“It’s Howdy Doody Time
It isn’t worth a dime.
It smells like turpentine
It’s Howdy Doody Time”
At least that’s one of the kinder versions we sang along with the theme song that led a freckled puppet onto our TV screen going on 70 years ago.
The 1950s television show starring and named for that obnoxious marionette Howdy Doody and his “handler” Buffalo Bob” (Not to be confused with Buffalo Bill, who murdered and skinned his quarry in “The Silence of The Lambs”) was blasted out of my subconsciousness when I finished my long ramble through the Memory Care Ward to see my pal, Jerry. He’s almost always in his room, physically. But sometimes his “upstairs” is unoccupied.
Jerry Manley, my longest-tenured newspaper pal, was sound asleep when I slipped from the 103-degree day outside and into the nursing home at the edge of one of Nashville’s most-exclusive suburbs.
I, for the third week in a row, was no longer sticking my
contraband foodstuffs (and drinkstuffs) into my pants when I smuggled them into
the pretty secure joint. I know Jerry, the recipient of this stuff, is not
allowed to eat or drink wares from the outside, because of his restricted diet.
Folks in his ward are only to eat what
the blood tests and doctors allow. From the first day I visited him, many
months ago, he has requested junk food.
I’ve been sneaking this stuff, at least once a week, into
the home since early December 2023. But I’ve tired of the shock felt when I
stick a frosty bottle of Diet SunDrop in my shorts. So now I keep it and two
packs of Ritz sandwich crackers in the plastic sack I carry in my cane hand.
Jerry requested both packs be peanut butter crackers, but they just had one of
those in stock in my pal Quincy’s Shell station on this day. So, I bought one other pack that is cheese-filled.
Quincy, manager of this station for decades, knows my normal
“purchase’’ and who it’s for. That’s why he started stocking the Diet SunDrop
for me a few months ago. He promises me he’ll have the peanut butter crackers
restocked by the time I return to top off my tank and get supplies for my
friend, who lives in a situation that Quincy tells me “is worse than prison.” A guy can escape or even be released from
prison. There is neither escape nor
parole for those spending the remainder of their mortal lives in the Memory
Care Ward. Folks like Jerry.
A cluster of women – one of them speaking with a Manchester,
England, accent (just guessing. I know it was neither Cockney nor Scouse, and
those are the only ones I recognize, really) scarcely decipherable by my
Midwest-bred ears – were deciding between ice water and lemonade when they sat
out on the portico talking about fish-and-finger pies. Perhaps, as some say, old people don’t feel
the heat. Well, I’m kinda old, and the heat was sucking my soul out of me and
frying it on the sidewalk. It occurs to me these women who are not yet
qualified for Memory Care but who get all chipper in this heat obviously are
crazy.
Nah, I shook my head at that summation. If they were crazy,
they’d be shackled to the wall, naked, caked in excrement, a tin cup for water,
begging for dried bread crusts, in the Memory Care Ward, like Jerry.
Joking again. The Ward is no dungeon from “Silence of the
Lambs” or even “Camelot” or “Peanuts” or "The Andy Griffith Show." This actually is a really nice nursing
home, if such exists. Even Jerry said
that when we were talking about what likely is his final frontier. “I really like it here. Pretty good place.
Clean. Bright. But it gets lonely, cause all I do is sit and watch TV.”
We compared it to the nursing home in Lewisburg, Tennessee,
where he’d lived for a few months. It
was really dark, depressing even for a semi-sane visitor. They kicked Jerry out
because he refused to shower. “Showers
hurt,” he explains. “And they are too cold.” The nurses down at that home used
to call me in my Nashville basement to encourage me to encourage Jerry to
bathe. “If he doesn’t this week, then they’ll throw him out.”
