1961: Bob Dylan plays his first major gig in New York City, opening for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City. The New York Times reviewer, Robert Shelton, gives the young singer a very positive review, which in turns helps launch Dylan’s career.

The Life & Times of Howdy Doody – Part 2

It wasn’t all smiles and squirting seltzer bottles. There were plenty of show biz squabbles behind the scenes of The Howdy Doody Show. And the first (and most important) took place barely six months into the show’s 13-year run! We’ll also tell you how a puppet was killed by a mouse.

As the first year of The Howdy Doody Show wore on, the man pulling the strings, puppeteer Frank Paris, grew to feel he was being cheated out his fair share of the royalties being generated by the bumper crop of Howdy Doody merchandise that had begun to appear. Thinking he had real leverage, Paris took his puppet and stormed out of the NBC studios in the spring of 1948, only hours before that day’s live telecast was to take place.

The show’s writers quickly created a crazy scenario where the kids were told that Howdy had left suddenly on a whirlwind tour of the U.S. to campaign for President of the Children of the United States (1948 was an election year). During each thrice-weekly show, he would phone in a report from the road (Buffalo Bob had always provided Howdy’s voice). So the kids could still hear, if not see, their favorite TV star.

(Frank Paris' original Howdy puppet)

After a few days, Howdy dropped the big bombshell. He revealed that he had decided to get some plastic surgery (and really, what TV star hasn’t?). In reality, puppeteer Velma Dawson was being paid $2,000 to create a new Howdy puppet. After a huge publicity build-up, her design was unveiled on June 8, 1948. Dawson’s Howdy is the face we all remember – the face that graced NBC’s test pattern (remember those?) for years.

By the end of June 1948, public demand for Howdy Doody was so great that NBC was broadcasting Howdy Doody Time, Monday through Friday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm.

For 8 years, it remained there until June, 1956 when huge ratings from ABC’s first season of The Mickey Mouse Club forced NBC to move the show to Saturday mornings. There, it ran from 10:00 to 10:30 am until it went off the air with an hour-long final episode on Saturday, September 24, 1960.

Along the way, Howdy Doody became the first show to be regularly broadcast in color. In those days, NBC was owned by RCA Victor. That company was manufacturing television sets and really wanted to stimulate sales of their new and expensive color sets. Just as Milton Berle had sold a lot of black & white TV’s back in the day, Howdy and the gang are given credit for helping the nation convert to color TV as we moved toward the 60’s.

When it comes to colorful, nothing was more colorful in network television than the amazingly large cast of Puppet-Americans and other creatures who populated Doodyville. We’ll take a look at them next time.

1965: The Beatles, a Saturday morning kids cartoon show debuts on ABC-TV. The show features the songs of the Fab Four, but not their actual voices. It runs for 3 seasons.

1988: It began with the singer waving a gun around in an office building. It ended after a one-hour, two-state car chase when police shoot out the two front tires of the singer’s pickup truck.

It was on this day that James Brown, one time “hardest working man in show business,” is carted off to jail and charged assault, resisting arrest, illegal possession of a firearm and (surprise, surprise) drugs.

Happy Rockin’ Birthday to:

1930: Ray Charles

1938: Ben E. King

1943: Steve Boone (Lovin’ Spoonful)

1947: Jerry Corbetta (Sugarloaf)

1949: Bruce Springsteen

1965: At a little coffee shop, known appropriately enough as The Coffee Gallery, a new rock group makes its debut. The group calls itself The Great Society.

The group’s lead singer is a young woman named Grace Slick.

1984: The compact disc, aka the CD, goes into production in the United States when CBS Records opens a plant in Terre Haute, Indiana. The first disc manufactured was Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

1969: With all due respect to Buddy Holly, for many of us in the Baby Boom, this is the day the music really died.

On this day 45 years ago, John Lennon tells the rest of the Beatles that he will be leaving the group. The announcement takes the other three by surprise. Paul McCartney proposes that the band start playing small clubs anonymously to recapture the feeling of unity they once had. Lennon will have none of it, reportedly telling Paul, "I think you’re daft. I want a divorce."

The band realizes they cannot go on without him, but agrees not to say anything until after the release of the Let It Be soundtrack. McCartney will break that agreement with his own announcement shortly thereafter.