It's Howdy Doody Time!

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This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Say kids, what time is it?

It's howdy duty time.

It's howdy duty.

If your parents or grandparents grew up in the United States in the 1950s, there's a decent chance that you have heard them sing this song.

And if you're the right age, you can probably sing it yourself.

In fact, if you're a boomer, it might be stuck in your head right now.

In which case, I am sorry.

It's time to start the show.

So kids let's go.

For those who don't know, this nearly atonal chanting is the theme song to one of the very first children's television programs, the Howdy Duty Show.

That's reporter and longtime 99 PI contributor, David Weinberg.

The Howdy Duty Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera, like the hula hoop, that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood.

For over a decade, every weeknight at 5 p.m., kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents' tiny television and take in the Wild West adventures of Buffalo Bob and his marionette puppet sidekick, Howdy Doody.

Howdy, what do you think we ought to do?

Well, I don't know, Mr.

Smith, but I guess everybody likes movies.

And why don't we show a movie and I'll bet you're the rabbit.

At the time, there wasn't anything quite like it.

Imagine a singing cowboy performing a puppet show for your birthday, only five nights a week.

And now imagine nearly every other kid in America enjoying the same party at the same time.

For a lot of children, it was their first encounter with the concept of a TV star.

Which is why Burt Dubrow can remember exactly where he was when he first heard the rumor.

I was out on a playground in fifth or sixth grade, Trinity School in in New Rochelle, New York, and some kids said that Buffalo Bob bought a liquor store in New Rochelle.

Now, that would be like saying Mr.

Rogers owned a liquor store.

It didn't make any sense.

This happened back around 1960.

And at the time, Bert loved all things TV, especially live TV, and especially howdy-doody.

So when he heard this rumor, that the show's host, Buffalo Bob, was selling liquor in New Rochelle, he couldn't stop thinking about it

and I literally found the route from the south end to the north end and I did not tell my parents and I got in the M-bus and

I got off and those big signs said liquors

10 years old I walked into the liquor store my chin came up to the counter and

I said, excuse me, there's Buffalo Bob here.

And there was a man behind the counter who was wearing a check shirt, black horn rim glasses, and said, I'm Buffalo Bob.

Well, that made no sense to me because he didn't look like Buffalo Bob.

He didn't at that second sound like Buffalo Bob.

And he reached down below the counter and he pulled out a color picture, that one right over there in the red frame, and

signed it to me.

And as he was talking, he started to sound like Buffalo Bob.

That's when Bert realized that this was really happening.

He was standing in front of his hero, the actual living, breathing Buffalo Bob, selling liquor.

So now I went home.

My parents were ready to kill me.

Where were you?

So I was at Buffalo Bob's liquor store.

Well, they thought I was smoking something.

But every day,

or many days after that, I went.

It reached a point that the people that worked for Bob at the liquor store, if they saw me coming through the big glass windows, Bob would run in the back back, so he didn't have to see me.

Bert Dubrow was not wrong to be starstruck.

It's hard to overstate just how massive a cultural juggernaut Howdy Doody was.

The show was disproportionately important to the history of television.

It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to be broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children.

All of which, while I was talking to Bert, begged the question.

I was doing the show on Saturday mornings and then running the liquor store the rest of the week.

That's crazy.

It made sense for him to buy a liquor store.

Let's just say that.

It was an induction.

If it seems strange that the star of one of the most successful programs on television needed a side hustle, well, today it would be.

But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Duty first started, the world of television was strange.

It was a place where no one knew what anything or anyone was worth, not even Buffalo Bob.

And honestly, the fact that he ran a liquor store isn't even the strangest part.

In many ways, the story of Howdy Duty is the story of the weird, Wild West days of early TV.

A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists, and moneymen were inventing everything as they went along, starting with what to put on television in the first place.

After all, the very first TV shows, including Howdy Duty, had no prior TV shows to build on.

