer than 200,000 television sets in America. By 1960, it was the longest running show on tv. And America had nearly 50 million televisions. Almost 90% of the country owned a tv.

David Weinberg

This freckled ten year old boy embedded himself into the minds of an entire generation of children in the 1950s. And the thing that howdy fans dreamed of more than anything was to be one of those lucky few kids who got to experience the show in person as a member of the peanut gallery, to feel that fine mist of seltzer on their face as it rained down from Clarabels bottle. I do remember like it was yesterday walking into that studio. Superfan Burt Dubrow says that back when he was a kid, after he finally won Bob over, Bob gave him a handful of tickets to a taping of the show. And even though he had seen Bob behind the counter of the liquor store dozens of times by then, when he stepped into the studio, he was transported.

Up to that point, Burt had only ever experienced howdy Doody on his black and white television. And only I can compare it to is in the wizard of Oz. You know, it starts out in black and white, and then when they open the door and she's in Oz and you see the color. That's what this was like for me. And there's everything.

Burt Dubrow

I mean, there's the puppets and, I mean, everything that I knew better than anybody knew it. And then all of a sudden, Bob, or I should say Buffalo Bob, now, came through the cameras and yelled out, where's Burt? And my friends are on the peanut gallery and they can't believe it. And he said, they introduced me to your friends and it was ridiculous. When we come back, the story of how the medium that Howdy Doody helped create would pass Bob and howdy by and never look back after this.

Roman Mars

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David Weinberg

When. We left the howdy Doody show appeared to be at the height of its popularity, its prestige, and its profitability. At the time, it would have been hard for kids and adults alike to imagine the show ever ending. But incredible as it was for fans like the young Bert Dubrow to sit in the peanut gallery, the truth was that for a long time, just behind the scenes, the Howdy Doody show had been having problems, one of which was money. In 1950, Buffalo Bob agreed to sell Howdy Doody to a new company created by NBC and the Wall street firm Lehman Brothers.

The name of this new company was Kagran, which, in my humble opinion, sounds like the name a tv writer would come up with for a soulless corporation that buys a beloved children's television show with the singular focus on squeezing as much money from the pockets of children's. Parents as possible, which, coincidentally, is exactly what happened. When Kagran took over, sponsors became increasingly involved, both on screen and off. More and more companies started to see the potential of marketing their products to kids or through kids. As Buffalo Bob told children to get their parents to buy this or that product, Howdy became a marketing bonanza.

Buffalo Bob Smith

Kids, look here. Clarabelle has his whole lunchbox just filled with hostess Twinkies. So, kids, you ask mom to buy some hostess Twinkies the next time she goes to the store. Howdy's face began staring at people from bread packaging and juice bottles. And eventually there was a backlash to the show.

Steven Stark

It provided an early window into how television would be criticized by intellectuals, and they could make the argument that, how can you show this crud to children? It's going to have this terrible effect on them. Leaving out for a second that Milton Berle was the same show. So adults were consuming the crud just. As much as the children were.

David Weinberg

At the same time, tv was evolving as a medium. New children's shows were popping up. Howdy had competition, including perhaps the biggest development in children's television, the cartoon here. I come to save the day. That means that mighty mouse.

The other networks realized that airing cartoons was cheaper than filming a bunch of actors on a soundstage every week, and kids loved them. And of course, puppets compared to a cartoon character, they can't possibly compete because they fit the style of the medium. And the competing live action shows didn't go away. They just got more visually sophisticated, including the show that perhaps would prove to be the perfect marriage of live action and cartoon ip. Who's the leader of the crocodile?

Buffalo Bob Smith

You with me?

Roman Mars

The Mickey Mouse Club featured a cast of singing and dancing kids alongside serials, often involving Disney characters. Meanwhile, Howdy Doody, the show that never met a problem it couldn't innovate its way out of, had stopped innovating. It was just the same old vaudeville puppet show. As programs like the Mickey Mouse Club evolved around it, howdy looked increasingly old fashioned and threadbare. So by 1960, when it left the air, I mean, basically the air had left them because, you know, the other shows were better.

David Weinberg

In 1956, the executives at NBC cut the show back from five days a week to just one on Saturday afternoon. And suddenly everyone on the show was only making a fraction of the money they had before. Burt says that's one of the reasons Bob purchased the liquor store. It was his way of giving some of the show's staff a job he. Wanted something for the guys that worked for him to do after the show was off the air, he knew the show was going to go away.

Roman Mars

The last episode of Howdy Doody aired in 1960. Bob Smith had not planned on being just a children's entertainer, but he didn't have a second act after he hung up his buffalo Bob outfit. And it was during this twilight period that our intrepid superfan, Burt Dubrow actually becomes part of the story. When he grew up, he went to college in Boston, but he never stopped being fascinated with the entertainment industry. What was the dream at that point?

