The Howdy Chronicles

There are those who would call it an American tragedy. Howdy Doody, TV's first superstar and an icon of childish innocence, is locked in a Rhode Island bank vault -- a scared, lonely little puppet, in the dark, far from his intended home.

In an agreement between NBC and the show's last puppeteer, Howdy was supposed to be given to the Detroit Institute of Arts, long credited with maintaining one of America's foremost puppet collections.

That plan broke down three years ago when the puppeteer's heirs waylaid everybody's favorite cowpoke and announced they'd sell him to the highest bidder. It's a turn of events that would unnerve any puppet with a heart. Indeed, walk through the DIA's blockbuster puppet show tomorrow, past Kermit the Frog or "Greta Garbo on Roller Skates," and you might just catch the whispered refrain falling from every pair of frozen lips:

Free Howdy.

The DIA, which had to fight for its very life earlier this decade, has applied the same grit -- backed by $300,000 in legal fees -- to securing what would be one of the biggest draws in its entire collection. Multiple lawsuits alleging breach of contract have been filed. Depositions litter the landscape.

It's a tale of innocence complicated by very adult drama -- a tangle of disputed maternity and alleged greed, a yarn populated by a kidnapped pal, a damsel in distress and what some Detroiters might describe as a rustler from back East. Long before Sesame Street, long even before Captain Kangaroo, there was Howdy Doody -- an icon of American innocence at television's dawn, who transfixed baby boomers through the 1950s on gee-whiz fun and useful lessons. When it came to stardom, even "Mr. Television" himself -- Milton Berle -- had to make way for Howdy.

And today? The fate of the little marionette in western duds rests with a federal judge in Hartford, Conn. The judge's decision could come any day or months from now.

In the hands of Bob

In the beginning, there was snow. The scene was New York's Rockefeller Center during the Blizzard of '47, when the lights first went up on Howdy Doody. For the first three episodes, Howdy was "too bashful" to come out, and delivered his lines from inside the desk of his human sidekick and creator, Buffalo Bob.

Every weekday at 5:30 p.m. sharp, Buffalo Bob, played by Robert Smith, would ask the tiny multitudes in the Peanut Gallery, "Say kids -- what time is it?" And back they'd shriek, pudgy cheeks straining, "It's Howdy Doody Time!"

Crisis struck Doodyville in the first months, when the original puppeteer stalked off with his puppet, a leering fellow thereafter known as "Ugly Howdy." Somebody knew a Hollywood dollmaker, and Velma Dawson walked into the picture, hired to make the new puppet posthaste -- $300, no residuals.

With her maternity rights in dispute today, Dawson, 86, makes a fetching damsel-in-distress -- a Palm Springs desert princess with liquid eyes that see poorly, a tan and platinum-blond hair. She is dressed on a 100-degree fall day in a Japanese-quilt jacket and looks, for all the world, like an exquisite doll in her coral-colored hacienda on the 18th tee at the Marrakesh Country Club.

Her toenails are coral, too.

"Howdy belongs to the people," says Dawson, who maintains, emphatically, that he should be at the DIA. Dawson's testimony could spell life or death for the DIA's case.

The Howdy Doody Show was running Howdy for president in 1948 -- ballots came with Wonder Bread loaves -- when Ugly Howdy vanished. West Bloomfielder Eddie Kean, who wrote all scripts and songs during the show's first nine years, told kids Howdy had decided he wasn't "pretty enough to be president, so had gone to Oregon -- don't ask me why -- for plastic surgery."

When the new Howdy arrived, nobody was quite sure what he'd look like. "We all stared" when the crate was opened, says Kean, who now plays piano at Dearborn's Ritz-Carlton. "It was a stupid-looking thing. And then we laughed and said, 'Well, maybe this will work.' "

Dawson's Howdy -- known as "Original Howdy" in legal papers -- made his first appearance with his face completely bandaged. With great fanfare, Buffalo Bob unwrapped the new puppet. Kids took to him immediately, and the campaign hurtled on. Producer E. Roger Muir ordered 20,000 "Howdy for President" buttons. With only 172,000 TVs in the entire United States, the show got a quarter-million requests.

The obsession with a show kids today might well dismiss as "dorky" can be difficult to understand. "It was the feeling of involvement," recalls William Harrison, 49, who works for Carlson Marketing Group in Troy. "That was the really big thing. The message was: This is your community."

Indeed, Howdy was a way of life, with an official club and product tie-ins like lunchboxes and a Clarabell-the-Clown (a show character) music box now selling for about $3,000 on the nostalgia market. And according to the New York Times, a write-in campaign put Howdy Doody third in the actual 1948 presidential election -- behind Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey but ahead of third-party candidate Henry Wallace.

"The show was huge," says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University television professor. "Howdy Doody is ground zero for the baby-boom generation. Before there was rock 'n' roll defining the lifestyles of baby boomers, there was Howdy Doody."

