The late Huell Howser was a local treasure…a TV reporter who covered interesting people and places in Los Angeles with great enthusiasm. Mr. Howser loved everything and everyone he encountered in our fair city and he had a knack for finding the unusual. He did some really fine shows documenting things that are no longer there and he did them while they were still there.
His shows appeared on the local PBS station, KCET. KCET is no longer a PBS station but they occasionally rerun old Huell Howser shows and they just put a huge batch of them online. I'll link you to a few of the best ones in the coming weeks and you'll see what I mean about Howser's unabashed interest and enthusiasm in almost everything.
This one is from 2000 and it's a tour of Forrest J Ackerman's "Ackermansion" in Los Feliz. Forry Ackerman, who passed in 2008, was an editor, writer, agent and historian of science-fiction and monsters with a penchant for horrid puns and self-promotion. He collected enough monster and s-f memorabilia to fill his home which he passed off as a museum filled with "millions of dollars" worth of artifacts. Near the end of his life, not long after Howser's video visit, Ackerman began liquidating his "museum" and the contents brought considerably less loot than he or anyone expected.
I visited there a few times and also went to his previous Ackermansion in Beverly Hills, back when he was still engaged in editing the magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. I found Ackerman to be colorful but awfully silly at times for reasons that will become evident if you watch this video. It's a pretty good record of what it was like to have Forry take you around his abode, which impressed me somewhat less at age thirteen than it seems to impress Huell Howser in this tour…