They did just that, and Jerry was sent back to his house,
where his nephew, who lives in Jerry’s house, found him alone, raped and freezin’,
alone, cold and sneezin’ – sorry, even Alice Cooper has lyrics planted in my
brain. In any case, Jerry was discovered passed out on the floor of his living
room last November. The family scooped him up, wiped him down and then dropped
him off here. He remembers none of that. Nor does he remember prior nursing
homes and rehab facilities where they unsuccessfully tried to bathe him.
He does reach the weekly shower requirement here, but it
takes a lot of work by the nursing staff. They turn his room thermostat up to
86 or so, and when it reaches that level, they hogtie him on the shower handles and
sit on him, swatting his butt like he’s a horse they are riding, while rubbing
him down with Mister Clean. That’s not even a fraction of the truth, but it’s a
helluva image. He does hate showers though, and they do crank up the heat in
his room before they strip him down for the pressure wash.
For the last months, contractors and corporate hacks have
been spiffing the nursing home up. Walls have been painted, new carpet is being
installed, new and larger TVs are in each room. And a higher-grade of
furniture, in general, has been put in the rooms and the hallways. Jerry hasn’t noticed the changes. I’m sure his
medical insurance will notice.
A lone woman is putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a table
in the “normal old people” part of the home when I pass by en route to the
double-locked and guarded entrance into the Memory Care Ward.
I am allowed through the door by a dietician, whose name I
don’t know. I look around to see that my favorite staffer, T’Alijah, is not around. I like her as a human, but she must be on vacation.
In fact, there must be a lot of folks on vacation, as I don’t see any helpers
I’ve gotten to know in the seven months I’ve been coming here, at least once a
week, to visit Jerry. I’ve been told I
am a very rare visitor on this side of the locked doors. My visits cheer the staff as well as the inmates. I really like these people.
Milford/Bob, Jerry’s horse-riding and breeding roommate, is
walking up and down the hall, looking for, I think, his room, when I get near
the 15-by-15 cubicle he and Jerry call “home.” Wasn’t it Dorothy who said
“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home?” It doesn’t take a
constipated wizard to know that this room really is no place like home. It’s a
place to spend your dying days, semi-incognito. Don’t bother clicking the heels
of your red slippers, you’d probably trip.
“It’s in here, Bob,” I say to the horseman who has that name
embroidered into his sweatpants. He just
looks at me, so I go into the room and see Jerry, sound asleep, in his
recliner.
The TV is blasting “Pawn Stars” when I sit in Bob’s recliner
– each resident has a bed, dresser and recliner, and Jerry’s asleep in
his. I loudly say Jerry’s name two or
three times and he doesn’t stir. I have
two thoughts: He’s sleeping really soundly, or he’s dead. It’s really difficult
to tell.
I’d prefer he wasn’t dead – “not dead, yet,” as the Python
dialogue goes -- so I push him with both hands, shaking him conscious. I give him another damn good whacking with the
cane my brother, Eric, made for me before he died recently. “I Don’t Work To Be
Ordinary,” a Paul McCartney quote, was etched into it before he gave the stick
the final, waterproof sheen. My brother
knew I love The Beatles as much as an evangelist preacher loves money, and he
also was proud of and amazed by the unconventional and stubborn way I’ve lived
my professional and personal life. I
wouldn’t recommend you try it, though, as friends, probably correct in their fears my
“success” might rub off on them, are hard to find. Yes, I'm lonely, but I know
where at least one true friend can be found, even if he sometimes doesn't realize he's there.
I have found friendship in the Memory Care Ward, both among
the patients – even the woman who addresses everyone as “knucklehead” and poor,
old Bob, who lives with Jerry but has no idea where that is.
“Hey man, what’s going on?” Jerry asks me, as he props open
his eyes.
I tell him I love him and that basically this is the day
dedicated to visiting him in the nursing home, and he nods.
“I don’t know why you come,” he says. “I can’t remember
anything to say. I can’t even remember if I ate breakfast today. You have to do all the talking. I wouldn’t
bother coming here if I was you.”
“Well, I’m me,” I answer. “And I like to see you, even
though you can’t even remember your last shit.”