Instead, they had to steal their programming ideas from other older mediums, including the greatest medium of all.

Well, it really, you know, Howdy Duty was born on the radio.

This is music historian Stephen Davis being interviewed by Terry Gross in 1987.

His dad worked on Howdy Duty, and he says that Buffalo Bob Smith got his name from his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

And his life in entertainment started early.

By the time he was four years old, Bob could recreate any melody he heard by plinking away on a piano with his two tiny fingers.

And by the time he was in his 30s, he was a popular radio DJ.

He hosted his shows sitting at a piano where he would sing along to records, perform comedy sketches, and read the weather.

And originally, his sidekick's name was not Howdy Doody.

Howdy's original name was Elmer, and he appeared on a Saturday morning quiz show that Buffalo Bob did in those days on the NBC radio network.

On the show, Bob developed the persona of Buffalo Bob, but he also voiced other characters, including Elmer, who back then was a kind of country bumpkin.

And he had this really dumb kind of yokel voice, which kept saying, howdy duty, boys and girls.

That was what the Elmer voice sounded like, kind of a rube, a cowboy, you know, somebody from the frontier,

a rough dude, so to speak.

And eventually, that became his name, Howdy Doody.

And in a slightly alternate universe, Howdy would have disappeared from cultural memory when Bob's radio program went off the air.

But mass media, and Buffalo Bob's show in particular, were about to undergo a huge change, thanks to the failure of television.

After the first television sets became commercially available in the 30s, for a long time, well into the 40s, the medium actually had a hard time catching on.

For starters, unlike radio, which had a huge variety of shows, there wasn't much to watch on these small, grainy, black and white screens.

So in the early days of television, when they didn't have much programming, basically what they often did was just borrow the popular radio show of the time and move it to TV.

This is Stephen Stark.

I wrote a book about television and I'm a poet.

I write poetry now.

So, yeah, that's what I do.

Did you ever write any poems about Howdy Duty?

No, I never wrote a poem about Howdy Duty, nor will I ever.

Stephen says that when televisions first were on the market, few people could afford one.

In 1948, very few people had televisions.

We're talking fewer than a million people.

And it was not yet a nationwide medium.

Most of the early television stations were in New York, and those first broadcast signals didn't reach all that far.

So nearly everyone who did own a TV lived in the New York area.

So what you tended to get in the early days of television were shows that were

very New York.

I mean, loud in your face.

Take off your clothes.

I want to examine you.

Take off your clothes.

Oh, I couldn't tell you.

A lot of slapstick, chaotic.

Some strange cameras here, Milton.

I want to give landscape.

And the number one television show in the early days of the medium was Milton Burrell's show, Texaco Star Theater, which was essentially a New York vaudeville show transferred to television.

One reason vaudeville worked so well was because of another big hurdle.

Video playback didn't exist yet, meaning television shows in the early days had to go out live.

Meanwhile, plenty of shows that worked on the radio, dramas like The Lone Ranger and The Shadow, couldn't be adapted for live television, even if they could playback recorded video.

In the 1940s, no one in the industry was ready to invest those kinds of resources.

As a result, there was so little programming being made for television that for a long while, there wasn't anything on before dinner time.

And I don't mean there wasn't anything on like it was boring.

I mean, there was literally nothing on.

The TV networks only broadcast after 7 p.m.

But then in 1947, NBC found something new to put on the air by borrowing a different trick from the vaudevillian playbook, puppets.

Puppets were highly visual, they were live, they were cheap, and perhaps most importantly, kids loved them.

The plan was to do a one-hour kids special at the ungodly early hour of 5 p.m.

They called it Puppet Playhouse and they tapped Bob Smith to host it along with his country yokel sidekick Howdy Duty.

And it is important to remember it didn't have

any competition to speak of

because it was kind of the first network kids show.

And just like Milton Burrell, It was going to be a vaudeville show made for television.

Howdy Duty, which premiered around the same time on the same network, NBC,

was essentially the Milton Burrell show for kids.

