Buffalo Bob Smith life and biography

Buffalo Bob Smith born Robert Emil Schmidt on November 27, 1917 in Buffalo, New York, United States - died July 30, 1998 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, United States was an American radio and television personality who was among the first stars of children's television as host and master of ceremonies of The Howdy Doody Show, which aired on NBC from 1947 to 1960.

Sidelights

Little in the family background of Smith, born Robert Emil Schmidt, might have predicted his career in children's television. Emil Henry Schmidt, an Illinois coal miner, was persuaded by his wife, Emma Kuehn, to take up carpentry following his narrow escape from a cave-in. The couple followed a job opportunity to Buffalo, New York, where they started a family. This, rather than a youth spent on the western prairies, is the origin of Smith's television stage name. The boy showed musical talent, and his mother saw to it that he received private lessons in piano, guitar, and voice. While attending public high school during the Great Depression, he formed a singing trio, the Hi-Hatters, which included the future comedian Foster Brooks. The group performed at dances and social functions and made live appearances on Buffalo radio stations.

A personal break came for Smith in 1934, when the singer Kate Smith (no relation), who was playing a Buffalo vaudeville theater, asked him to substitute for her regular piano player and master of ceremonies. Impressed by his performance, she invited him to New York City to perform on her nationally broadcast NBC radio program. Billing himself as "Smith" rather than "Schmidt," he returned to his hometown as something of a prodigal son and embarked on a career as a radio personality in upstate New York. He married Mildred Caroline Metz on 21 November 1940; the couple had three sons.

In 1947 WEAF, the flagship station of the NBC radio network, summoned Smith to New York City to become host of its morning wake-up show. Not used to being in the media spotlight of the nation's largest market, Smith became involved in a bit of mischief that under other circumstances could have cost him his career. In 1949, more than a decade after the "War of the Worlds" incident, during which the actor Orson Welles frightened listeners with a realistic-sounding radio broadcast reporting a Martian invasion of New Jersey, Smith announced in the tones of a newswire story that a space ship had landed in rural Virginia and that an army of tiny aliens was disembarking from it. Although the station received a stern warning from the Federal Communications Commission, Smith's ratings protected him from being sacked.

His first foray into children's entertainment also came at WEAF. In addition to his full-time weekday duties, he was made host of Triple B Ranch, a Saturday morning radio quiz show. School-age contestants on the show were asked questions by various fantasy characters created by Smith and his writers. One of them, a hayseed named Elmer, who sounded like Edgar Bergen's famous radio dummy Mortimer Snerd, greeted the audience by saying, "Howdy doody, everybody." Elmer was the prototype for the marionette that would bring Smith stardom. The Howdy Doody Show was born in 1947 in the midst of Bob Smith's breakneck radio schedule. As if his daily and weekly programs were not enough, NBC assigned Smith to host an afternoon children's show, Puppet Playhouse, on its recently launched New York City television station. The show did so well that NBC upgraded it to a network broadcast the following season, renaming the series for its most popular character.

Dressed in the fringed leather outfit of a frontier hunter, Buffalo Bob Smith was as familiar a figure to early television viewers as the comedians Milton Berle and Lucille Ball. He opened more than 2,300 live afternoon telecasts with the famous question "Hey, kids! What time is it?" "It's Howdy Doody time!" shot back an onstage bleacher section of children, known as the Peanut Gallery. At the peak of its popularity the show's daily audience was more than 15 million viewers.

The deepness of Howdy Doody's penetration into the psyche of America's children provides an etiologic example of television at its most effective. Bob Smith, renamed Buffalo Bob by the writer Edward Kean, became an interlocutor between the everyday world of demanding adults and a place where "kid think" ruled. With his big ears and forty-eight freckles ("That's one for each state, kids!"), Howdy, though a nerd and even a "sissy" according to Kean, just wanted to have fun. The Native American characters, who lived on a reservation in the green world just outside Doodyville, had no problem with that. Laconic Chief Thunderthud had little to say besides "Kowabunga!" (Bart Simpson, or his writers, no doubt borrowed the phrase from Chief Thunderthud.) Princess Summerfall Winterspring began the series as a puppet but reappeared, Pygmalion-like, in 1953 as a fully fleshed woman. According to the New York Times, "Buffalo Bob wanted something beautiful and life-sized for girls to identify with."

