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PART TWO : by L. WAYNE HICKS
A: The young. The young audience. Q: Did you have a particular age in mind? A: Yeah, particularly anywhere from 3 to 8 years of age. Males left us earlier than females as they grew. That’s just the nature of our culture. Males between 8 and 9 were drawn to action programming and the like. Young females would very often stay with the show until 10 or 11 years of age. That was an indication more of the way we in this culture approach males and females differently. And we successfully reached that audience. The only surprise to us really from the beginning was the number of adults that we reached. About a third of our audience was adults. That of course I always interpreted as being positive because we felt these were parents experiencing the program with their children. Perhaps it was providing some guidance to them in providing nurturing skills and ideas that would be useful to them in nurturing their young people. "Sesame Street," on the other hand, in the beginning did not reach that audience at all. They were reaching older kids because they were dealing in older material, which they did realize and now the program’s entirely different. Now it does deal very much with the emotional development of the child and they’re much more on target than they were in the very beginning. Q: Going into your show originally, were you focusing on just entertainment or did you have the educational component in mind already? A: I often made the point that there is no difference in
my mind between education and entertainment. That the stuff of entertainment
is education. That material is fascinating and it ought to be the basis
for entertainment, and that’s really what it was. We didn’t
want anybody, a child, looking at the show to say oh he’s trying
to teach me this. They’re trying to demonstrate that. We would have
failed if that occurred.
A: Well, we did, we always had consultants. We had people from the Harvest Mann Lincoln Institute or the Columbia Teacher’s College, places like that, who were on staff and met with our writers and our producers and others regularly and taught us. For those of us doing the program, it was kind of a workshop on the education of young people. But no, it didn’t happen overnight. A lot of us did rely. We were young. We were parents and we knew what parents were facing in raising children. We knew the questions they were asking because we were asking the same questions and we were just simply try to answer them. Yes, we did consult with people who were experts. On the other hand, depending on the expert -- some of them understood us tremendously; others didn’t know what their function was. We had some experts write Bunny Rabbit material for us and submit it and it was dreadful. It was really dreadful. We had to say, "We don’t need the material. Leave that to us. You just tell us what the needs of the child are, what’s important in the life of a typical 4-year-old, what’s typical in the life of an atypical 4-year-old, a child who has this problem or that problem or doesn’t have the kind of home setting that would be ideal in raising a child. Give us an education in all of those things, hey, and we’ll take care of Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose and all that." That’s pretty much the way it worked out. It was a very collegial effort and it turned out well.
A: You didn’t know it then. We didn’t want you to know it. Q: I look back at the show and I think about Tom Terrific and ping pong balls and Dancing Bear and I have this sense of well-being. A: That latter is probably the most important thing you
could say. However we got there, that’s where we were going. Giving
you that sense of well-being, giving you that confidence, that good feeling
that you were able to do anything, that you were able to accomplish some
things. That you were able to undertake something that maybe other people
would tell you you couldn’t do. That was important. That was where
we were going. And how we got there really wasn’t important. Whether
it was the culmination of a circuitous plot by Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit
which ended with ping pong balls on my head, it didn’t matter how
we got there.
A: It’s kind of like the Dancing Bear story. It was nothing. It was just an idea. We wanted to give a device to Mr. Moose of some kind. A writer came up with this notion. The only difference was when I looked at the script I said, "Oh, no" because he had called for golf balls to drop on my head. I said, "I’m not going to last very long if you’re going to drop golf balls on my head." Somebody said, "How about ping pong balls? They’re not weighty and you’ll be able to take that." I said Fine. If it’s set up properly, it’s a funny concept. Mr. Moose enjoyed it so thoroughly; as did every child and ever parent at home enjoy it. They were laughing with the Moose. They weren’t really laughing at me. I liked being in that position, of being outwitted by Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose because there’s a vulnerability to us as adults. We’re not perfect, and it’s important for a child to understand a parent is not perfect. That it is possible to be smarter than a parent once in a while. Q: Was it written that way, that Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit would sort of be your children on the show and you’d be the parent? A: Yeah. Well, they weren’t my children but they certainly were surrogates for children and they were mischievous. They had these really way-out ideas that any child would find wonderful. They conduct themselves that way. That was fine. That was very appropriate behavior for them. On the other hand, there was always a pulling back if they ever moved too far in that direction. It would never become unkind without our pointing out that you don’t do things that are unkind. Q: How many ping pong balls do you think were dropped on your head during the course of the show? A: Uh, 952,483. How do I know? (laughs) I had one child convinced once that we spent every day counting them and that we had that tabulated perfectly to the very last one over all those years and he believed it. But I won’t do that to you.