The show was scheduled to air on December 27th, but they didn't greenlight it until the week before Christmas.

So the producers only had two weeks to put together a live program.

Bob Smith said that he didn't find out he was hosting the show until four days before the broadcast date.

And the stakes were very high for Bob Smith's television debut.

He was about to have an unexpectedly huge huge audience.

The day before Puppet Playhouse went on the air, it started snowing in New York, and it didn't stop for 24 hours.

A record-breaking storm dumped mountains of snow on New York City.

So

the day after the big snowstorm

was the airing of the very first live Puppet Playhouse show.

This is Chance Mitchell.

He runs the Dutyville Historical Society, basically the Howdy Duty fan club.

Luckily, Bob had already been in the studio for a while.

So when everybody was snowed in, they were kind of snowed in, too.

Chance says that the snowstorm closed down all the typical entertainment options.

There were no shows on Broadway, no music in the clubs.

All the movie theaters shuttered.

Everyone was stuck at home.

And there were only three TV stations at the time.

Two of the stations were showing basketball games that night.

The third was debuting Puppet Playhouse.

And so everybody was at home, so everybody tuned in to this puppet show that was on the air.

The only problem was, there was no puppet.

Remember, they'd only had two weeks to adapt material that had been designed for the radio into highly visual entertainment, including designing a physical Howdy Duty, because up until then, he had just been a voice.

And the puppeteer didn't have enough time to finish the puppet before the show went live.

So they improvised.

When the moment came for Howdy to make his entrance, Buffalo Bob told the small handful of kids that had made it to the studio that sadly, poor old Howdy was too shy to appear in front of the camera.

So he was hiding in Bob's desk drawer.

And he would go over to the desk drawer and say, are you in there, Howdy?

And Howdy would say, oh, yeah, but oh, I'm too bashful to come out.

Well, he was too bashful for three weeks.

And in spite of the fact that no one could see the star of the show, or who knows, maybe because they couldn't see him, the kids loved it.

NBC decided to give Bob Smith his own children's TV show five nights a week.

And mothers would take their kids, plop them in front of the television set, howdy duty would come on, and they could do something else.

So it was the first show in television history, really, to see

TV as a babysitter.

Suddenly, a new, beautiful gift was given to parents all around the country.

A break from their little monsters.

Every episode of this new show opened with a question.

Hey, kids, what time is it?

And there was a live studio audience.

They all sat together and they were called the Peanut Gallery.

And if you watch any of the old shows the boys and girls are still very dressed up.

The kids would all be wearing coats and ties and party dresses and there less than 10 feet away on the stage was Bob along with Howdy who did eventually come out from that desk drawer.

Howdy duty how did you like hearing that little fella?

Well Mr.

Smith that was oh it was just wonderful.

It's so thrilling when the boys and girls sing my songs so loud.

Now I just want to pause right here and say that if you have any familiarity with Howdy Duty, you probably have an image in your mind of what this puppet looks like.

But the howdy that is currently prancing around in your brain is not the howdy duty that first appeared on the show.

The original Howdy Duty was a different puppet, one that a lot of people thought was hideously ugly.

And allegedly it was too scary for the kids.

I don't really believe that to be the case, but that's a story that Bob and people around Bob would say about the puppet.

They eventually ended up calling him Ugly Duty.

He kind of looked like Beaker from the Muppets, in my opinion.

But it didn't matter.

In spite of him being ugly, or who knows, perhaps because he was so ugly, the kids loved Howdy, even more than when he was stuck in the drawer.

Though it's possible they would have loved a mop with googly eyes, this was, after all, the first time the kids watched television.

But it's also the case that Howdy was just nice.

He's always a positive, outgoing, happy 10-year-old.

He was 10 in 1947, and 75 years later, he's still 10.

Everything that Howdy does is for the good of the whole community of Dutyville, not just for himself.

Howdy was operated by a woman named Rhoda Mann.

