How Howdy Doody Changed Your Life

Almost 60 years ago today, a record snowfall hit New York City and the Northeast. Leaving 25 inches of snow on the streets, the blizzard caused movie theaters and Broadway shows to close. As a result, on December 27, 1947, almost every television set in the region was turned on when The Howdy Doody Show made its debut.

The show—originally billed as Puppet Playhouse—was supposed to be a one-time holiday special to entertain children on Christmas vacation. It starred Bob Smith, a local radio personality who hosted a kids’ radio quiz show called Triple B Ranch. No Howdy Doody puppet existed, so Smith pretended that Howdy, a character from his radio show, was hiding in a drawer, too shy to come out. The program was essentially a vaudeville act for kids, with songs, puppets, and jokes. No one expected it to have an impact, or even to make another appearance.

Instead it went on to be a smash hit, staying on the air until 1960. It was a pioneer in the television business, single-handedly inventing the notion of children’s programming. Howdy Doody introduced future television staples such as product placement and merchandising tie-ins and became the first show to be regularly broadcast in color and the first to use a split-screen cross-country broadcast. It also made itself an important part of pop culture, introducing the word cowabunga to the national vocabulary, and creating television favorites like Clarabelle and Chief Thunderthud. By the time it went off the air, an entire generation of children had grown up with Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick.

But in 1947 television was still a luxury, though that was about to change. Many bars had a television set—as bar owners found that the new technology improved business—but TV was not yet a household staple. Sets were mainly owned by upper-middle-class families, and the medium still lagged behind radio as the primary form of entertainment. At the end of 1946 there were some 40 million radios in the country—and only 44,000 TVs. And just 15,000 sets could receive NBC; the network was available in only four cities in 1947: New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Schenectady. Thanks to the blizzard, though, kids gathered at any home with a TV on Howdy’s debut night, so the show ended up being watched by many more people than there were sets.

At the time, television stations played a test pattern during the day, having no daytime programming to air. (With the success of Howdy Doody, NBC put Howdy’s face in the middle of the color test pattern in 1954.) TV was mainly a prime-time affair. But the decision to put on the show at 5:30 meant that Howdy could keep children occupied as their mothers made dinner, changing the way families and networks alike viewed television. This was a mission that Buffalo Bob took seriously. As he told Time magazine in 1950, “We must never offend. Whatever we do on Howdy Doody must make us the ideal baby-sitters.” As the number of TVs sold rapidly increased, more and more children watched Howdy Doody every weekday.

Already there were critics decrying TV’s influence on children. Many mothers complained when Flubadub, an imaginary animal on the program, was shown eating his favorite food, flowers. Children all over the country started eating flowers; the show’s writers quickly changed Flubadub’s preferred meal to spaghetti and meatballs.

The impact of The Howdy Doody Show was discovered early in the show’s run during the puppet’s presidential campaign. To take advantage of the election happening in 1948, the show decided that Howdy would run for President against the real candidates, Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, Strom Thurmond, and Henry Wallace. (Howdy’s platform included campaigning for two Christmases and one school day a year, as well as more pictures in history books.) An NBC producer, Roger Muir, wanted to know just how many children were watching. Noticing the many letters that viewers sent in about Howdy’s campaign, he came up with the idea of giving away a free button to any child who wrote in. NBC ordered 10,000 buttons and assumed that there would be plenty extra. In just a few weeks, the network received 60,000 letters, a number equivalent to a third of all the working TVs in the country at the time. (TV prices had been dropping, making sets more affordable.) Within days, NBC had lined up sponsors for years into the future.

Eventually Howdy Doody became less popular, as other stations began offering competing programs. The biggest rival was Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club, which debuted at five o’clock on ABC in 1955. Cast changes hurt the show as well, as a number of the original characters quit or were fired over contract disagreements and personality conflicts. And the show’s original loyal viewers simply grew up.

Howdy Doody also brought earlier entertainment to television, creating in that way a legacy that continues today. It introduced a generation of children to silent Warner Bros. films with its “Old Time Movie” segments, playing shorts featuring 1920s stars such as Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton, and it continued the long tradition of slapstick humor and puppet mayhem that stretched back to Punch and Judy. Alumni from the program went on to appear on other shows and become television stars in their own right, among them Bob Keeshan, the original Clarabelle, who became a rival of Howdy Doody as Captain Kangaroo on CBS, and Gumby, the green clay character, who got his start on Howdy Doody. Innovations pioneered on the show endure in today’s children’s programming, including merchandising tie-ins and the use of educational songs to teach everything from dental health to proper eating habits. And “cowabunga” has been embraced as a catchword by generations of characters, including the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, Michelangelo on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Bart Simpson on The Simpsons.

Howdy Doody started as an experiment, just as did television itself. Thirteen years later, the show and the technology were no longer fads; they were part of the nation’s cultural fabric.

—Claire Lui is an editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine.