This is the first time that I have featured someone that we recently lost, it was suggested to me by staff member Pam, and I think it was a good idea. Join me as I salute someone who had an impact on so many of our childhoods.
Bob Keeshan
The actor and producer responsible for the success of the long-running children's program, Captain Kangaroo. As the easy-going Captain with his big pockets and his bushy mustache, Keeshan lured children into close engagement with literature, science, and especially music, adopting an approach which mixed pleasure and pedagogy. Children learned most easily, he argued, when information and knowledge became a source of delight. Keeshan's approach represented a rejection of pressures towards the increased commercialization of children's programming as well as a toning-down of the high volume, slapstick style associated with earlier kid show hosts, such as Pinky Lee, Soupy Sales and Howdy Doody's Buffalo Bob.
Keeshan was working as a receptionist at NBC-Radio's Manhattan office when Bob Smith started offering him small acting parts on his NBC-TV show, Triple B Ranch, and then, subsequently, hired him as a special assistant for The Howdy Doody Show. Though Keeshan's initial responsibilities involved supervising props and talking to the children who were to be program guests, he was soon pulled on camera, bringing out prizes. After appearing in clown garb on one episode to immense response, he took on the regular role of Clarabell, the mute clown who communicated by honking a horn. Leaving the series in 1952, he played a succession of other clown characters, such as Corny, the host of WABC-TV's Time For Fun, a noontime cartoon program, where he exerted pressure to remove from airplay cartoons he felt were too violent or perpetuated racial stereotyping. While at WABC-TV, he played an Alpine toymaker on Tinker's Workshop, an early morning program, which served as the prototype for Captain Kangaroo.
The CBS network was searching for innovative new approaches to children's programming and approved the Kangaroo series submitted by Keeshan and long-time friend Jack Miller. The series first aired in October 1955 and continued until 1985, making it the longest running children's series in network history. Keeshan not only vividly embodied the Captain, the friendly host of the Treasure House, but also played a central creative role on the daily series, supervising and actively contributing to the scripts and insuring the program's conformity to his conceptions of appropriate children's entertainment. Through encounters with Mr. Green Jeans and his menagerie of domestic animals, with the poetry-creating Grandfather Clock, the greedy Bunny Rabbit, the punning trickster Mr. Moose, and the musically-inclined Dancing Bear, the Captain opened several generations of children to the pleasures of learning. Unlike many other children's programs, Captain Kangaroo was not filmed before a studio audience and did not include children in its cast. Keeshan wanted nothing that would come between him and the children in his television audience and so spoke directly to the camera. He also personally supervised which commercials could air on the program, and promoted products, such as Play-Dough and Etch-a-Sketch, which he saw as facilitating creative play, while avoiding those he felt purely exploitative.
As his program's popularity grew, Keeshan took on an increasingly public role as an advocate for children, writing a regular column about children and television for McCall's and occasional articles for Good Housekeeping, Parade, and other publications. Keeshan wrote original children's books (as well as those tied to the Kangaroo program) and recorded a series of records designed to introduce children to classical and jazz music. He appeared at "tiny tot" concerts given by symphony orchestras in more than 50 cities, offering playful introductions to the musical instruments and the pleasure of good listening.
Upon his retirement, Keeshan became an active lobbyist on behalf of children's issues and in favor of tighter controls over the tobacco industry. A sharp critic of contemporary children's television.
Bob Keeshan died on January 23rd at his home in Vermont, our deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends.
He will be greatly missed and lovingly remembered.
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