Six-Foot Baby-Sitter

Across the U.S., the search was on for a boy with left-parted hair, jug ears, freckles, dimples and a saucer-sized grin. When introduced to the moppet public at Easter, he will be dubbed the living "Howdy Doody Boy," and showered with 500 gifts to celebrate the 500th performance last week of the Howdy Doody Show (weekdays, 5:30 p.m. E.S.T., NBC-TV).

Double Sodas. The original Howdy is a wooden puppet 26 inches tall, who hates guns, dresses like a cowboy, and talks as though his mouth were filled with marbles. His voice and brain are supplied by a fretful, 32-year-old disc jockey named Bob Smith, who conceived Howdy three years ago on a daytime radio show. Transplanted to TV, the puppet flourished so sensationally that, in 1948, Howdy ("The only candidate made completely of wood") claimed more write-in votes for U.S. President-than Henry Wallace. "It's been a hard job," says Smith. "We have to bend over backwards not to antagonize parents. One woman wrote us asking why Howdy always blinks his eyes when he talks. She said, 'Now my son goes around all the time blinking.'"

Howdy Doody is long on action and short on coherence. Smith, a six-foot 200-pounder, delights his juveniles by chasing, and being chased by, the clown Clarabell, taking pratfalls, and getting squirted in the eye with seltzer water. In his new role of Buffalo Bob, great white chief of the Sigafoose Indians, Smith has traded in his lion tamer's suit for fringed buckskin, but still struggles manfully with such gadgets as the Plapdoodle and the Scopedoodle. To keep things moving he plays the piano, accordion, drums, organ, guitar, ukulele, string bass, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, trombone, tuba, and such novelty instruments as the tonette and slide whistle. He can also arrange music and imitate a bass fiddle.

Van Gogh's Nightmare. No ventriloquist, Smith must stay out of the camera's eye when speaking for Howdy. An elaborate prompting system for the entire cast is based on 2 1/2-by-4-ft. cue cards which are placed on top of the offstage monitor set. "It looks something like a drunken Van Gogh's nightmare," says Smith. "My dialogue is printed in black letters, How-dy's in red, Mr. Bluster's in orange, the Flubadub in blue, Dilly Dally in green, and the Inspector in yellow."

Smith escaped last year for a much-needed vacation by telling his large and intent audience that he had to go to South America to find the Flubadub, a gangling, simple-minded animal that wears a flowerpot for a hat, has the head of a duck, a spaniel's ears, a giraffe's neck, the body of a dachshund, a seal's flippers, a pig's tail and cat's whiskers.

With four sponsors (Colgate Tooth Powder, Mars Candy, Ovaltine, Pollpar-rot Shoes), some 30 commercial tie-ups (hand puppets, record album, comic books, a rocking chair that plays It's Howdy Doody Time), and a two-hour morning disc jockey show on Manhattan's WNBC, Smith can look forward this year to a $350,000 income. The only change he plans for Howdy Doody is an increasing emphasis on plot: "Slapstick alone will not hold kids. You need some sort of a story line. And, within the confines of this show, we can do almost anything." Anything within limits, that is. "We must never offend," says -Smith earnestly. "Whatever we do on Howdy Doody must make us the ideal baby-sitters."

*Howdy's platform: two Christmases and one schoolday a year; more pictures in history books; double sodas for a dime; plenty of movies.

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