He laughs at that, and agrees that he really might take one
soon. “My stomach kind of hurts from all the bacon and eggs and toast I had for
breakfast,” he says, suddenly comprehending and quickly forgetting that he has,
indeed, eaten this morning.
“I’m sitting here thinking about using the bathroom. Need
to, but I’m really hungry. I wonder when they have lunch? I don’t think I ate
anything today. Missed breakfast, maybe.”
I look at the time on my phone and tell him it’s just after
11 a.m. and lunch is served at noon.
“Good, cause I’m really hungry,” he says, as he begins to
shove the crackers I’ve brought down his throat. I open the bottle of Diet
SunDrop – his favorite beverage – and hand it to him. He takes a greedy gulp, then uses the rest to wash down the crackers.
“I hope we have lunch soon, because I’m really, really
hungry,” he says, again, between bites of crackers and swish-around-the-mouth
savoring of the pint of citrus beverage.
He looks up at the TV, where “Pawn Stars” grifters are
taking a look at things to buy from down-and-out Vegas gamblers who lose everything
but their boxers in the casinos and then try to sell junk found in their car
trunks to pay for a head-vacuuming visit to the Mustang Ranch.
Well, that’s over-simplifying the premise of the History
Channel show. People come from all over to bring high-class junk to the guys on
“Pawn Stars.”
The first guy I see is selling a Civil War rifle used in Texas. The Pawn Star sets it aside to check on its
worth.
Then comes that damned puppet. I only wish it was Chucky.
I look up at the screen to see a guy holding up a
marionette’s face and arms. The rest of the red-headed puppet is missing,
likely the result of a custody dispute or a bad blackjack hand or rats.
The dismembered body’s face looks familiar, and considering
how it has been ravaged and savaged, I ponder that maybe Buffalo Bob was more
like “Silence’s” Buffalo Bill, after all.
“Hey, Jerry, that’s Howdy Doody,” I say, almost cheerfully.
I remember religiously watching the puppet’s great Saturday morning show when I
was a kid. I was lying belly-down, on the floor of my house at 1812 Beverly
Road in Sylvan Lake, Michigan. My brother, Eric, was up on the couch.
He’s dead now, something that still makes no sense to me and
that keeps me from getting a full night’s sleep. But 65-70 years ago, he was
not dead yet (that happened just a couple of months ago).
He was a typical big brother, in that I had to watch “Howdy
Doody” from the floor, while he relaxed on the sofa, staring straight at the
old black-and-white Philco.
By today’s standards, the show was pretty simple. Then again, so were “The Lone Ranger,” “Sky King,” “Buffalo Bill Junior” and “Roy Rogers.” The most complex Saturday morning show was “Mighty Mouse,” mainly because it was about a rodent with superpowers. “Here I am to save the day,” he’d chirp. And the answer from some sort of rodent chorus was “That means that Mighty Mouse is on his way.” Or was it “on the way?” Debate rages among Paris intellectuals.
And I don’t want to lump “The Lone Ranger” in completely
with this elementary school TV mindlessness, because I loved the guy. “Mr. Lone
Ranger,” as I used to call him whenever we got together, was a close friend of
mine when he got old and I was moving in that direction. Forty years or so ago,
I met The Lone Ranger at a gathering in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
He immediately took a liking to me and my comrades on that
wintry day. Rob “Death” Dollar and Scott “Badger” Shelton, two of my News
Brothers cronies, were with me, “Flapjacks,” on that day. So was Eric, who had stayed with me in my
Clarksville, Tennessee, apartment the night before, so he could meet Clayton
Moore as well. Eric took the picture of
me and the guys with Mr. Lone Ranger.
I think it was Badger who shot Eric’s picture with Mr. Lone Ranger. But I don’t have it. I wish I did.
We talked with Mr. Lone Ranger, who mounted Silver, while we
watched, in shock.