A: Yeah. When we first went on the air he was kind of a Down East character with a little bit of Down East accent. I think we lost that in about three weeks. It was me. It grew into me. It just evolves that you become more yourself and that’s really it. The Captain is pretty much me. And that’s fine. Q: And you went from having to whitening your hair to having white hair. A: That’s for sure. Hey, I have less hair than the Captain did. (laughs) If I were to do it today, I’d still wear a wig. But I never want to do that again. I’d love to go back. Q: The attempt to bring it back with a different actor didn’t work. A: Oh, God no. Absolutely not. I was not involved with that at all. I offered my services as a consultant but they didn’t want me. There’s a tremendous audacity in this business. Take a producer from Fox’s Saban, the people who did it, they don’t need anybody. They don’t need the original cast, they don’t need the writers, they don’t need the producers. "We know how to do a show. We did the Power Rangers." So I just walked away. Q: So if someone were to put it on the air again, would you be willing to step back in the role of the Captain? A: I really wouldn’t want to come back in costume as the Captain because it’s a lot of work. What I would be willing to do is the creation of new material and I would be very willing to do maybe an animated Captain that would be part of the show. That’s very possible. We could do some very nice material there, including the development of a lot of new characters. What can be done today with the technical advances that have occurred in the last decade are just tremendous. I think we could make a very presentable program. I don’t want to get involved in the production as the executive producer anymore. I’ve had that. But if other people wanted to do it, my services would be available to them and I think we could do a very good program.
A: He was talking about the environment in 1955. Many adults didn’t know what environment in that context meant. This was early on. Nobody talked about the environment in those days, not certainly on a general program and certainly not one for children. But he had a reverence. That came from him. It wasn’t something that our writers said: "Now you’re going to have a reverence for life." He taught them that. He felt that way, very strongly. He was a protester when they were building dams on rivers that would destroy farms and property. He was for clean water. He was for clean air. He was for non-fossil fuels and production of energy and the like. His reverence for life was there. It was for the growing things, the vegetables and the plants he would literally bring from his farm in Pennsylvania. It was obvious that Lumpy was at home with these things. Q: What did Gus Allegretti bring to the show? A: A genius is what he brought. Gus is a genius. He’s a great, great puppeteer. Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose and Dancing Bear. But he’s also got an incredible sense of humor. A wonderful, wonderful sense of humor. It sounds denigrating when you say "childlike." I don’t believe that at all. It’s a simple honest quirky sense of humor that worked very well when the Moose did something or said something to the staid Captain. It was just an absolutely wonderful addition. We got along very well from the very beginning. We were good friends. We weren’t close personally, actually. We’re very different human beings. He’s a very, very conservative guy, recognizing his background. His parents were immigrants to this country. He was very appreciative of America and all that America meant to his parents and to his family and to him. Every once in a while somebody in the studio would express an idea that was a little too liberal and Gus would tie into it. He made good arguments. He wasn’t just ranting and raving. He was quite an intellectual. Q: What did you bring to "Captain Kangaroo"? A: I don’t know. It’s hard to define what you do. Q: How did you wind up working in television? A: I had just come back from service, in the Marine Corps
in World War II, at the end of World War II. I was in college and back
at my old job at NBC. I worked as a page at NBC. They didn’t like
it, but when I came back they had to give me my job back. That was the
law. I was going to college at night and working during the day. I got
involved with television, which didn’t exist then. There was New
York, Philadelphia and Syracuse. That was the whole NBC network in the
East in those days. There was hardly programming at all.