She stood on a platform above the set, holding Howdy's strings.

She was an especially gifted puppeteer who excelled at making Howdy move as much as possible like a real human.

And Bob and Howdy would have all sorts of adventures together, usually designed to teach the kids a valuable lesson.

And it's actually a magic word friendship.

I hope all the kids know what friendship really is, Mr.

Schmidt.

Although, since his previous voice acting had been for the radio, Bob Smith never learned to throw his voice.

So anytime Howdy talked, Bob had to be off screen.

Well, I think they do.

Matter of fact, I could go over and find out out about it.

Do you all have a lot of friends, I hope?

Well, now, what do you think are some of the best ways that you could possibly make a friend?

There was also a rotating cast of other characters, including live actors, like a mute clown named Claribel, who kept blasting everyone in the face with a horn and a seltzer bottle, just like Milton Burroughs' old act.

Claribel, would you bring that rope there?

Which apparently caused the same maniacal laughter in kids that that it did in adults.

This being a 1950s show about cowboys, there were also some Native American characters that traded on racist stereotypes.

They were played by white actors, including an Indian princess and an Indian chief named Thunderthud, who is mainly remembered for coining the term cowabunga.

Oh, cowabunga doggone, I should have guessed that.

But mainly there were puppets, wonderful, inventive, gloriously cost-saving puppets including the flubber dove a creature that was eight animals in one and phineas t bluster the villainous mayor of dutyville here's burt dubrow again our 10-year-old howdy duty super fan he says mayor bluster often had some scheme he was cooking up there was an easter egg episode where mr bluster

bought all the Easter eggs in Dutyville, all of them, so that they would have to then buy them from him and he would overcharge them

just to piss off everybody and upset the kids.

You get the point I'm making here?

Yes.

Okay.

The executives at NBC knew they had a quality television show on their hands, but the problem was there was no easy way of knowing just how many kids were actually watching it.

Nielsen television ratings didn't exist yet, making it hard to sell the program to sponsors.

Not without data.

And without sponsors, there was no profit.

So in 1948, the suits at NBC and the writers at Howdy Duty devised a scheme worthy of Phineas T.

Bluster himself.

Eddie Keen, the absolute genius script writer and songwriter for the show, came up with the idea that Howdy decided he would run for president of all the kids in the United States.

Howdy told the kids watching at home that if they mailed in a postcard, with a write-in vote for Howdy to the NBC office, he would send them their very own Howdy Duty campaign button.

Now, kids, I want you to all make sure of this.

Now, this is the last chance that you have to vote.

Just the end of this week, and all the votes must be in.

The more postcards that came in asking for buttons, the more kids must be watching the show.

And that, in turn, would help NBC sell the program to potential sponsors.

And then it's Box 333, Box 333, and then it's New York 19 New York.

Now, come on, all of you kids, get in there and vote, will you?

And so they thought, you know, maybe we can print up, you know, probably 5,000 buttons or something.

Well, at the end of the entire run, they had reached a total of 60,000 buttons.

This was an insane number.

We don't actually know how many postcards would have come in because NBC's mailroom got so overwhelmed, they refused to accept any more.

By which point, the number of postcards received was equal equal to one-third the total number of TV sets in America.

That was more households than were technically able to get Howdy Duty.

Which proved that kids and their families would go over to their neighbor's house that did have a television set and sit down and watch the Howdy Duty show.

And so this got them sold out completely.

Within months, some of the biggest brands in the country wanted to sponsor the show.

Colgate, Ovalteen, Kellogg's.

The department store Macy's wanted to sell howdy dolls, and NBC was more than happy to arrange a licensing deal.

Money was pouring in.

But there was one person who was not getting a cent.

Frank Paris, the man who had designed the Howdy Duty puppet.

NBC had only paid him $500 to make it, but Buffalo Bob and NBC owned all the rights to the character.

Well, Frank got very angry at this and one day barged into the office and said, well, if you think it's your puppet, see how you do a show tonight.

