I learned yesterday that Carl Bernstein, the legendary Watergate reporter, won a Howdy Doody lookalike contest when he was a boy. My first horrified thought was that he might have looked like this:
For this was in fact the original Howdy Doody who alarmed households across America beginning around 1950. Fortunately he only lasted a couple of years. Much acrimony developed between Buffalo Bob, who thought up the character, and Frank Paris, who made the puppet, Paris growing increasingly incensed about his revenue share. One day in 1952 he snatched Howdy and disappeared from the studio four hours before airtime. What to do? When the show went on at 5 pm, Buffalo Bob explained that Howdy had left town for a while to cover the presidential election. They put up a big map tracking his whereabouts. He then filed reports (unseen). Meanwhile Clarabell, Big Chief Thunderthud and the others picked up the slack, until Howdy reported that seeing one of the presidential candidates up close had inspired him (Howdy) to have plastic surgery. Puppeteer Velma Dawson went to work and created the addled redhead we know today, with 48 freckles, one for every state in the Union. Howdy was really pleased with the results:
He still doesn’t look like Bernstein to me.