“From out of the blue of the Western Sky comes Sky King,”
the intro to that show about the pilot and his niece Penny, played, slightly, in
my head while I recalled the Saturday morning TV squabbles I had with my
brother. I loved him like a brother when he died, but he was a bully to my
pacifist ruse when we were kids.
Back to “Howdy Doody,” though. My parents liked my brother more than they
liked me (He was the older child and was generally much nicer than I.) So, it
was Eric who got the Howdy Doody marionette at Christmas. He kept it stashed
away in the toybox my dad made him, that’s emblazoned with “Ricky.” There never was a toy box emblazoned “Timmy.”
My brother’s grandsons now have the
large, red “Ricky Box.” I never had a
toy box, so my grandchildren have to make due without. They won't know otherwise, of course.
When I saw the freckled puppet on “Pawn Stars,” the first
thing I did was think of my brother and how much I miss him. Even if, when we
were kids, he made me lie on the floor to watch TV and he got Howdy Doody and
the toy box.
Since that show was made back in the 1950s, and was among
the first programs telecast from Rockefeller Center, most of you may not know
what I’m even talking about. The Howdy Doody generation is falling almost as
quickly as the heroes of our parents’ Greatest Generation.
Jerry did remember, after I began describing it to him. He
listened to me, while his eyes focused on the marionette on the pawn shop
counter.
Basically, the puppet was created by Buffalo Bob Smith,
first as a radio sensation in the late 1940s.
Without going into a lot of detail, when TV came along, so
did the demand for Buffalo Bob and a real Howdy Doody (or marionette). They
both wore western clothes.
Puppetmaster Buffalo Bob, by the way, was given the nickname
mainly because he was from Buffalo, New York, (where the Ghianni family settled after finally getting released from Ellis Island.) Network execs also thought "Buffalo Bob" had a cowboy ring to
it, kinda like Buffalo Bill. The arrogant little puppet was given his name as a
play on the “Old American Greeting”: “howdy doody/howdy do.”
It became a merchandising sensation. By the way, Howdy Doody
was a red-haired puppet with 48 freckles, one for each state at the time of his
birth. They did not add a freckle when
Alaska joined the Union. And nobody could figure out how many freckles to add
for the 137 Hawaiian Islands.
I should add that there was a mute clown, Clarabell, played
by Bob Keeshan, who went on to eternal glory as Captain Kangaroo, on the Howdy
show. I used to laugh like hell when Clarabell honked his horn and squirted the
crowd and Buffalo Bob with seltzer.
Old guys like me remember the show’s Peanut Gallery, bleachers onstage that held 40 children. (Local channels copied this with their own clown or cowboy and a bleacher of kids for great television, like introducing "The Three Stooges" or "The Little Rascals" or "Tarzan.")
Buffalo Bob started off the show by asking “Say kids, what
time is it?”
The kids would yell "It's Howdy Doody Time!" and
sing the theme song (set to the classic “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay, ain’t had my beer
today, I had one yesterday, ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-yay.’’ Actually,
the beer part of it was constructed by my grandfather, George Champ, who used
to sing that song to us while he was teaching us five-card stud and sipping Stroh's. Beginning when I was 5, I was losing hands and
pennies to my Grandpa, who learned his “show-no-mercy” gaming habits when working
as a roving thresherman, working the wheat fields from Vancouver to the Chicago
area in the first part of the 20th Century. Also, when you are a child, a small sip of Stroh's goes a long way to assuage the pain of poker losses.
“It's Howdy Doody time,
It's Howdy Doody time,
Bob Smith and Howdy, too,
Say "Howdy do" to you.
Let's give a rousing cheer
’Cause Howdy Doody's here.
It's time to start the show
So kids, let's go!”
That was the theme song, but as I noted earlier, kids would mix and match rhymes and wordplay when singing along. You should have heard what I did with "Huckleberry Hound." My mother got pissed.
His daughter hasn’t visited, or at least he doesn’t remember
it.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“That monkey story,” he responds, referring to the
front-page news story 40-some years ago.
Almost every week we talk about the story of Chico, a squirrel monkey,
who escaped in Clarksville.
