Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, Dies at 76

Bob Keeshan, who entertained generations of children as Captain Kangaroo, died of a long illness on Jan. 23. He was 76.

Keeshan first donned his red coat with large pockets in 1955, when Captain Kangaroo premiered on CBS. The series ran for 30 years before moving to public television for six more, winning six Emmy Awards and three Peabody Awards.

The following excerpts are from an interview with Keeshan conducted by Karen L. Herman on Oct. 19, 1999 for the Archive of American Television:
"I had a very imaginative childhood, which is very nice. I often tell parents how important it is to release children, to allow them to have a nice, happy and unobstructed childhood and give vent to their imagination. I would take my mother’s box where she kept buttons to sew on shirts and I would play in the sand and make them ships at sea or Hannibal moving across the Alps. At seven or eight years of age, I could bring my imagination to buttons, to clothespins put together, to be an airplane.... Imagination is very important."

"Howdy Doody was about to go on the air in December of 1947 and Buffalo Bob Smith couldn’t get people to work with him. The radio actors wanted no part of television because nobody paid any money. There were no advertisers. In desperation, he turned to me, the NBC page, and said, 'Would you like to help with this?' I joined the program looking exactly like myself, a young kid in a sport jacket. I would bring prizes to the children who won a contest and make sure the props were there when we needed them. After the show, Bob would tip me five dollars out of his pocket. ...A couple of months after that, the producer and writer decided Buffalo Bob Smith is a character and this is a make-believe place...and here we have this kid in a sport jacket. So they called down to costuming and found some surplus canvas and they made a clown suit out of it. Dick Smith, who went on to become one of the greatest makeup artists, designed the makeup, and a character was born -- Clarabell the clown."
"We had agreed that Clarabell's makeup was right. A great big smile painted on my face. It was a classic clown kind of makeup, and great big eyebrows, heavily accentuated. He was a pantomime character, he said nothing. I’ve made up for it since then....I had gone to the library and researched classic clowns and they were all pantomime. They gave me a horn and it was attached to my belt that I honked and of course the thing that Clarabell did more than anything was carry a seltzer bottle and squirt Buffalo Bob Smith and other characters at the appropriate time and it was much fun. The children loved it and the show became quite a success."
"One of my jobs, even though I was doing the Clarabell character, was to write cue cards. I didn’t mind writing cue cards, it’s one of those details that make television and everybody should be able to do it. Eventually, when I was doing Captain Kangaroo, and I was the principle character and the executive producer I wouldn’t think anything of picking up a pen and writing some cue cards. And people would say, 'My goodness the executive producer’s doing cue cards! What's the difference? You do everything you need to do to get a program produced properly."
"When I actually started Captain Kangaroo, I was 28. It took a lot of work to make me look 70 years of age."