A: No, not immediately. I came on in a sports jacket. I looked very incongruous because Bob was in a ringmaster’s outfit, not quite the Buffalo Bob outfit, but a ringmaster’s outfit. It had a circus format. And I didn’t look as though I fit in that format so they decided to make a clown out of me. They made a clown suit. Dick Smith, who became a brilliant makeup artist for the movies eventually, was doing makeup and he created the makeup. I went to the library and did my research on clowns. That’s how he became to be a pantomime clown. Classic clowns were pantomime. I did a lot of research on things and created the character, as we knew it. The mail indicated that he was tremendously popular and the writers started writing material for him, the seltzer bottle and the mischievous tricks and so forth, and there you go. I spent five years as Clarabelle. Q: What did you learn from Buffalo Bob about doing television, or about doing live television? A: Almost everything I know. Now don’t confuse the live television and the technical aspects of it, all of which I learned from Bob Smith, with the philosophy. I mean, there couldn’t be two philosophies as different as Bob’s philosophy and mine. We looked at children in a totally different way. But as far as learning the craft of television and the timing and comedy, all of that sort of thing, Bob taught me everything. He was an absolute master at it. I owe him everything I know about it. Some years later, of course when we were doing the Captain live and people would marvel at how I would be able to be on camera for five minutes and know that I was on camera for five minutes and not 4 minutes and 30 seconds or 5 minutes and 15 seconds. I was a master at timing. That I learned from Bob. So I owe him all of that. Now that’s the craft of television. I don’t want you to misunderstand me and say I learned my programming philosophy from Bob. Not at all. Q: What was the difference between your philosophy and his philosophy? A: Bob was much more the conventional. "Kids, what time is it? "It’s ‘Howdy Doody’ time." Shouting, loud, fast-moving, very little reference to the education of the child. Bob’s idea of education was to sit at the piano and say, "You cross the street with your eyes, not with your feet." And that was fine. There’s nothing with that. But he certainly wasn’t pro-education as far as it was concerned. He just felt that he was there to entertain, which is a fine philosophy. There’s nothing wrong with it. Except I felt education and entertainment combined could be of a greater service to young people. Q: What happened that made you decide to leave the show? A: We had a disagreement. A whole bunch of us, five of us, who were actors on the show. We hired an agent because we wanted to do other work other than "Howdy." And the "Howdy" group was a little insecure. They thought we were hiring an agent to form a union to negotiate against them. Of course, we had given specific instructions to our agent that he was not permitted to negotiate our "Howdy" matters. He was there only to get us work other than "Howdy," that we couldn’t make ourselves the lead. One day we were told we were no longer needed.
A: I went on to do an interim show called "Time for Fun," which was a clown show, on the local ABC station. And then a year later "Tinker’s Workshop," which was a direct antecedent of the Captain. Q: Were people approaching you about these shows? A: Absolutely not. I went nine months looking for work. I was about ready to go into the insurance business or whatever because I had a young son and my daughter was on the way. We were destitute. We were in dire straights. I just kept making the rounds and making the rounds and just by luck the WABC program manager said that they were going to try doing a show here in New York that was being done in Chicago that involved a clown at lunchtime and would I be interested. Would I be interested? I practically went across his desk. So that was my first break. I was out of work nine months before that program came on. "Time for Fun," the noontime show, it was a clown character, this time a talking clown. It turned out to be very successful. It was the direct antecedent of "Tinker," which preceded "Captain." Q: How long did these two shows last?