Took the puppet and went home around 2 o'clock in the afternoon when the show had to be on at 5.

Howdy Duty was supposed to go live in a matter of hours, and the star of the show was missing.

Again, puppet napped by its disgruntled creator.

And because the show's producers were still learning how to run a television show, they had only made the one puppet.

There were no backups.

They would need time to make a new one, leaving Buffalo Bob and the writers writers to come up with one of the most preposterous storylines in the history of television.

Because when Frank Paris stormed out with Howdy Duty, aka Ugly Duty, they realized that it might just provide the perfect excuse to give Howdy the visual upgrade they had always wanted.

After the opening theme song, Buffalo Bob explained to the kids in the Peanut Gallery that Howdy would not be joining them today because he was out campaigning to be president.

And while he was on the campaign trail, Howdy had met his opponent, a mysterious man who went by the name Mr.

X.

And Eddie Keene came up with the idea, which sounds so ridiculous now, that he ran into his running mate, Mr.

X.

And Mr.

X was very handsome and getting all the votes from all the girls.

Buffalo Bob told the kids that after Howdy met his insanely handsome opponent, he had come to the sad realization that he was too ugly to be president.

But fear not, because there was a solution.

Howdy was going to visit a plastic surgeon.

For a few weeks after that, from the neck down, Howdy looked just like his old self.

But from the neck up, he had bandages covering his head.

That way, none of the kids realize that it was just some random puppet standing in for the star.

In the meantime, they fire Frank, they get rid of the ugly puppet, and now they got to find someone to make a new one.

a good-looking one.

NBC hired a woman named Velma Dawson to create a new Howdy Duty puppet, one that would not allegedly frighten small children.

And on June 8th, 1948, the new Howdy was ready.

And so then when the new one came in, they took that puppet, put bandages around him, and then they unveiled him.

Slowly, Buffalo Bob unwrapped Howdy's bandaged head.

And a freckled, bulbous-cheeked child gazed out at the world with its unblinking blue eyes and a perpetually smiling face.

The surgery was a success.

The future president of the kids of the United States had arrived and the kids went wild.

For the next decade, Howdy Duty had an unprecedented run of success.

It was the first kids show to be broadcast nationally and the first to regularly broadcast in color.

And as the show became more popular, so too did television itself.

When Howdy Duty first went on the air in December of 1947, there were fewer than 200,000 television sets in America.

By 1960, it was the longest-running show on TV, and America had nearly 50 million televisions.

Almost 90% of the country owned a TV.

This freckled 10-year-old boy embedded himself into the minds of an entire generation of children in the 1950s.

And the thing that Howdy fans dreamed of more than anything was to be one of those lucky few kids who got to experience the show in person as a member of the Peanut Gallery.

To feel that fine mist of seltzer on their face as it rained down from Claribel's bottle.

I do remember like it was yesterday walking into that studio.

Super fan Bert Dubrow says that back when he was a kid, after he finally won Bob over, Bob gave him a handful of tickets to a taping of the show.

And even though he had seen Bob behind the counter of the liquor store dozens of times by then, when he stepped into the studio, he was transported.

Up to that point, Bert had only ever experienced howdy duty on his black and white television.

And only I can compare it to is in The Wizard of Oz.

You know, it starts out in black and white, and then when they open the door and she's in Oz and you see the color, that's what this was like for me.

And there's everything, I mean, there's the puppets and the, I mean, everything that I knew better than anybody knew it.

And then all of a sudden, Bob, or I should say Buffalo Bob now, came through the cameras and yelled out, where's Bert?

And my friends are on the peanut gallery and they can't believe it.

And he's introduced me to your friends and it was ridiculous.

When we come back, the story of how the medium that Howdy Duty helped create would pass Bob and Howdy by and never look back after this.

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When we left, the Howdy Duty Show appeared to be at the height of its popularity, its prestige, and its profitability.

