O Captain, My Captain
by L. WAYNE HICKS

Bob Keeshan hid behind makeup and the horn of Clarabelle the clown on the classic "Howdy Doody Show," and disguised himself with a gray wig to play the grandfatherly Captain Kangaroo on his own celebrated TV show.

But on this day, a Saturday in November in 1996, Keeshan stood alone, without costume or character. He was visiting Denver as part of a tour promoting his newest book, "Good Morning Captain: 50 Wonderful Years With Bob Keeshan: TV's Captain Kangaroo." Hundreds of fans would wait patiently for a chance to talk with Keeshan, ask him for an autograph or to pose with them, and recount stories of what he meant to them growing up.

To many fans, Keeshan’s "Captain Kangaroo" was everything: a substitute fatherly figure, a calming influence during their childhood, a familiar voice and face. To me, he was a teacher, a storyteller and clown, a foil of Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose, a target for ping pong balls. And, on that November day, a confidant.

Outside of our own families, my wife and I had not told anyone she was pregnant with our first child: a daughter, Madeline, who would be born in June 1997. But something prompted me to tell Keeshan my news, which delighted him. During the years of "Captain Kangaroo" and after it left the airwaves, first on CBS and then on PBS, Keeshan developed into an advocate for children. He offered me an excellent piece of advice: Read to your child every day.

Not too long after my hour-long interview with Keeshan, a package arrived in the mail. It was a copy of "Books to Grow By," a reference guide Keeshan published in early 1996 of what books are best for children.

In the years since, I had the pleasure to talk twice more with Keeshan, each time on the telephone. Both conversations were lengthy, and provided insight into his life and into "Captain Kangaroo."

The three interviews have been combined into the following piece, which is intended to provide as complete a historical record as possible into Keeshan’s life and career, including his never-realized plans to return to television. He was hoping to produce a children’s program called "The Captain and the ZooZoo Crew" in the years before his death. Keeshan died in 2004 at age 76.

Q: I grew up watching you, as probably everyone in the country did, but I wanted to thank you for all those years of fun.

A: It was a pleasure. Always happy to hear that.

Q: I enjoyed your book. I actually read both of yours. I read "Growing Up Happy," which was a very good book, and I read this one this week. It’s wonderful to see these pictures.

A: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of a nice book. It was wonderful to do. The reaction to it has been a lot of fun too.

Q: It seems, after reading the two books over a course of a few weeks, that "Growing Up Happy" (full title: "Growing Up Happy: Captain Kangaroo Tells Yesterday's Children How to Nurture Their Own," published in 1989) was much more serious. Was it a conscious effort to keep this a little bit lighter?

A: Yes. I think that’s the nature of this book. The other one was biographical but much more personally biographical. This book is much more fun, you’re absolutely right, and really designed to elicit good solid memories, good positive memories of people who grew up with the program. There’s probably somewhere around 220 million grew up with the Captain in some way or another. About the only exceptions are those who grew up in another culture and have come to this country in recent years. "Growing Up Happy" was much more biographical and much more a nurturing book; if you recall the subtitle of that book was "Captain Kangaroo Tells Yesterday’s Children How to Nurture Their Own," so that’s much more a useful book. A lot of people have expressed the opinion it was a very valuable book to them in nurturing their children, and that was really the intent of that book. Quite different from the intention of this book, which is to, in a nostalgic way, recall happier times.

Q: I look back at that time in television, the ‘50s and the ‘60s and I think of certain people. I think of you as Captain Kangaroo, I think of Adam West as Batman, and George Reeves as Superman. They're always in our minds as those people. Is it fair for people to think of you as the Captain when you were really just an actor portraying a role?

A: Well, I don't think I was just an actor. I was the executive producer and everything funneled through me. In the very beginning, everything went through me. Obviously, the Captain's personality is me, is my own personal feelings and philosophy. So all of that is as much a part of the program as any actor might be. It's obviously more than that.

Q: Was there a point early on when you wanted to stop and do other things?

A: I never had that Shakespearean disease. Never had the desire to do something else. It's been a very busy time. I did six hours of programming every week for most of the time. That kept us tremendously busy, particularly producing and editing it and I had a very big hand in writing it. I was serious about it. I am serious about it. I'm serious about families and children. I'm an advocate. I spend a lot of time public speaking on behalf of children and issues concerning young people. I just left the National Association of Children's Hospitals board last year after fulfilling my constitutional limit of six years. I've always been involved in children's issues and family issues. This has been a serious enterprise. It's not just a children's show that I did. Not at all.