Q: What parts of "Time for Fun" and "Tinker’s Workshop" translated into "Captain Kangaroo"? A: You use something that you used successfully before so what you do at any point in a career is an amalgam of everything that has preceded you. It’s much easier to make a direct connection between "Tinker’s Workshop" and Captain Kangaroo because Tinker was an elderly man, Tinker was on at that hour of the morning. Tinker talked gently to children, but so did the noontime show, "Time for Fun." So there was a line, a transition from each show to the other. Q: People don’t always remember this, but you were also the Town Clown on "Captain Kangaroo". You kept up with your clowning. A: Sure. That comes from my heritage of Clarabelle and being a clown on "Time for Fun." It was a difficult thing to do. We could only do it once we got to using tape seriously because it required so much amount of makeup, which would have been impossible live in those days. There wouldn’t have been any time. It literally was almost an hour of makeup and costume and of course that couldn’t be done on live television. But once we started to tape the program then we were able to take an afternoon of production and get me into makeup and costume and do maybe five or six, 2, 3, 4-minute sequences, which were then edited into the program. Q: I know the name Kangaroo came from the large pockets in the coat you wore. But which came first, the coat or the name? A: Well, the coat probably. But it really doesn’t matter all that much. It seemed at the time of "Howdy Doody," "Rootie Kazootie" and the like that alliteration was a value. It wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t even make that much of it. But yes, we liked to be alliterative and so he had this pockets and we thought similar to the pouch in a kangaroo. And of course captain matching kangaroo was an alliteration and that’s about as much thought that went into it. It really had no meaning until many years later people thought there must have been some magic to arriving at that name. None at all, really. Q: CBS approached you and said they wanted you to do a children’s show for them. Is that how it worked? A: Well, CBS wanted to do a children’s show at that hour. When I came on with "Tinker" and was doing well on WABC, our local ABC station, at 8 o’clock in the morning, somebody [at CBS] said hey there is an audience there. Knowing this, they wanted to do children’s in the morning. And so they invited me to put together a pilot. They also invited four other producers to put together a pilot. They looked at the five pilots and chose the "Captain." Q: They didn’t come to you with the idea? A: Oh, they came to me with nothing. In fact, I remember very clearly that the producer who was in charge, the vice president in charge who said, "You want a set? We’ll get you a set. You want costumes? We’ll get you costumes? You want this? We’ll get you that. But just do me a favor. Don’t ask me what to do." That was the extent of their contribution. Which was fine. We appreciate that and we simply went ahead and did our thing. As it turned out, the program people and Mr. Paley and Dr. Stanton and all of those people who were making the decision liked it very much. It was their kind of program, much more so than Jerry Colonna. Jerry Colonna was one of the other pilots and he was kind of brash and loud and so on. CBS liked our approach to children. Q: What makes good children’s television? A: What makes good adult television? I really can’t answer a question like that. Children are not monolithic. Children come from diverse backgrounds. Not only ethnic backgrounds and cultural backgrounds. This is a nation today more than ever of immigrants. We have children in our society who are from Mexico, from Central America, from Puerto Rico — I know it’s American but it’s essentially a different culture — from Vietnam and from almost anywhere you can name. Then you have different sets of circumstances that children experience. Do I have a mother and a father? Do I have just a mother? Do I have just a father? Do I never see my father? Do I not know who my father is? Is my grandmother the principal caregiver in my life and my principal guide? All of these vast and different backgrounds presume different needs and different likes. Q: So there’s no one size fits all. A: Exactly. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all. Q: Did you have any inkling you’d be spending your career entertaining children? A: No. I was going to be a lawyer. God, weren’t we lucky. I really have always felt that the bar association owes me a letter of gratitude. Q: Can you conceive of how people's lives would have been different if you had kept up with your studies of law? A: Well, I think the bar association has owed me a letter
of gratitude for many years but they never sent me. I think that I've
made a contribution. How to measure it quantitatively? I don't know. I
think that's relatively impossible to do. Q: It’s hard to picture you as either a lawyer or a Marine. A: I had a brother in the Army Air Corps, long before the
Air Force was founded. He was a navigator. Then I had another brother
who was a Naval officer, a supply officer. So I thought, Army, Navy. Only
thing left for me and that’s Marines. So I went into the Marines.