At the time, it would have been hard for kids and adults alike to imagine the show ever ending.

But incredible as it was for fans like the young Burt Dubrow to sit in the peanut gallery, the truth was that for a long time, just behind the scenes, the Howdy Duty Show had been having problems, one of which was money.

In 1950, Buffalo Bob agreed to sell Howdy Duty to a new company created by NBC and the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers.

The name of this new company was Kagran, which in my humble opinion sounds like the name a TV writer would come up with for a soulless corporation that buys a beloved children's television show with the singular focus on squeezing as much money from the pockets of children's parents as possible.

Which coincidentally is exactly what happened.

When When Kagran took over, sponsors became increasingly involved both on-screen and off.

More and more companies started to see the potential of marketing their products to kids, or through kids.

As Buffalo Bob told children to get their parents to buy this or that product, Howdy became a marketing bonanza.

Kids, look here.

Clarabelle has his whole lunchbox just filled with hostess Twinkies.

So kids, you ask mom to buy some hostess Twinkies the next time she goes to the store.

Howdy's face began staring at people from bread packaging and juice bottles.

And eventually, there was a backlash to the show.

It provided an early window into how television would be criticized by intellectuals.

And they could make the argument that, how can you show this crud to children?

It's going to have this terrible effect on them.

Leaving out for a second that Milton Burrow was the same show, so adults were consuming the crud just as much as the children were.

At the same time, TV was evolving as a medium.

New children's shows were popping up.

Howdy had competition, including perhaps the biggest development in children's television, the cartoon.

Here I come to save the day.

That means that mighty mouth.

The other networks realized that airing cartoons was cheaper than filming a bunch of actors on a soundstage every week, and kids loved them.

And of course, puppets compared to a cartoon character,

they can't possibly compete because they fit the style of the medium.

And the competing live-action shows didn't go away, they just got more visually sophisticated, including the show that perhaps would prove to be the perfect marriage of live-action and cartoon IP.

Who's the leader of the trusted APOU within?

Make it up!

Power up!

Forever!

The Mickey Mouse Club featured a cast of singing and dancing kids alongside serials, often involving Disney characters.

Meanwhile, Howdy Duty, the show that never met a problem it couldn't innovate its way out of, had stopped innovating.

It was just the same old vaudeville puppet show.

As programs like the Mickey Mouse Club evolved around it, Howdy looked increasingly old-fashioned and threadbare.

So by 1960, when it left the air, I mean, basically the air had left them.

Because,

you know, the other shows were better.

In 1956, the executives at NBC cut the show back from five days a week to just one on Saturday afternoon.

And suddenly, everyone on the show was only making a fraction of the money they had before.

Bert says that's one of the reasons Bob purchased the liquor store.

It was his way of giving some of the show's staff a job.

He wanted something for the guys that worked for him to do after the show was off the air.

He knew the show was going to go away.

The last episode of Howdy Duty aired in 1960.

Bob Smith had not planned on being just a children's entertainer, but he didn't have a second act after he hung up his Buffalo Bob outfit.

And it was during this twilight period that our intrepid super fan, Bert Dubrow, actually becomes part of the story.

When he grew up, he went to college in Boston, but he never never stopped being fascinated with the entertainment industry.

What was the dream at that point?

What did you do?

Just to be in television, to be a producer, to be in television.

I'm not even sure a producer, just to be in it.

But it was because it was live and it was real.

So, once it became cartoons, I didn't have an interest in it anymore.

But I always did with talk.

Always.

Always.

Then in 1970, he heard that Buffalo Bob was coming to town to perform.

He had been doing a howdy-duty revival tour.

So I go to the auditorium, I sit down, big place, probably 1,500 people, and it's like, there's Buffalo Bob.

And in spite of the fact that Bob was effectively putting on a show designed for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men, or who knows, perhaps because he was putting on a show for toddlers in front of a bunch of grown men, the audience loved it.

And he was effing amazing.

