As if losing Lloyd Thaxton wasn't bad enough, another legend of Los Angeles TV has left us. Charles Runyon had a great run (1955-1964) as Chucko the Birthday Clown on KABC and KTTV (Channels 7 and 11, respectively). Chucko was a superstar of local birthday party gigs before Channel 7 hired him, probably inspired by the successes of Bozo and other clowns as kids' show hosts. They called in every performer they could locate in that profession — there were a lot of them back then — for a huge audition…and Runyon won.
His show changed formats and time slots often but most of the time, it was a big, on-air birthday party for a studio full of kids born on that date. For a time, it was on at 7 AM and done live, so you can imagine what parents had to do to get their birthday kids up and dressed and down to the KABC studios in time for the broadcast.
What I remember of it: Chucko himself was delightful but he ran crummy cartoons — mostly aged Paul Terry shorts with Farmer Al Falfa — and not very many of them per hour. The bulk of his show was frequently too much about the kids to hold my attention.
I had little interest in watching a bunch of children my age showing their stage fright as they answered pointless questions about how old they were, if they had any pets, what they wanted to be when they grew up, etc. I had even less interest in watching them play games. Every so often though, Chucko would sing a song or do a skit or interview a grown-up guest and when he did that stuff, he was funny and fun. I recall him being enormously clever when props would fail or things would otherwise go wrong and he'd ad-lib his way around the calamity. It was one of those shows — like the one Soupy Sales did in, I think, the same studio at KABC — where you could often hear the crew convulsed with laughter as the host improvised madly.
As this obit notes, Chucko left local TV in '64. I remember a friend's parents tried to book him to appear at a weekend birthday party around then, only to discover that he was booked solid for months and that his price was rather steep. A year or two later, he affiliated with Jungleland, an amusement park out in Thousand Oaks where one could ride on rides and see a lot of live animals. Jungleland was suffering financially when he signed on and his presence reportedly gave it a big boost but wasn't enough to save the failing enterprise. (It was hurt by a rash of bad publicity. A black panther escaped and terrorized the neighborhood and later, Jayne Mansfield's son was mauled by a lion there.)
When the place closed down in '69, Runyon moved to Oregon. Years later, the great comic book artist Carl Barks moved to the same town, to a home about two blocks from the Runyons. There is however no evidence that the two men, who accounted for a lot of happy hours in my childhood, ever met.
In the eighties, a couple of folks I know — producer-writer Bruce Kimmel and kids' TV historian Paul Maher — assembled a loving tribute to the kids' show hosts of Los Angeles TV…a special called Weekday Heroes. The segment on Chucko the Birthday Clown will tell you more about this fine entertainer than I ever could. Here it is. That's Tony Dow of Leave it to Beaver acting as host…
