...It's Howdy Doody time!  Thank you for joining me today on a brief visit to the 1950's with one of the most memorable characters of my childhood.   Bill

Memorable Character                  DOUBLE DOODY - Celebrity Stand-In

I grew up in the 1950’s with a bunch of dummies......marionettes and hand puppets and fond memories of listening to Charley McCarthy along with Charlie’s country cousin Mortimer Snerd brought to life by Edgar Bergen on our car radio on Sunday rides. The very first TV show that I can remember watching was Kukla Fran and Ollie at my uncle’s home in a darkened room on a 5” screen (complete with an adjustable magnifying glass). The gentle souled globe nosed clown and wacky misguided single toothed dragon, created by Burr Tillstrom, made a deep life long impact on me. We had the first black and white TV in the neighborhood (with a 10” screen!) and Jerry Mahoney became a Saturday morning favorite along with his adopted unpredictable brother Knucklehead, and of course there was Jimmy Nelson’s Danny O’Day and Farfel the dog (N-E-S-T-L-E-S Nestles make the very best CHAW-CLAAAAT!). Sunday nights were extra special when Senior Wences’s fist puppet Johnny was on the Ed Sullivan Show (S’awright?). But my all time favorite memorable wooden headed character was Howdy Doody with his marionette friends Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally and Flub-a-Dub. I was totally engrossed member of Buffalo Bob Smith’s daily peanut gallery (Hey kids, what time is it?) and the wacky situations compounded by Chief Thunderthud, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, and a dozen other characters where violence never exceeded a squirt in the face from a seltzer bottle or frantic horn honking from Clarabell the trouble making but good natured clown. I crossed paths with the memorable character “Double Doody” at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC dutifully standing-in for the original Howdy Doody marionette on display at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. A third stringless Howdy is owned by a private collector and was used for personal appearances, parades and photos. I had my own Howdy Doody marionette and folding cardboard stage, Jerry Mahoney ventriloguist dummy and a Kukla hand puppet, and like many kids in a kinder and gentler time I had fantasies of performing my own puppet shows for family, friends and neighbors. Howdy, Jerry and Kukla are long gone, however a seven decades old Mickey Mouse hand puppet sits quietly gathering dust on a shelf as a reminder of times when my best friends were dummies.....marionettes and puppets.      -Bill .  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdy_Doody