All the songs, sang all the songs, did everything.

Everybody knew the words to every song.

Like an idiot, I'm singing the songs too.

And when the show was over, Bert went to see Bob and his brother Vic backstage.

He knew that Bob had had a heart attack several years earlier, and he figured that Bob's health was as good a reason as any to get his foot into the door of show business.

So I said to Vic, listen, he needs me on the road.

He'll drop dead if he's going to get another heart attack.

Anyway, Bob called me and said, Let's do it.

You'll travel with me and all that.

And it was, it was rough.

He was rough.

He was not easy.

What do you mean?

He was very demanding and

I'd say moody.

I didn't get my own room on the road, so I sleep in the same room as him.

So I think I got $25 or $50 a show.

That was it.

But I couldn't have been happier.

Bert's decision to drop out of college and pursue a career in television paid off.

He went on to create the Sally Jesse Raphael show.

And then after it became a hit, he came across a local news anchor in Cincinnati and he thought, this guy should have his own talk show.

That anchor's name was Jerry Springer.

It started out as a straight show and ended up with throwing chairs.

Yeah.

But

I interviewed Bert at his home in Denver, Colorado.

He told me we would be doing the interview in his basement.

And I was not prepared for what was down there.

Get ready.

Go ahead.

I'll meet you down.

Okay, all right.

When we descended the stairs, I was greeted by the smiling faces of so many puppets.

It was like a museum.

Wow, this is amazing.

Yeah, feel free to look around.

Yeah, I'd love you to give me a little tour and try to.

Sure, sure, sure.

There's Buffalo Bob's suit.

Did you find it?

Oh, wow.

And there's Claribel's.

That's the real stuff.

Oh, yeah.

That's the.

This is the last Seltzer bottle he used.

The last one.

All around me, everywhere I looked, was something from the original Howdy Duty show.

All the costumes and props and photographs and puppets.

I felt kind of like how Burt must have felt when he first went to that taping and finally got to see everything in color.

That's the original Princess Summerfort Winterspring puppet.

One of the hats they used to give away at the Peanut Gallery.

There I am in the Peanut Gallery that day.

That's me.

Oh, wow.

Right there.

Yeah.

When I asked Bert how he got all this stuff, he says that when the revival tour was winding down, he asked Bob if he could keep a few things.

And Bob couldn't understand why he would want any of it.

This was before collectibles really took off.

So when the show wrapped, he gave Bert everything that happened to be left.

And so here I am sitting with, you know, Claribel's box and horns.

And hold on here.

Hold on.

everybody will recognize that that knows howdy will recognize that and that's the actual horn it's one of them there's uh

oh wow bob and springer and me burt led me around his basement glass of ice water in his hand pointing out various pieces of memorabilia from his long career in show business and there in a corner standing upright was the star of the show Howdy Duty himself, one of the very few puppets made from the original mold that was used on the the show when Howdy first came out of plastic surgery.

There's the boy in the corner over there.

Nice case.

Wow.

I know.

This is sort of my friggin' life.

It's crazy.

99% Invisible was reported this week by David Weinberg, produced by Jacob Moldonano-Medina and edited by Joe Rosenberg.

Mix and sound design by Dara Hirsch.

Music by Swan Rial.

Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

Special thanks to Roberta Chirac and Fresh Air for the use of the Stephen Davis interview.

Kathy 2 is our executive producer.

Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Barubay, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashima Dawn, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Nina Patuck, Sarah Bake, and Me Roman Mars.

The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

I strongly recommend you go check out David Weinberg's experimental podcast, Random Tape.

It's sort of a cabinet of auditory wonders and curiosities that David started in the form of, and I am not joking here, a physical audio zine on compact disc in 2006.

And it's been a favorite of us radio and podcast nerds ever since.

Check it out.

It's worth your time.

99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

You can find us on all the usual usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server, which I highly recommend you check out.

That's where I'm spending most of my time these days.

You can find a link to it and every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

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