Burt Dubrow

What did you want? Just to be in television? To be producer. To be in television. I'm not even sure producer.

Just to be in it. But it was because it was live and it was real. So once it became cartoons, I didn't have an interest in it anymore. But I always did with talk. Always.

Always. Then in 1970, he heard that Buffalo Bob was coming to town to perform. He had been doing a howdy duty revival tour. So I go to the auditorium, I sit down, big place, probably 1500 people, and it's like, there's Buffalo Bob. And in spite of the fact that Bob was effectively putting on a show designed for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men, or who knows?

Roman Mars

Perhaps because he was putting on a show for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men, the audience loved it. And he was effing amazing. All the songs sang, all the songs did everything. Everybody knew the words to every song. Like an idiot, I'm singing the songs too.

David Weinberg

And when the show was over, Burt went to see Bob and his brother Vic backstage. He knew that Bob had had a heart attack several years earlier, and he figured that Bob's health was as good a reason as any to get his foot into the door of show business. So I said to Vic, listen, he needs me on the road. He'll drop dead. He's gonna get another heart attack.

Burt Dubrow

Anyway, Bob called me and said, let's do it. You'll travel with me and all that. And it was. It was rough. He was rough.

He was not. He was not easy. What do you mean? He was very demanding and I'd say moody. I didn't get my own room on the road, so I sleep in the same room as Hammerwith.

So I think I got 25 or $50 a show. That was it. But I couldn't have been happier. Burt's decision to drop out of college and pursue a career in television paid off. He went on to create the Sally Jesse Raphael show.

David Weinberg

And then after it became a hit, he came across a local news anchor in Cincinnati, and he thought, this guy should have his own talk show. That anchor's name was Jerry Springer.

Burt Dubrow

It started out as a straight show and ended up throwing chairs. But I interviewed Burt at his home in Denver, Colorado. He told me we would be doing the interview in his basement, and I was not prepared for what was down there. Get ready. Go ahead.

I'll meet you down. Okay. All right, sounds good. When we descended the stairs, I was greeted by the smiling faces of so many puppets. It was like a museum.

Let me put the lights on. Wow. This is amazing. Yeah. Appropriate to look around.

Yeah. I'd love you to give me a little tour and try to. Sure, sure.

There's Buffalo Bob's suit. Did you find. Oh, wow. And there's Clarabel's. That's the real stuff.

Oh, yeah, that's the. This is the last seltzer bottle he used the last one. All around me, everywhere I looked was something from the original Howdy Doody show. All the costumes and props and photographs and puppets. I felt kind of like how Burt must have felt when he first went to that taping and finally got to see everything in color.

That's the original princess Summerfall winter spring puppet. One of the hats they used to give away at the peanut gallery. There I am in the peanut gallery that day. That's me. Oh, wow.

Right there. Yeah. When I asked Burt how he got all this stuff, he says that when the revival tour was winding down, he asked Bob if he could keep a few things, and Bob couldn't understand why he would want any of it. This was before collectibles really took off. So when the show wrapped, he gave Burt everything that happened to be left.

And so here I am sitting with, you know, Clarabelle's box and the horns and. Hold on here. Hold on. Everybody will recognize that. Knows howdy, will recognize that sound.

David Weinberg

And that's the actual horn. It's one of them. There's Bob and Springer and me. Burt led me around his basement, glass of ice water in his hand, pointing out various pieces of memorabilia from his long career in show business. And there in a corner, standing upright, was the star of the show, howdy Doody himself, one of the very few puppets made from the original mold that was used on the show when Howdy first came out of plastic surgery.

Burt Dubrow

There's the boy in the corner over there. Glass case. Wow. Yeah, I know. This is sort of my freaking life.

It's crazy.

Roman Mars

99% Invisible was reported this week by David Weinberg, produced by Jacob Maldonado Medina and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mix and sound design by Dara Hirsch. Music by Swan Rial. Fact checking by Graham Haysha special thanks to Roberta Chirac and fresh air for the use of the Steven Davis interview. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney hall is our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Borube, Jason de Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lasha Madonn, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Nina Patuck, Sarah Bake, and me. Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. I strongly recommend you go check out David Weinberg's experimental podcast, random tape. It's sort of a cabinet of auditory wonders and curiosities that David started in the form of, and I am not joking here, a physical audio zine on compact disc in 2006, and it's been a favorite of us radio and podcast nerds ever since.

Check it out. It's worth your time. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building and beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own discord server, which I highly recommend you check out. That's where I'm spending most of my time these days.

You can find a link to it and every past episode of 99 PI at 99 PI.org.

581- It's Howdy Doody Time!

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1: Introduction to Howdy Doody

2: The Origins of Howdy Doody

3: The Rise of Howdy Doody

4: Financial Struggles and Innovations

5: Legacy and Impact

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