Q: You were fairly new as a parent back then, weren't you?

A: That was probably a great blessing, really. In the very beginning the program staff was populated by young parents, so a lot of our programming was intuitive at that time because we probably wrongly assumed that most families were in the same situation as ours. We certainly did not think about other families that were not in as good a position as we were. We were people who were not worrying about food on the table and poverty and everything else, which were existent then, not to the extent that they are today in families in the richest nation in the world. But we felt that we did understand what it was to be a parent with young children. Then, as time went on, we did bring aboard child professionals in various disciplines, child psychologists and educators and others whose function really was to teach us about the needs of children. So we really had a seminar going for 30-some odd years from some of the best child professionals available. It was very useful to us because then we would take that information, whether we were writers or producers or actors, we would then take that information and translate it creatively into the work that we were doing. That was very positive.

Q: Was there ever a point when your children were embarrassed to be Captain Kangaroo's kids?

A: No, because they were kept away from the show right from the beginning. We really never made much of a big deal of it. We never used them as a laboratory, we never questioned them. They may have watched it, they may not have watched it. We never asked them. The community was very respectful of our wishes. The schools never made a big deal of it. As a result, they lived a very, very normal childhood.

Q: There were so many different characters on "Captain Kangaroo" and so many different segments, how did it all get put together?

A: Well, at different times in different ways. The show really crossed the boundaries of a lot of changes in television, particularly technical and production changes. So the putting together of the show was done differently at different times. When we first went on the air in 1955 we were live and so there were limitations to that. There were also benefits from it. There was a wonderful spontaneity to it. But things happen. We actually did two shows a day Monday through Friday. We would do one at 8 o’clock for the Eastern Time Zone and in 40 seconds turn everything around and at 9 o’clock did the show all over again.

Q: The same show?

A: The same show, all over again, for the Central Time Zone and the Mountain Zone. Then through a terrible, terrible process called kinescope the show was shown on the West Coast. Then tape came along. That was one development. Tape made it possible for us really to do the show pretty much as we always had done it, because we couldn’t edit tape in the very beginning, or we could but literally it could take an hour to make one single edit so we just didn’t do it. So it was basically a live show that was taped, and California got the live show but with a better technical version. Then as time went by it became easier to edit. Digital editing came along. So it was not only easy to edit, there were all kinds of effects that could be achieved. The production values changed considerably as a result of all this and ultimately we were doing the show more like they do motion pictures and television because we would 3 minutes here and a minute and a half there and we could always do a 20-second segue. All of this came together in the editing suite. We could mix and match shows. We could take, for example, we could do a story a fairy tale of some kind or our interpretation of a fairy tale which would require large sets maybe and guests and so on. Expenditures which we could never have afforded when it was done just for the one live show. But now because we were able to tape it and edit it and perfect it, it went into the library. That might then be amortized over 12 runs over three years or something of that sort. All of those things, there are hundreds of details of that nature that changed the way the program was done.

Q: How long would it take to do one show?

A: As opposed to doing a show in one hour straight in the live days, we did the show in pieces. So it was done in maybe 25 different pieces. Or there might be 20 pieces and there might be four pieces from another day, so there’s no way to say it took us an hour. It actually took us a lot longer to do each show in total than it did when we were live and that’s because we were doing more ambitious programming. The production was much more ambitious. That was not possible in live days.

Q: The signature characters on the show —

A: Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose and Grandfather Clock, Dancing Bear — how many of those characters were there from the beginning?

A: Well, Bunny was there from the beginning and Mr. Green Jeans of course was there from the beginning, as was the Captain. Mr. Moose came along about year two. Dancing Bear maybe year three. They were all there pretty much in the early days. There were a lot of other characters that were introduced over those years that even I forget at this point that didn’t work out, so we abandoned them.

Q: What’s the process? Do you have a staff meeting and say we need a Dancing Bear?