Because puppets are notoriously fragile, the show needed duplicates, leading to an entire gene pool of Howdys -- Original Howdy; Double Doody, used as an alternate (and now at the Smithsonian Institution); two Photo Doodys for personal appearances; and the Canadian Doodys from the Toronto version briefly hosted by Robert Goulet.

When the Mickey Mouse Club elbowed Howdy Doody off the air in 1960, all puppets, including Original Howdy, were stored at the Waterford, Conn., home and studio of Rufus and Margo Rose.

The Roses, hired by NBC in 1954, made several replicas. Distinguished members of the puppeteering fraternity, they won the 1958 Peabody Award for a non-Howdy TV special. Their adult children -- Rufus and James, both in their 60s, and Christopher, 53 -- are the ones now trying to sell Original Howdy.

After Howdy moved in with the Roses, a fire destroyed much of their studio; headlines blared that Howdy had met his maker, but Rufus Rose said he found Howdy unharmed. Still, some insiders, like puppeteer Rhoda Mann-Winkler, with the show from the beginning, have always maintained that Howdy perished in that puppet holocaust.

The DIA, whose puppet collection numbers more than 800, enters the picture in 1967. That's when Rufus Rose proposed to NBC that Original Howdy eventually be given to the museum on behalf of the network. NBC's lawyers agreed, asking only that they be notified "which of the puppets will be going into the Puppet Museum and which you will be dismembering."

Whether or not this agreement rises to the level of a contract lies at the heart of the current legal fight. For its part, NBC maintains that ownership passed to the DIA at the time of that correspondence.

"The unfortunate thing" about the legal mess, says producer Muir, who's working on a book called The Whole Truth -- So Help Me Howdy, "was that nothing was really properly handled, in terms of what and where."

In 1970, Rufus boxed up Original Howdy and loaned him to Buffalo Bob with the caveat that he eventually land at the DIA, concluding in his letter to Bob Smith: "I hand Howdy on to you with this mutual understanding and responsibility."

Smith, who'd spent the intervening years on the celebrity retread circuit -- he did a stint on Hollywood Squares in the late 1970s -- found himself desperate for cash after losing $750,000 in a Florida land scam. In 1993, he wrote all interested parties asking them to let him sell the marionette.

He got no takers. A letter from a DIA attorney on behalf of then-acting-director Maurice Parrish noted that waiving a gift would set a "harmful" precedent for a museum. And Christopher Rose reaffirmed his parents' intent to send Howdy to Detroit.

But a sea change occurred after producer Muir sold a Photo Doody for $113,000. In short order, Christopher Rose signed an agreement with Smith to auction Howdy and split the proceeds. (Smith died shortly thereafter.)

Rose and thorn Rose, who's been delegated by his brothers to speak for the family, now insists he doesn't have Velma Dawson's Howdy, which he claims was lost or rejiggered into another character on the show. In any event, his lawyer Mark Block argues, there were so many substitutions of body parts as puppets broke that trying to figure which is the Original Howdy is a little like searching for "the holy grail."

The DIA's lawyers -- headed in Detroit by Mark Stern -- maintain that ownership of Original Howdy was vested with the DIA at the time of Rufus Rose's agreement with NBC, and filed complaints alleging multiple counts of breach of contract.

"It's a very serious issue," says Stern. "It's important that potential donors in the future understand that the museum is willing to do what is necessary to make sure people's wishes are carried out upon their deaths."

Why covet Howdy at all?

DIA Curator of Film Larry Baranski argues Howdy's importance is historical, as the "pivot" between the old theatrical use of marionettes, now dying out, and the beginning of their "electronic exploitation" on TV and film. He points to Sesame Street, but also to Hollywood's use of "puppets without strings" in Star Wars -- Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Chicken Run.

For his part, Rose says in depositions that his mother, Margo, began to have doubts about the DIA's puppetry program, citing "disarray" at the museum in the wake of the early-'90s fiscal crisis when state funding was slashed.

In 1991, the DIA also abolished the Theater Arts Department, which managed the puppets. "(My mother) understood that the DIA had not maintained their puppet collection," Rose testified, "and it was not where (Howdy) would get the best showing."

But a revival began in 1995, when Baranski convinced the museum to let him bring back the puppetry program and mount a major exhibition. Steve Abrams, board president to the Puppeteers of America, applauds Baranski's stewardship, calling it "wonderful -- museum-quality," a renaissance he calls "very encouraging."

Rose and Smith signed and presented to Leland's Collectibles in New York a contract that claimed the puppet is the Original Howdy used on the show from "approximately May 1948 through September 30, 1960." Dawson's Howdy arrived on the set sometime around May 1948. Rose now calls the contract's language "inaccurate" and blames Smith for insisting on the wording.

