As sick as I am of writing about the recently-deceased, I have to write about Bob Keeshan, aka Captain Kangaroo. I don't know if the formal obits will make it clear but Mr. Keeshan, with whom so many of us grew up, was an extraordinary individual. He had a capacity to talk to (not "down to") children and to host a very difficult live TV show…and this was a man who, when he first got into television, was by his own admission largely devoid of talent. As is well-known, his first role was as Clarabelle the Clown on the original Howdy Doody show. Less well-known is that he started there as a kind of go-fer/errand boy for the show's star, "Buffalo" Bob Smith. Among his duties was to herd the kids in and out of the show's Peanut Gallery and to get them to shut the hell up during the live broadcast.
In this capacity, he occasionally got on camera and when some NBC exec suggested it looked wrong to have a guy in a sport coat on the show, Keeshan was sent off to work up a clown costume. He started at the public library where he learned what he could about clowns, then he rummaged through the wardrobe and make-up departments and soon, Clarabelle was born.
Clarabelle did not speak, partly because clowns were traditionally mute but mainly because Keeshan couldn't. By his own admission, he was too untrained and untalented to utter an on-camera word. By trial and error though, he managed to develop a pantomimed personality for his clown that the kids loved. It was mean, petulant and often quite nasty but it was Clarabelle. The only one who didn't love him was "Buffalo" Bob, who lived for the musical segments of his show and who was frustrated that the clown couldn't play an instrument. They tried giving Keeshan lessons but he had a tin ear and no sense of rhythm: He couldn't even play a triangle on the beat. At one point, Smith fired Keeshan and put a trained musician in the Clarabelle make-up…but the trained musician failed to capture the popular Clarabelle personality and they had to hire Keeshan back. That happened at least once, maybe twice.
After many years of Smith getting very wealthy off Howdy Doody, several cast members, led by Keeshan, made a stand and demanded better pay. They were fired and it looked like Bob Keeshan's TV career was over. But after failing in some non-television jobs, he made an amazing comeback with two different local shows on which he actually spoke. He had to, since he was the entire cast and mime wouldn't have worked. Eventually, it all led to Captain Kangaroo, which he did on CBS for thirty years. For much of that time, the show was live and it had to be done twice each morning, back to back. Keeshan and his small stock company (often, just Lumpy "Mr. Green Jeans" Brannum plus one puppeteer) would do an entire hour telecast live and then, after he said good-bye, they'd have sixty seconds to reset everything and do the entire show again for a different time zone. Somehow, it worked.
I actually watched the first telecast of Captain Kangaroo in October of '55. I was three and a half years old but I still remember it. A few years back when I worked with Mr. Keeshan, I of course told him this. He was very polite about it but I had the feeling that lots of people around my age told him that and he tended to not believe it.
The project was a show called CBS Storybreak, which we taped over at Television City on Stage 33, the home of The Price is Right. Keeshan had retired Cap'n Kangaroo by then and he hosted our show as Bob Keeshan. The network wanted him because of his enormous credibility in the area of children's programming and the fact that his hosting would help endorse a show they wished to have viewed as enriching. Mr. Keeshan, having learned well from "Buffalo" Bob, charged CBS what they felt was an exorbitant fee…but they paid it. One of the Business Affairs guys grumbled that the last few years Captain Kangaroo was on the network, as they kept cutting back his show and moving it to worse and worse time slots, he held the network up for vast amounts of cash. He kept threatening (they claimed) to go public and tell America that CBS didn't care about programming for children, and they essentially paid him off to let them phase out his show without a huge protest.
I don't know to what extent that's true but if it's completely true, it only adds to my respect for the man. Holding CBS up for money is an admirable skill, and I wish I was as good at it as he apparently was. Beyond that, I found him to be a genuinely kind, soft-spoken man who was everything you'd want Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan to be. He answered all my silly questions about his various TV endeavors, but he also kept asking everyone on the show about our backgrounds, particularly what kinds of training and education had led us to our present stations in life. He talked at length with the make-up lady about her family problems and joked with her about how, all the years he did Captain Kangaroo, he "grew into" the part and required less and less make-up. Eventually, he said, he reached the stage where they had to try and make him look younger than he really was. "That was a frightening moment," he said.
He said that despite turning into the kindly old man he played, he never got recognized in public by the visual. People, he said, only recognized him from his voice. It was a wonderful voice…warm and instantly friendly, and so much a part of so many lives for so many years. It's amazing to think that for so long, that man couldn't even use that voice in front of a camera. And it's sad to think of all the kids who won't grow up hearing it.