A: That’s a good example really of how accidentally things come along. We had a meeting and we were listening to a record that we’d just received. Believe it or not, it was a record, not a tape or a CD, but it was a record called the "Dancing Bear." We just sat around and said how do we do this? Somebody said how about Gus in a bear suit? Gus being Gus Allegretti. Gus said, "Yeah, I’m game," and so we had a nice bear suit made that Gus crawled into. It was not a lot of fun but he is a great talent. Then we just had him dance to this record, the "Dancing Bear," and that was that. Then we got mail. A lot of people said oh, we love that dancing bear. Let us see him again. So we repeated the number but then we also started writing other material for him. We made him a character on the show and within a year or so he was a very well established character on the program. Bunny Rabbit just came along in the beginning. Mr. Green Jeans, we didn’t create Mr. Green Jeans, he [Lumpy Brannum] did. It was his own personal character. It represented everything that he felt strongly about. The environment and animals. He was of course by background a musician, a very good one, and played for Fred Waring for 16 years prior to coming to our show. But he had had an avocation. He had a small farm in Pennsylvania and tended his garden. He was tied to the earth. He was tied to animals. And that was just his personality, which we took full advantage of, which turned Mr. Green Jeans very much in that direction.
There really is no great magic to it. It’s just a combination of intelligent planning and even with all of that it sometimes, very often doesn’t work, there’s a lot of chemistry and a lot of luck there. There are other characters that probably were planned as well but just didn’t pick up, just make it. You see that every year at this time of year when you see the new shows. They look good on paper. Wow, this is going to make it. Then you look at the first show and you say this ain’t going nowhere. Because it’s a combination of writing. That’s where it all begins, writing and production and the actors and the chemistry between them, the director and so on. This business is a very very difficult business to write a rule book for. If I could write a rule book or guide on creating a successful program, I would have done it a long time ago and would have retired to my palace on the mountaintop.

Q: You were constantly evaluating what worked and didn’t work on the show?

A: Oh, sure. It’s a constant ongoing process. Absolutely.

Q: Were there things that you thought would work well and you were wrong?

A: Oh, sure, all the time. Probably much more than the ones that made it. Now you’re going to ask like what? I don’t remember most of them. You forget them.

Q: You forget your failures.

A: Yeah. Well, you don’t forget your failures. It’s just that you remember your successes. Because successes are around and they’re there and they become important to the program and what they do becomes important to the program whereas a failure’s maybe on the program four or five times when we realized it wasn’t working and that’s that. You don’t really remember them very well. Not that you intentionally try to forget them out of embarrassment or whatever, but there’s nothing to remember about them except they didn’t work.

Q: Tom Terrific was added at what point?

A: Tom Terrific came on very early, probably a year or so into the program. One of our agreements with CBS was that they would supply us with animation and it was animation that we would approve. We went through everything that was available. They had just bought Terrytoons and had the whole Terrytoons library so they felt very comfortable.
We went through that whole Terrytoons library and there was almost nothing that we wanted to use. A lot of it was theatrical releases from the ‘30s and all kinds of material that we felt inappropriate. The attitude toward racial matters and ethnic matters. Believe it or not, in the ‘30s cartoons had all of these things mixed in it. I can remember one. I always cite it as an outstanding example of the kind of thing that we saw. Two golfers were teeing off and one says "fore" and shouts "fore," and out of the bushes jumps a guy with a long beard, obviously a rabbi, who says "3.98."

Q: Inappropriate.

A: Yeah. Completely inappropriate. So we said we can’t find anything here. And they agreed with us. They looked at and they agreed with us. They said that’s not what you should be using. Why don’t you do your own? So we went to Terrytoons and they were the producers. A terrific guy who was one of my writers, Gene Wood, was assigned to the task and Gene and a bunch of the other people devised this character, Tom Terrific, and other characters, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog and the villains, Pittsburgh the Pirate and Isotope Feeney. Gene wrote the storylines and actually lived at Terrytoons and supervised the production of it. That’s how Tom Terrific came into being.

Q: Why was it important to have animation as part of the show?

A: It was really a technical thing. It was live and it gave us three and a half or four minutes of relief to regroup ourselves. Animation, as we had envisioned it originally, would have been about a third of the program material and as it actually turned out it was probably less than a tenth of the program material. But it gave us the physical relief in doing the show.

Q: At what point did you realize that Captain Kangaroo would be a successful show?

