Today's Video Link

KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles was the first commercially licensed television station in the western United States. It went on the air in 1947 as an enterprise of Paramount Pictures and an awful lot of programs originated from its studios.

In 1987, the station produced a 40-year retrospective called KTLA at 40 and the clip below is an excerpt from that special. Stan Freberg — who as you'll hear started his TV career with a show on KTLA — hosted this segment about programming for kids, not just at KTLA but on other local stations as well. In separate clips here, you'll meet Jimmy Weldon, who hosted cartoons on Channel 13 and Vance Colvig, who played Bozo the Clown on Channel 5. No mention is made that Vance's father Pinto was the actor who first played Bozo, nor is it mentioned that on the Hanna-Barbera Yakky Doodle cartoons, Weldon supplied the voice of Yakky and Vance Colvig was the voice of his bulldog pal Chopper.

I kinda grew up, to the extent I grew up at all, on those guys plus Skipper Frank, Engineer Bill, Sheriff John, Tom Hatten and other kids' show hosts on local television, seen here in some of the few pieces of video that have survived of these babysitters. I also grew up to a great extent on Stan Freberg and Daws Butler…