“Remind me, whatever happened to Chico?” Jerry always asks.
I’ll not go into it the whole story here, other than to say
local deputies were terrified and, months later, Chico was eaten by dogs. His
little jacket and scarf and scant remains were found where the dogs did their
business.
It’s about this point when Bob finally comes into the room.
I’m in his recliner, so I get up and say “Bob, you have your chair back, I’ll
sit on Jerry’s bed.”
Bob smiles, says "Yes," and I reach for his arm to lead him to
the chair. Instead, he sits on Jerry’s
bed, where he finds his combination UT Volunteers/camouflage deer-hunting cap.
He gets up and leaves the room, coming back a few minutes later.
Again, he declines my offer to let him have his chair.
Instead, he opens his closet and does some sort of mental inventory, though
doesn’t remove anything.
“I don’t know where he’s going next,” says Jerry. “Sometimes I don’t see him all day. I never
have talked with him.
“He’s a crazy, old man.”
I don’t know if Bob understands this or not, but he decides
to plop down on Jerry’s bed and lies there pulling tiny pieces of tissue out of
his pocket and carefully putting them on the dark, blue bedspread.
Jerry watches for awhile as the mess grows on his bed, then
asks Bob “What are you doing? Stop that.”
With neither word nor grunt, Bob gets up, tosses more tissue from
his pants pocket to the rug, puts on the Vols camo hat and leaves the room.
“I wish they had something else on TV, but I don’t know how
to change the channels,” Jerry says, as the Howdy Doody segment is done on “Pawn
Stars.”
I have several times taught Jerry how to find channels,
raise volume, etc., so on this day, I decide to skip the lesson.
“They’ve got good shows on this channel, anyway,” he says,
adding, quickly, “I’m really hungry.”
It’s been an hour since he had the crackers and Diet
SunDrop, and he’s ready to go eat.
“I may want to use the bathroom first,” he says, though when
he gets up, he doesn’t go in that direction.
Instead, he begins his slow march toward the lunchroom. “I wish you could join me,” he says.
I probably could, but I’m not sure I want to try to eat
among the rather eccentric dining styles of those in the Memory Care Ward.
Jerry turns to go toward the table he shares with the guy
with the Vanderbilt sweatshirt, another guy I’ve not met and Bob at every meal.
The nurses call it “The Guys’ Table,” as the other 20 or so
diners all are women. This ratio makes me wonder if women do live longer than
men or if they simply go nuts more quickly.
“I’ll see you in a few days,” I tell Jerry, as I turn to
leave.
Way down at the other end of the hall, Bob is lost. He keeps
looking into each doorway. The nurse
leads him down the hallway, saying “Lunch is up here.”
“Jerry and the guys are waiting for you, Bob,” I say,
lightly tapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
He clicks his false teeth three or four times and enters the
TV/dining room.
On the television, Lucy and Ricky are yelling at each other about
bad sex while Fred and Ethel look on, their expressions as empty as Bob’s and
Jerry’s.
I wander through the security doors and toward the front of
the home, passing through the “normal old people’s” lunchroom.
I greet those whose names I’ve learned, like Stockton, the
guy who always wears UT orange golf shirts and who has lived in this “great”
nursing home for the 10 years since he left his beloved home near Reelfoot Lake.
On the portico, more women – late to lunch – are finishing their
water and lemonade and talking in strange accents.
An older man is sound asleep in his wheelchair. Doubtless, a
staffer will come to get him for some of the pulled pork, cornbread and grits
they are eating on this day.
Exhausted, I climb into my 40-year-old Saab with half-strength
air-conditioning, and I start it up.
An ambulance pulls up, slowly, and blocks my immediate exit.
“It’s Howdy Doody time,
It isn’t worth a dime,
Let’s turn to Channel 9
And we’ll watch Frankenstein.”
I remember singing that version of the theme song with my brother, Eric. Probably the first time in 65 years that has popped into my damaged brain.
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