Doodyville itself was run by the evil (though strictly nonviolent) Mayor Phineas T. Bluster. He presided with the assistance of his two brothers, Don Jose, a hot-blooded Latin, and Hector Hamhock, a cold-blooded Anglo. The corrupt civic officials, for all their bluster, were no real threat to either Buffalo Bob or Howdy. Conflict, when there was any, more often came from the seltzer bottle of Clarabell, a humanoid clown who spritzed Bob at will and then hid behind his back as the kids in the Peanut Gallery went bananas trying to clue Bob in on what was happening. "He's right behind you, you idiot," at least one child could not help but yell. Among other highlights were the antics of Flub-a-Dub, a mutant wild animal who ate only meatballs. There were also sessions at the Super Talkascope, where Buffalo Bob and Howdy could look at anything that was happening anywhere in the world at any time, and sing-a-longs featuring such songs as "Iggly Wiggly Spaghetti" and "Ooga Booga Rocka Shmooga." Giddiness was Howdy Doody's gift to children at the end of the rigors of the school day.

In 1954 Buffalo Bob suffered a heart attack. While he was still in the hospital, NBC constructed a studio in the basement of his home in suburban Westchester County, New York, so that the show could continue. Live remote broadcasts allowed viewers to follow Bob on a "secret mission" while Howdy and the gang held forth at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Smith returned to full-time work in less than a year and forged ahead for six more seasons. By the time of the show's cancellation at the end of the 1959-1960 season, the show had become a national institution, with the product tie-ins to prove it. Satisfied to have made "a pile of money," Smith told the press that he had enjoyed "a good run" and had no regrets. He moved back to Buffalo, once again a local hero, and bought three radio stations in Maine and a liquor store in Florida, his favorite spots, respectively, for summer and winter vacations.

Smith remained frozen in time as Buffalo Bob for the rest of his show business career. He first realized that he had become a kind of totem for a generation in 1970, when he received an unexpected invitation from a University of Pennsylvania student organization. Appearing in public in his Buffalo Bob outfit for the first time in ten years, he sold out the Ivy League gathering. Over the next five years Smith rode a powerful wave of pop culture nostalgia. Referring to his fans as "alumni," he conducted a national Howdy Doody revival tour of college campuses, followed by some fifty shows for the United Service Organizations (USO), playing to American troops in Germany. The theory that recreational drug use among the Doodyphiles had a role in Howdy Doody chic is supported by some of Buffalo Bob's bookings. At New York's Fillmore East, he brought down the house with a medley of period commercial jingles from such sponsors as Colgate toothpaste, Sealtest ice cream, and Texaco gasoline. In 1975 Buffalo Bob made it to prime time when he appeared on an episode of the top-rated sitcom Happy Days, which was set in the 1950s.

The limits of wistfulness were reached soon after. In 1976 the graying Smith returned to daily television as host of The New Howdy Doody Show. The syndicated program, however, was cancelled in a matter of months. Some industry analysts believed that local programmers had inadvertently sabotaged the show by placing it on their afternoon children's schedules. Kids had become more interested in animated superheroes. A better strategy might have been to place the show in a time slot that did not conflict with baby-boomer work schedules. Buffalo Bob had a last hurrah in 1987 when he hosted a two-hour TV tribute on Howdy's fortieth birthday. In 1991, hoping to expand his golf season, Smith left his beloved Buffalo for Flat Rock, North Carolina. He died in Hendersonville, North Carolina, of cancer.

Read more