It’s all they say it is. Parris Island is not a nice place. But
it was good training. It taught me things. It taught me discipline. Q: I don’t suppose you made captain in the Marines? A: Me, a captain? Oh, no way. PFC was the highest I ever got. They dropped the bomb when I was in boot camp, so that ended any threat to me. I then spent my life running around closing schools, literally. They would send me to Japanese language school and I’d be there for six weeks and it occurred to somebody they no longer needed interpreters because that was all over with. They sent me to signal school and they decided they didn’t that anymore. I spent a year or so after boot camp closing down schools that had been very active. And then finally said, "Oh, we don’t need you anymore. Here you go." It was a good experience. Q: Your show was on during a time during great social change in this country. Do you think your show served as a stabilizing force? A: I think that’s a good way to put it. That’s what we thought of ourselves as. There was no way in the world that we could deal with those very complex issues in terms that a 4-year-old would appreciate and understand, without risking all kinds of insecurities being given to the child. This is a dreadful world that we live in and what is important for a young child is stability. A young child likes routine more than anything in the world. Routine is tremendously important to a young child. The security of the home. The security of a room that they like. Going back to the basics. The security of a blanket. These things are very important to us, to a young child. Q: What were your parents like? A: Oh, I had a wonderful mother. My father was so busy. I came to love my father dearly as I grew older and I came to appreciate him more. When I was a young kid, he was out of the office at 5:30 in the morning and back at 8 o’clock at night. He worked like crazy. Q: What kind of job did he have? A: He was a supervisor for a grocery chain. In those days, they were all small stores, not supermarkets. This is in the 30s I’m talking about. He was a vice president of the company and he traveled. He was in charge of all of Long Island, which was like 300-some odd stores. He would visit them. He would be in his automobile, go to his office, then get back in the automobile. The poor man worked and worked and really worked. But I had a mother who was absolutely imaginative. She was not educated well. She had not gone to college. But she was a mother. She knew what mothering was. She was instinctively a mother and she knew what children needed. She knew the love that children needed.
A: No. She actually supervised my radio listening, strange as that may sound, because we think of radio as kind of an innocent age, but she didn’t like some of the stuff she heard. She didn’t like "Gangbusters" that much. And she was worried sometimes that some of the adult dramas, the "Lux Radio Theater" and so on, had material that was inappropriate to me when I was 7 or 8 or 9 years of age. I was a radio buff. I loved radio. I knew all the characters. I knew the directors and the producers of radio shows. Q: You paid attention. A: Oh, sure. Absolutely. But my mother was careful. She intervened, in radio. Q: Was radio your preferred form of entertainment or were you a big reader as well? A: Oh, I was a big, big, big, big reader. I read much more than I listened to radio, but I was fascinated by radio. I found it to be a lot of fun and I liked the shows. I was just a fan of radio, really, but I was a very big reader. In the summertime I would take care of people’s animals when they went on vacation. I would feed the dogs and take them for a walk and that sort of thing and when they returned I got paid not in money but in books. The people knew me, they were all neighbors, and they would give me various books for me to read and that to me was my great pleasure.
A: Well, I think it’s basic, I think it’s basic parenting, a basic part of raising a child is to read and to be intimate with the pleasures of reading. Q: When you were doing the show, would you rather have seen a child spend an hour reading a book or a child spend an hour watching "Captain Kangaroo"? A: Well, that’s a no-brainer. Why either-or to begin
with, but if you insist on it being either or I think reading is always
more important than watching television, regardless what they’re
watching on television. Q: You’re famous. A: Holy Christmas. I didn’t know that. (laughs) I don’t know. I guess I was watching "Jeopardy" one night and I was a question on "Jeopardy."
A: Oh, just that I made children feel a little better about themselves, in general. I certainly didn’t do it with every child, but that was my intent.
