7 Local TV Hosts Ohio Kids Grew Up Watching
If you grew up in Dayton, you may have been one of the kids packed into the WHIO-TV studio for Uncle Orrie’s show.
Every Ohio city seemed to have its own after-school host, and you probably still remember yours.
Here are the local TV hosts Ohio kids grew up watching.
1. Captain Penny
Dressed as a railroad engineer, Captain Penny entertained Cleveland children on WEWS from 1955 to 1971.
The show featured cartoons, Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts, and live features.
Depending on the year, you could catch it in the morning, at noon or in the late afternoon.
Ron Penfound, an Elyria native, played the captain.
Penfound joined WEWS as a sports announcer in 1953.
At one point, he played Captain Penny two or three times a day.
If you watched WEWS on weekends after 1971, you saw him as the weatherman.
2. Barnaby
Barnaby showed Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons from a park bench.
Linn Sheldon played Barnaby in a blue blazer, an ascot and a straw skimmer.
The show debuted on KYW-TV in 1956.
Sheldon had played Uncle Leslie before he became Barnaby.
Barnaby also talked to Longjohn, an invisible parrot.
A 1964 parade of invisible pets reportedly drew 8,000 people downtown.
Nobody could see a thing.
If you kept watching Barnaby, you found him on the new UHF station WKBF in 1968 and on WUAB the next year.
The last Barnaby show aired in 1990.
Why Few Old Kids’ Shows Survive
If you go looking for clips of Cleveland’s old kids’ shows, you’ll find few surviving recordings.
A big reason was cost: Videotape was expensive in the 1960s and 1970s.
If you want more, the book From Captain Penny to Superhost covers Cleveland children’s television from the 1950s through the 1970s.
3. Uncle Orrie
Uncle Orrie’s show packed 50 to 60 school kids into the WHIO-TV studios on Wilmington Pike each weekday at 4 p.m.
The show debuted on WHIO-TV in 1955 and ran 13 years, the Dayton Daily News reports.
Joe Rockhold, the man behind the wire-rimmed glasses, first developed the character for radio.
The show aired live, mixing cartoons, games and studio banter.
Jack Jacobson played Nosey the Clown.
Ken Hardin portrayed Ferdie Fussbudget, who wore a striped jacket, oversized dark glasses and a bowler hat.
The show often paired slapstick comedy with a safety tip.
Hardin said in 1985 that the cast played a game with kids from the audience and gave away prizes.
If you were in that audience, you left with a goody bag of penny candy, according to videographer Chuck Hamlin.
After Uncle Orrie was canceled, the short-lived Ken and Don Show took its place, running from 1968 through 1970.
4. Uncle Al
About 14,000 episodes of the Uncle Al Show aired on WCPO in Cincinnati between 1950 and 1985.
Al Lewis played a soda jerk named Uncle Al in a segment called “Al’s Corner Drugstore.”
Taking phone-in requests, he performed songs on his squeezebox.
If you were a kid standing in the studio doorway, you were reportedly invited onto the air.
Kids sat on the soundstage while parents sat in fold-out bleachers.
Lewis, a former nightclub performer, built the sets and wrote all the stories.
His wife, Wanda Lewis, played Captain Windy in a short skirt, blouse and matching shiny cape.
Larry Smith joined the show in 1957 and brought puppets such as Teaser the Mouse and Hattie the Witch.
ABC aired the show nationally for a year, from 1958 to 1959.
Rebranded as Uncle Al Town, the show came to an end in 1985.
Psst! How much do you know about Ohio television history? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Ohio Airwaves IQ
Answer ten questions on Ohio television and radio history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Ernie Anderson hosted a Friday night horror movie show in Cleveland as Ghoulardi. Which network’s voice did he later become?
5. Flippo the Clown
Flippo the Clown was the invention of William Turner, an art director at WBNS in Columbus.
Under the costume was Marvin Fishman, better known as Bob Marvin.
According to 10TV, WBNS-TV discovered him in the early 1950s and asked him to audition for a children's program.
He kept performing for more than 25 years.
Flippo introduced cartoons on an afternoon show.
Archive clips from the station show him leading kids to city hall in 1970 to ask Mayor Jack Sensenbrenner for a donation.
If you went to Westland Mall in 1971, you could have seen him introduce Santa.
6. Skipper Ryle
Glenn Ryle, known as Skipper Ryle, played a riverboat pilot on WKRC in Cincinnati.
The Skipper Ryle Show began in the mid-1950s and ran for 17 years.
If you grew up near Cincinnati in the 1960s, you could watch Skipper Ryle on WKRC and Uncle Al on WCPO.
Jonny Quest cartoons aired during the Skipper Ryle Show.
Ryle also hosted Bowling for Dollars and afternoon movies before doing the morning weather reports.
7. Woodrow the Woodsman
Cleveland Magazine lists the shows of Woodrow the Woodsman as starting in 1961.
Clay Conroy played the woodsman, a Cleveland host whose popularity rivaled Barnaby's.
If you watched Barnaby, you may have met Woodrow there first.
Before he took on the woodsman's role, Conroy was a talented swimmer who performed in water shows.
Then came the encore.
Fox 8 brought Woodrow back in 1997.
The revival ran for three years.
The Decline of Kids' Shows
The golden age of Cleveland's local TV hosts ended in the 1970s, a victim of economics, Ideastream reports.
Children's programming went to the networks.
WOSU adds the economics of running syndicated shows versus creating new programs.
If you watched Barnaby late in his run, you caught a host who outlasted that golden age.
There were some brief revivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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