A: I thought it was great from the first minute of the first day. I was prejudiced. I thought we had a very different and new approach to programming for young people and if we remained faithful to our principles of catering to the intelligence and potentially good taste of the child then we had an opportunity to do some very, very good programming. I was probably one of the few that thought it would really make it because it was nonconventional. It did break a lot of rules. It wasn’t the commercial venture that most programming was then and it wasn’t one-tenth the commercial venture that most children’s programming is today.
It did break all those broadcast business rules and fortunately we were in the right place at the right time. We had CBS and in those days CBS was really quite a wonderful place. We had Mr. Paley. We had Frank Stanton. They were the two top executives and they were very, very supportive. No. 1, they were understanding of what we were attempting to do and they took pride in it. So when the sales department complained they couldn’t sell the show, Frank Stanton stepped in and told them just relax. We’re going to stick with it. Of course, eventually it did become quite successful commercially, in three or four years and they weren’t complaining anymore, but it did have to prove itself. It had to break all those rules first. You don’t get that anymore.
It’s a very, very high-pressure business now, financially, and if you don’t get ratings numbers in the first three episodes there’s a red mark put to the show and you’re gone.

Q: So you think if you were launching it now, it wouldn’t last?

A: Oh, no. Not at all. It wouldn’t get on the air today. We once, I forgot what year it was, somewhere in the ‘60s, we did a "Carol Burnett Show" and Carol played the part of a network executive and I played myself. I was coming in and making a presentation. She was wonderful, of course, as she is.
She said, "Let me understand this: You’re a captain, but not necessarily a captain of anything. And you have a bunny rabbit that actually communicates with you and you have this moose who talks." She went down the characters. "A grandfather clock that speaks poetry." And she was getting herself more hysterical as she enumerated all the elements of the show, which sound ludicrous when approached from that direction, of course. But that’s probably pretty much the reception we would get today from a network executive.

Q: When you started the show, a lot of the children’s entertainment was local. So was a national show fairly rare at that time?

A: Well, not really rare. There were quite a few others. "Howdy Doody," of course, had started in 1947. This was 1955, so "Howdy Doody" was very well established. I was on "Howdy Doody." I lived through that experience. Then there were other programs. Miss Frances, who just passed away recently: "Ding Dong School." A number of network programs.
But yes, most of it was local programming that took advantage of the commercial aspects of it: get Charlie who’s the staff announcer. He may not know anything about children, but so what? Let’s not spend any money on writers. That’s ridiculous. We’ll put him in a clown suit or a fireman’s outfit, make him a police officer, whatever, and he’ll basically wend his way through cartoons. Don’t worry about what’s in the cartoons. We really shouldn’t be too much concerned about that sort of thing. They worked in theaters all through the ’30s and ’40s and I’m sure they showed all kinds of what we would now think of as anti-social messages. But they sold. And that’s what was important in those days.

Q: Did those bad local children’s shows give children’s entertainment a bad name?

A: I don’t think they did. I think it depended on the personality; the personality was very often enormously popular. The original great local show was Uncle Al in Cincinnati. He was on long before the Captain. When CBS was thinking about doing children’s programming at 8 o’clock in the morning, it was a really off the wall idea, who would program for kids at 8 o’clock in the morning. Oscar Katz, who was in the research department at CBS at the time, said take a look at Cincinnati, look at this fellow Uncle Al who’s been on for five or six years now. It was a frenetic show. Noisy and moved like a jet plane. It just was so fast, but it was enormously popular. Uncle Al was the greatest figure in Cincinnati. Children were born and their parents wrote to Uncle Al and made reservations for five years from now so that kids could come in and be on the show. It was enormously successful and it was one of the reasons that CBS took a chance on putting the Captain in that time slot. Uncle Al and I became good friends. He was an unusual guy. We had enormously different program philosophies, but he was a nice fellow.

Q: As your show was being broadcast around the country, did you have to contend with competition from local and other national shows?

A: Not really. The only other competition nationally was "Today," and that was counterprogramming. We never felt competitive with anything. We just simply said, "We’re not going to play at this game. We’re going to do what we think is right and what is proper quality programming and hey, if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, well, we gave it a try." You’ve got to be true to your own principles. In those days it seemed like the right thing to do. Today you’d be crazy to take that approach and ignore the ratings numbers but we did it and it worked because it was a different world. There was no cable. There was no satellite available. It was simply broadcast television. Public television didn’t exist. People say, "Why didn’t you go to public television? Why did you go to commercial television?" Well, I went to commercial television because there was no public television. There wasn’t a network. They had about four stations. But Fred Rogers came along. He started locally in Pittsburgh and only in the early ’70s were there enough stations to tie together to make a network. And of course that all came about when "Sesame Street" and its tremendous foundation, financial backing, came along and really made public broadcasting what it is today. Established it as a network. But in my day there was no public broadcasting, so I had no choice.

Q: You and Fred Rogers are probably the two most recognized figures in children’s television history. What was your impression of "Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood?"