See Also: Captain Kangaroo History More on Captain Kangaroo Captain Kangaroo Books & Toys
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See Also: Captain Kangaroo History More on Captain Kangaroo Captain Kangaroo Books & Toys Rare Interview with Captain Kangaroo - Bob Keeshan Kevin S. Butler writes: In his conversation with Mr. Hicks, Bob Keeshan claims that originally CBS TV wanted entertainer Jerry Colonna to host the network's daily kid's TV show. Originally CBS had three performers that they were auditioning - Merv Griffin, folk singer Frank Luther and Jerry Colonna. These men were talented but with the exception of Griffin none of them had ever done a kid's show (Griffin had briefly served as the host of WTVJ TV 4, Miami's Lucky Duck Show. The heads of CBS TV decided to go with Mr. Keeshan's and Jack Miller's (Jack was Keeshan's first director) educational show concept. Another recollection of Mr. Keeshan's states that he did a skit on The Carol Burnett Show where he tried to explain the premise of Captain Kangaroo to a skeptical network exec (played by Ms. Burnett). This skit was actually performed on the Cher show in the 1970's when Keeshan and the Hudson Brothers were guests on Cher's Sunday Night CBS variety program. As to how Mr. Keeshan got the name for Captain Kangaroo, according to my interview with Jack Miller in October of 1989, he told me that the show was going to be set against the backdrop of a children's museum. Keeshan didn't like this setting, he feared that it would discourage children from watching the show. The setting was instead called the Treasure House and Keeshan's character was given the rank of "Captain of the Guards and Tour Guide." Jack liked that idea but he felt that the character needed a last name to offset the formal rank. He told me, "In those days, Kevin, kids TV shows had titles that were silly - Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee, Rootie Kazootie - and we needed a a last name that would not be too ridiculous but still make the Captain's name meaningful and funny. So we went to the bar that night and after a few beers and a quick trip to the men's room, Bob wrote down a name on a slip of paper and put it into my jacket pocket and he said to me, 'Here it is.' And the name on the paper said 'Captain Kangaroo.'" In regards to the years that Time For Fun and Tinker's Workshop were on the air on WJZ (WABC) TV 7 in NYC, Mr. Keeshan's knowledge of those two local series is inaccurate. Time For Fun was on from Monday, September 21, 1953 until Friday June 2, 1960 and that show was hosted by Keeshan's Corney The Clown, "Uncle Joe" Bova, Johnny Jellybean (Bill Britten) and by JJ Jellybean / Johnny Jellybean #2 Keith Hefner. Tinker's Workshop was on Channel 7 from Monday, November 15, 1954 to Friday, August 22, 1958 and the character of Tinker The Toymaker / Tinker Tom the Toymaker was played first by Bob Keeshan then by Henry Burbig, Gene London and Dom Deluise.
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Q:
Who were you trying to reach? 
Q:
You had experience as an entertainer, working on the "Howdy Doody
Show," but how comfortable were you with the educational component?
Did you rely on your own experiences as a parent or did you have to bring
in experts to say this is what you should do to teach the kids about this
or that? 
Q:
I can’t recall what I specifically learned from watching your show.
It’s been too many years.
Q:
I have to ask you. Did you anger some writer who wanted to drop ping pong
balls on your head? 
Q:
Did the character of the Captain change much of the years? 
Q:
I wanted to ask you what you think different people brought to the show.
What do you think "Lumpy" Brannum, who played Mr. Green Jeans,
brought to Captain Kangaroo? 
Q:
Were you Clarabelle immediately? 
Q:
And then you went on to the "Tinker’s Workshop"? 
A:
"Time for Fun" lasted I guess, let me see, about a year and
a half. "Tinker" lasted, "Tinker" with me, lasted
about six months. "Tinker" was hugely successful in the early
morning time period, locally in New York only of course because it was
not network. But by that time we were then being sought out by CBS. They
proposed that I do a pilot for them for early morning. We were in dispute
as to whether I had a contract with WABC or not and what we did was we
had a wonderful program manager there who didn’t respect talent
very much and he thought it was the idea of the show that really made
it. So I exchanged the show, which I did own, for my personal services,
which were possibly in dispute. He gave me my release on that and he hired
another fellow to do "Tinker’s Workshop" and that lasted
three months after I left. I went on to do "Captain."
Q:
She didn’t just plop you down in front of the radio? 
Q:
And you carried that on to television by reading to children every day.
Q:
So how would you like to be remembered? 