Rose lives in Stonington, Conn., a seaside town of many Mercedes. An administrator at a tiny arts college, he is 53 -- just Howdy's age. He's got a craggy face framed by black hair and and a graying beard. His house, smack-dab in the town center, is a three-story, gingerbread Victorian in need of a fresh coat of paint.

According to friend Regan Morse, Rose served briefly in the mid-'80s as a town burgess, keeps the the town clock running and often works on local theater productions. "He's a very nice guy," says Morse, who takes issue with newspaper charges that the Rose kids are greedy. "That's a mean thing to say about anybody," she says, and frowns.

Rose says he can't comment on any aspect of the legal case but recalls that his parents had to buy their first TV in order to watch their own show. His family's connection with the biggest kid-cult of the 1950s, however, didn't make him an elementary-school celebrity. "It never came up," he says, picking at his cuticles. "It wasn't discussed. It wasn't an item."

Rose is silent when asked if he liked Howdy himself but finally says he enjoyed the gifts he got when he sat in the Peanut Gallery with the other kids. "You'd line up at the end of the show," he says, "and the pages would give you a bag with Hostess Twinkies, maybe a coloring book and several party favors."

That's all he has to say about Howdy.

Free Howdy

Velma Dawson, on the other hand, has much to say. "Howdy's made me famous," she says, sitting in her light-filled home office, reading glasses dangling from her right hand. "I should be fond of him. I'll never have fame other than Howdy."

Still, being Howdy's mom has been "a dreadful association," she says. "For years, everyone else -- the Roses -- took credit for Howdy, and here I sit with no accolades at all."

So getting Howdy to Detroit has become her mission. The DIA flew her -- first class -- to New York City last December to examine Howdy in the hopes that she could identify his head as the one she made. If Judge Christopher Droney rules in the museum's favor, he vindicates Dawson as well -- trumpeting her undisputed maternity before a national audience and shining a powerful spotlight on this desert rose.

But the actual Howdy examination left Dawson distressed. The way she and another witness describe it, the conference room at the Rose attorney's office in Norwich, Conn., was crowded with members of his firm, who chattered and guffawed throughout. One fellow kept making snide remarks about Detroit.

"They're all looking at me as if I'm a villain of some sort," Dawson recalls. "It was awfully embarrassing. I should've said, 'Look -- I'd like you all to leave the room.' They were really rather mean about it."

She left the meeting unable to say whether or not the puppet's head was hers. She'd looked at the spring system inside, she says, as well as the sanding on the plastic wood. But after numerous repaintings and repairs, nothing looked quite right. A court reporter allegedly overheard her mutter, "This doesn't look like mine," but Dawson emphatically denies saying any such thing. More puzzling, Dawson discovered the words "Made by Scott Brinker" -- an NBC puppet maker and prop man -- inside the puppet's head.

Complicating the situation is Dawson's decaying eyesight. She acknowledges she suffers from macular degeneration but insists she\ was able to see into the little trap door on the back of Howdy's head just fine. (The DIA arranged for extra-bright lights and an illuminated magnifying glass.)

Buffalo Bob's road manager after the show closed, Burt Dubrow, insists Brinker told him he put his name in when he repaired Howdy's head in the late 1970s for a Hollywood Squares appearance.

Reached at a New Jersey nursing home, Brinker, 89, says he never put his name in a puppet that wasn't his. He also says Rufus and Margo Rose never claimed authorship in his presence, "but they were a little loose with Howdy's creation," he says, "because it came easily. They didn't care if you thought they'd done it. It was kind of tough, to be honest, because the glory was great."

Indeed, the New York Times hailed Rufus as "the creator of Howdy Doody" in his 1975 obituary. Beloved myths die hard. Walk around the Roses' hometown, and it's hard to find anybody who doesn't think the Roses created him. At the Waterford Public Library, circulation chief Jean Sugrue recalls the Roses' annual Christmas performances years ago in their basement theater, where Original Howdy was always the star.

"It was," she says, savoring the memory, "just thrilling." But the news that someone other than the Roses gave birth to Howdy comes as a complete shock to her and Waterford High School principal Dan Macrino, just returning a book for his daughter.

"I thought Rufus did create Howdy Doody," Macrino says, a little taken aback. "Absolutely," Sugrue is nodding. "I did, too."

"Mrs. Rose brought the original out for my kids when they were young," Macrino recalls. "But the paper trail you just related -- well, I never read that. I was always under the impression that he belonged to the Roses. But if that's the trail, well," he says, running a hand through his graying hair, "then he should be in the museum, I guess."

Now, that's a principal a puppet could love.

Michael H. Hodges has been a feature writer at The Detroit News since 1991. Before that he was a feature writer for the New York Post. He started his writing career at The Daily Journal, in Caracas, Venezuela, and now lives in Ann Arbor with his cranky cat, Bob.