A: Well, I love Fred. Fred and I are very dear friends. We talk quite a bit. Every New Year’s morning, the telephone rings around 10:30 or so. It’s Fred, calling me from Florida where he’s resting on vacation. We spend a half-hour, 45 minutes. Quite honestly, we spend most of the time talking about our families and our children and once in a while we’ll talk a little bit about our concerns about the world, the world in which our children are growing up. We’re good friends.

Q: What do you think of his show?

A: Oh, I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s perfect. There are a lot of adults who don’t particularly care for him because he is very pedantic and very slow. "Captain," on the other hand was a show that did have appeal to adults as well as children because there was a little more universality. Fred is not that. Fred is not even a show. Fred is a vision. Fred builds everything on personal relationships and the development of the child and the security of the child. I think he’s absolutely wonderful.

Q: Was there ever any rivalry between the two shows?

A: Never. Fred has exactly the same attitudes I have. You do what is right. There was never any rivalry. Never. I had no rivalry with anybody. People will say, "’Sesame Street,’ you must been rivals with them." Not at all. Why? Most of the people who created "Sesame Street" came from my organization. David Connell and Sam Gibon. Jon Stone. All of those people who were writers and directors, the executive producer, David Connell, all were trained with "Captain Kangaroo" and spent anywhere from five to 10 years with the Captain before they went to that organization.

Q: Were you sad to see them go?

A: Oh, no. No, it was time for everybody to move on. People have got to do their thing. David Connell was kind of in a crunch because there were other people he would report to for a long time on my show. He wanted to be on his own, and rightfully so. When Joan Ganz Cooney gave him an opportunity to be the executive producer there, that was fine. Jon Stone, who was a writer for us, wanted to direct. So David said why don’t you try directing "Sesame Street"? And he did. Sam Gibbon wanted to write different material than he was writing on the "Captain." He was also our studio producer, which was a tough job, so David gave him the opportunity to create new properties, and he did, the names of which I can’t even remember. There was a show that came along about the same time as Sesame that was produced by Television Workshop.

Q: "Electric Company"?

A: "Electric Company," right. That was Sam’s creation, basically. They all had their opportunity to broaden, to spread their wings a little bit.

Q: Well, what was your impression of "Sesame Street"?

A: I think it’s a lot better today that it was in the beginning. In the beginning there was such a concentration on mathematics and reading. I just don’t think works with its basic audience, four and five year olds. Some kids are ready for that at that age. Most are not. Of course, the intention of "Sesame Street" was to reach kids who are not getting that kind of preparation at home. They completely failed to reach that audience. What they were reaching were the kids whose parents were very much concerned and were using "Sesame Street: as a tool to teach literary skills and math and so on. So they were reaching the wrong audience.
Fred Rogers and I both have a philosophy. At this age you’re not dealing so much with the cognitive needs of the child, which are important. Don’t downgrade them in any way. But the emotional development of the child is critical at this age. This emotional development to both of us is far more important. That’s what the Captain was. The relationship between Mr. Green Jeans and the Captain and the Dancing Bear and Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose were all demonstrations of how we get along and how we develop in the world.

READ PART TWO OF THIS
INTERVIEW WITH BOB KEESHAN

See Also:
Captain Kangaroo History
More on Captain Kangaroo
Captain Kangaroo Books & Toys

Rare Interview with Captain Kangaroo - Bob Keeshan

Captain Kangaroo Site

It is what it is!

Mr. Moose
Bunny Rabbit
Dancing Bear
Grandfather Clock

Captain Kangaroo Site

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TOM TERRIFIC
The producer of those wonderful but simple cartoons was Gene Deitch who took over as the producer and guiding genius of the Terrytoons studios, helping to create and develop many films for the them besides the adventures of Tom Terrific and his dog Mighty Manfred.

Tom Terrific's main villain was Crabby Appleton, that mean old man who did everything that he could to ruin the fun of many kids and to make poor Tom and Manfred's lives miserable. Luckily for all of us our two heroes foiled this miserable. fink and taught him the hard way that crime doesn't pay. The late Lionel Wilson did the voices for "TT".

Tom Terrific didn't last too long on Captain Kangaroo, the films were eventually replaced by Lariat Sam and later by The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo, the Toothbrush Family, Ludwig, and The Adventures of Simon In The Land of Chalk Drawings. Mr. Keeshan did the narrations for the Simon cartoons, the original narrator for the British version of the films was character actor Bernard Cribbins.

- Kevin S. Butler

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