A few years back I wrote a story about a former kid’s show host, a fellow who went by the moniker Suddsy Watters. The story centers on a free-lance writer who finds his childhood hero – a kid’s show host he almost go to see live on the afternoon John Kennedy was assasinated.

Kids shows. Gotta love ’em. The way I figure it, the golden age of local TV kid’s show hosts was between about 1955 and 1975 in the time slot between roughly 3 and 6 pm, when Mom and Dad took control of the television set for the evening news. In many markets, there were multiple hosts. For instance, while I was a kid in suburban Cleveland Ohio, there were, notably, “Barnaby” on Channel 3, “Franz the Toymaker” on Channel 8, and my favorite, “Captain Penney” on Channel 5.

Captain Penney hosted a variety of short features, including The Little Rascals and The Three Stooges. The other two hosts were geared to younger children, featuring much tamer fare. My sisters preferred Barnaby, and they came up with the term “Neighbor Doors” to describe two part “Dutch Doors”. Barnaby would appear from the upper half of the door and say “Hello little neighbors…”, hence the term “Neigbor Doors.” [As an aside, the swinging saloon doors seen on Westerns were called “Stranger Doors” from the greetings given to someone entering a saloon, as in “Howdy Stranger!”]

A few years back I read a book describing a number of those kid show hosts from coast to coast. Interesting reading. There were a lot of “Captains,” “Uncles,” at least one “Skipper,” and a host of other colorful characters. As the genre faded out, a victim of syndicated game and/or talk shows, the hosts faded, too. Some faded into obscurity, others survived by adaptation to other roles at the stations where they worked.

Other than news, most local stations did away with local programming sometime in the seventies. Too expensive by the time you figured in props and the personnel needed to run shows. Besides, there were standards which came into play which took away some of the bread and butter that the stations relied on to keep the shows running.

For stations wanting to keep a certain amount of local content, there was another opportunity available to them. One of the Hollywood studios made available a catalog of “B” feature horror flicks at bargain rates to individual stations. Many of the operators in the markets where the package of horror flicks was purchased, used a host, sometimes called a “sprocket jockey.” Hosts were as diverse as the markets where they worked – usually with monikers having to do with horror movie tropes.

In Cleveland in the mid sixties, it was Ghoulardi. Channel 8 knew a good thing when they had it and they milked the routine for all it was worth. To Ghoulardi’s credit, the person playing the character (Ernie Anderson) organized a baseball team which would appear at various places around town to raise money for charitable organizations. Ghoulardi departed Cleveland at around the same time our family left, and at about the same time as Cleveland’s most popular disc jocky – A fellow with the moniker “Jerry G” (of Jerry G and Company).

Jerry G moved to Chicago, became Jerry G Bishop, worked at a couple of radio stations, then was tapped to be a horror host on one of the Chicago’s television stations.

Called himself Svengoolie.

From a description seen on the internet (“If it’s on the internet, it must be true”) a portion of Jerry G Bishop’s schtick was lifted from Ernie Anderson’s Ghoulardi. At least, there had to be some cross-pollination as Jerry G and Ghoulardi were working the same market in the same time frame. Svengoolie was moderately popular in its day. Again, going back on the internet (“It has to be true”), a fellow named Rich Koz started sending jokes to Svengoolie, eventually being hired as a writer for the show. Mr. Koz continued the show when Bishop left, calling himself Son of Svengoolie.

At some point, Bishop gave his blessing to Mr. Koz to use the Svengoolie moniker still used by Mr. Koz on his show seen on Saturday nights on ME-TV.

While I contend that the current success of Svengoolie may hinge a little on his being a descendant of Ghoulardi, there are a number of dissimilarities. Svengoolie depends a lot on what we call “Dad Jokes,” while Ghoulardi’s humor centered on ethnic humor. Sven is more politically correct. It should also be noted that Rich Koz has had the Svengoolie moniker all to himself for a couple of decades, Ghoulardi was a relative flash in the pan, lasting less than five years.

Anyhoo, that’s my rattle for this Sunday evening. Anyone else have a favorite kid’s show host or sprocket jockey? I’m always open for suggestions.

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