| Subject: Robert 'Buffalo Bob' Smith, 'Howdy Doody' Creator, Is Dead at 80 |
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July 30, 1998
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Date Posted: Monday, July 30, 2012, 02:36:57pm
Buffalo Bob Smith, a singing piano player and chatty radio disk jockey who created Howdy Doody and then teamed up with the puppet on one of early television's most enduring children's shows, died of cancer yesterday at a hospital near his home in Flat Rock, N.C. Mr. Smith was 80.
''Say, kids, what time is it?'' Buffalo Bob would ask his Peanut Gallery of children ages 3 to 8, gathered in an NBC studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza every afternoon, five days a week, in the late 1940's and 1950's.
''It's Howdy Doody time,'' they'd respond with the lung power that only children of that age can demonstrate.
And then they'd sing their Howdy Doody theme song, set to the tune of ''Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay:''
It's Howdy Doody time,
It's Howdy Doody time.
Bob Smith and Howdy, too,
Say 'howdy doo' to you.
Let's give a rousing cheer,
'Cause Howdy Doody's here.
It's time to start the show,
So kids, let's go!
''Howdy Doody'' was the first daily show NBC produced in color and the first to have live music.
For many years in the 1950's, Buffalo Bob and Howdy were on Monday to Friday at 5:30 P.M. After the theme, they'd be joined for an hour by their friends, some human, some made of wood. These included Clarabell the Clown, human, (he said nary a word but hopped around honking a Harpo Marx-type horn to signal yes or no and spraying Buffalo Bob with a bottle of seltzer); Chief Thunderthud, human, official representative of the Ooragnak Indians (Ooragnak was kangaroo spelled backwards); Princess Summerfall Winterspring (she began as a puppet, then was transformed into a human because Buffalo Bob, who hired the actress Judy Tyler, wanted something beautiful and life-sized for girls to identify with and Ms. Tyler was all of that); and such puppets as Phineas T. Bluster, the always grumpy but never evil mayor of Doodyville; his Latin and Anglo brothers, Don Jose Bluster and Hector Hamhock Bluster, and Flub-a-Dub, a meatball-eating wild animal made up of eight different animals that Buffalo Bob claimed he had caught in a jungle in South America.
There was also a machine of sorts, a Super Talkscope, that enabled Buffalo Bob and Howdy to instantly see what was going on any place in the world, any time they wanted to. There were songs, too, one of which was ''Iggly Wiggly Spaghetti,'' a big hit with the Gallery.
Mr. Smith was a big man with an easy smile who almost always wore a fringed cowboy outfit. At first Howdy called him ''Mr. Smith,'' but as the years progressed, he became known to one and all as Buffalo Bob, a name that had nothing to do with the Wild West but rather with his hometown in upstate New York.
Howdy started as an unprepossessing piece of wood in 1947 after Mr. Smith talked NBC into letting him do a children's show. He grew out of a character Mr. Smith had created on his radio quiz show, ''The Triple B Ranch,'' a bumpkin called Elmer, who opened the show with a ''howdy doody.'' His audiences soon came to call the puppet Howdy Doody.
That first Howdy was quickly retired when NBC and Mr. Smith got into a dispute with Frank Paris, the puppet-maker, who declared that Howdy was and forever would be his property and nobody else's, the creative fortunes of Buffalo Bob and his writer notwithstanding.
Mr. Smith then found Velma Dawson, the artist who refined Howdy into a 27-inch-tall boy with prominent ears who wore jeans, a bandanna and a checked shirt. He had 48 freckles, one for each state. His delivery sounded suspiciously like that of Mortimer Snerd, a dummy hayseed who had been created on radio by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen for the madcap top-hatted wiseacre, Charlie McCarthy. The second Howdy was so successful that Mr. Smith commissioned a stand-in, whom he called Double Doody, and a third puppet with no strings attached who posed for photos. He was called Photo Doody.
