The Captain

Somewhere along the line when I wasn’t paying very careful attention, I woke up just a precious few months shy of having been here for sixty years. Most of this life has had some form of a connection to trains involved with it, which makes it pretty easy to relay the stories to you as I reflect upon them myself. Sometimes I feel the pain of the miles and the years, but I must admit that waking up here in Tehachapi every day makes it worth it and surely beats the alternatives.

In past articles I have shared a bit of my early experiences and recollections with you and today I will stay consistent and reminisce upon a few more of those childhood memories to hopefully entertain and enlighten. This time we board Mr. Wizard’s wayback machine and set the controls for the early days of television, long before I was a part of the picture, but important none-the-less. We have landed in early post WWII New York.

Robert Keeshan was born in Lynbrook, N.Y. in 1927. He worked as a page for NBC while still in high school and joined the Marines upon his graduation. When WWII ended he went back to work at NBC, where Buffalo Bob Smith hired him to play the role of Clarabell the Clown on the Howdy Doody Show in 1948. For the next five years he entertained millions of children across the country as the original Clarabell on national television. CBS lured him away from Rockefeller Center and in October of 1955, at the age of 28, Robert embarked upon a thirty year journey of giving children educational, non violent and mentally stimulating entertainment. This is where I came into the picture.

The year is now 1960-something and I am a young, soon to be full-blown train geek living in the shadow of television broadcasting from Los Angeles. We were lucky to own a TV set and even luckier to get five or six semi-clear stations fifty miles from LA – in glorious black and white – with what we fondly always refer to as ‘the ant races.’ These were the olden, dark days of television when you actually had to stand up, walk across the room and manually change the channel, adjust the antenna or whack the side of the giant, simulated wood cabinet to lose the rolling horizontal lines. TV Guide was yet to be invented, BUT, if there was a show that came in on our TV that had trains as a part of it, you can safely bet that I would find it. I was channel surfing early one morning when I discovered ‘The Captain’.

Given a nickname that would follow him the rest of his life for the giant pouch like pockets on his Captain’s jacket, Captain Kangaroo spanned four decades on national television. One of the regular features on this newly discovered morning kids program were Lionel trains that both he and Mr. Green Jeans took great pleasure in operating. He also had one of the New York train collectors bring in a table of antique trains, mostly Lionel, to actually show the history and development of these wondrous toys that we aspired to find under the tree on Christmas morning.

Don’t tell my mom, but when we knew that the good Captain would be featuring the train layout on a day when we had school, several of the guys in my neighborhood would mysteriously be sick that day. It was magical to see the trains that were such an important part of this thing called childhood played with by someone whom we saw on TV!

Captain Kangaroo won a total of five Emmy Awards, three Peabodys, was elected into the Clown Hall of Fame in 1990 and was inducted into the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1998.

Bob Keeshan died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 76.

As with an earlier article I wrote about other television personalities giving kids decent stuff to fill their minds, educate and entertain using trains as the medium, thank you Captain Kangaroo, you transported us to a better place.