But Buffalo Bob was neither a ventriloquist nor a puppeteer and he never tried to engage in the kinds of pungent exchanges that occurred between Mr. Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Professional puppeteers off camera manipulated Howdy's movements whenever he and Mr. Smith had a conversation. Mr. Smith prerecorded all Howdy's responses and when they were on television, the exchanges between Buffalo Bob and Howdy were all controlled by an engineer. He simply put his finger on the record and stopped the turntable when Mr. Smith was talking, then took his finger off and let the turntable roll when it was Howdy's turn.
Howdy, as he was developed by the writer Eddie Kean, was neither excruciatingly thick like Mortimer nor wickedly and unredeemably sophisticated like Charlie. Howdy was somehow direct without being intrusive and friendly and supportive of Buffalo Bob without becoming dull to the Peanut Gallery.
''The character of Howdy Doody was a sissy,'' said Mr. Kean on one occasion. ''He was me as a child. I always preferred to study than to play baseball. I never hit anybody. No one ever hit me. He was the dullest character on the show. No offense to Bob, but he was because I made him so.''
The first Clarabell was Bob Keeshan, who went on to become Captain Kangaroo. Clarabell never had a line to say until the show went off the air (after 2,343 performances) on Sept. 30, 1960, at which time he looked into the camera and said simply and wistfully, ''Goodbye kids.''
Buffalo Bob moved to Florida, bought three radio stations and a liquor store, and thought he was out of the Howdy Doody business.
But it was not to be. It could never be a permanent goodbye for the youngsters who grew up watching Buffalo Bob, then went off to serve in the war in Vietnam or to oppose it. After the tumult of the 1960's, they felt they needed to return to simpler times. A Howdy Doody revival started at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. Someone asked students there what they would like to do most of all, and many of them said they would like to revisit the world of Howdy Doody. On Feb. 14, 1970, Buffalo Bob and Howdy showed up at Penn and served as hosts for a repeat of Howdy's 10th anniversary show of Dec. 28, 1957. They were a hit and Buffalo Bob never stopped being Buffalo Bob after that.
Buffalo Bob Smith was born Robert Schmidt on Nov. 27, 1917 in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of Emil H. Schmidt and Emma Kuehn Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt had for years earned his keep as a coal miner in Illinois. One day there was a cave-in and Mr. Schmidt was one of only three miners to survive. At his wife's suggestion, he left the mines and moved his family to Buffalo, where he became a carpenter.
Young Bob was encouraged to learn to play the piano and organ. By the time he was 15, he was singing on a Buffalo radio station. He formed a three-man vocal group called the Hi-Hatters. One member of the Hi-Hatters was Foster Brooks, who in later years became famous as the drunk who frequently appeared in Dean Martin's television program in the 1970's.
After several years of making his way on upstate New York radio, he moved to New York City in August, 1947, and got a job as a disk jockey on radio station WEAF, then owned by the National Broadcasting Co. Early in his career, he changed his name to Robert E. Smith. By 1947, Mr. Smith had a Saturday morning quiz show for kids.
The ''Howdy Doody'' show started that same year, at first on Saturdays, then on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and finally, five times a week. It was successful from the very beginning.
''Howdy Doody'' was so popular that people gathered in the streets before appliance store windows to watch it, as they did with baseball games and wrestling matches.
Howdy's popularity being what it was, it was announced in 1948 that he would run for president of all the boys and girls. Harry S. Truman also happened to be running that year, and he won the election over New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. But Howdy did get a great many votes, becoming president of the boys and girls.
All was not trouble-free, however. In 1949, Mr. Smith ran afoul of NBC executives when, during his early morning talk show, he announced that a space ship had landed in Virginia and that it had contained that bodies of Liliputian-like men attired in 15th-century outfits. He read it as though it had come from the wires of United Press and although it did not cause the alarm of Orson Welles's ''Martian invasion'' of 1938, it frightened a great many people, especially those living in Virginia. NBC told him never to do anything like that again.
In 1954, Mr. Smith suffered a heart attack and for a time, he did the show from a studio built in the basement of his home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He returned to the NBC studio in 1955.
Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Mildred, to whom he was married for 57 years; three sons, Robin, Ronald and Christopher, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. None of his sons went into show business.
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