January 27, 2004, 8:42 a.m.
Mornings with the Captain
A different era.

By Dennis E. Powell

For someone who thinks the whole idea a little ridiculous, I suppose I have a more intimate knowledge of morning television than most. As a tiny tot, I was propped in front of the round-tube Philco for the very first broadcast of Captain Kangaroo in late 1955. The Captain became a good friend; his associates — Mr. Greenjeans, Mr. Moose, Bunny Rabbit, Dancing Bear, and Grandfather Clock — were amiable and amusing, the whole program gentle. It was instructive ("Use round-nose scissors!"), amusing ("The real great adventures of me, Tom Terrific, with Mighty Manfred, the Wonder Dog"), and fun. The only time the Captain ever lied to me was when he said that Hostess Snoballs were edible.

At that time, and for more than a decade after, the morning-television landscape offered Captain Kangaroo and The Today Show. That was it. The former was a babysitter-in-a-box, the latter a wonderfully cosmopolitan mixture of news and elegant features — a song or two from the latest Broadway musical, and discussions with authors, as the local weather forecasts rolled by on (if memory serves) a scroll of teletype paper. That box full of people was almost part of the family: It recognized that we were just getting up, and it served as a buffer between our early-morning fragility and the starkness of the world beyond the front door.

Time passed, and somehow programmers got the idea that television viewers and radio listeners wanted to be assaulted in the morning by loud voices and horrible electric-guitar noises. This probably grew out of two phenomena: CBS and ABC's desire to gain part of the placid Today Show's audience, and the growing affluence of kids, who listened to music, not news, on the radio in the morning. Captain Kangaroo's timeslot was changed, and he became less useful for parents who wanted to keep the tots occupied while they and the older kids got ready for work and school. This made way for a succession of CBS morning programs, all of which were abject failures.

I was present at the defining moment of one of them, The CBS Morning News. That show had gone through a long litany of hosts and hostesses, and now featured onetime beauty queen Phyllis George. Competition for content among that show, Today, and the now-established and relatively classy Good Morning America on ABC was hotter than the ratings suggested. On this particular day in 1985, the story the herd was following was that of Cathy Webb and Gary Dotson. Webb had claimed in 1977 to have been raped by Dotson, who was tried, convicted, and imprisoned.

Now, eight years later, she had recanted and after much wrangling — prosecutors are disinclined to free people merely because they are innocent, as DNA now proved Dotson was — he had been freed. Today had flown the pair to New York for a live appearance; the other two morning programs were trying, literally, to hijack the duo. Webb and Dotson didn't make an especially compelling interview to begin with, and by the time they were dragged into the studio of The CBS Morning News, they had been pushed and pulled in every direction on television and had, in between, been crushed by a typical New York news mob, of which I was a member.

Though a mere radio guy, because I worked for CBS News, I was allowed in the studio as the interview took place. Cathy and Gary recounted their story, haltingly and poorly, and finally Phyllis demanded that they shake hands, which they self-consciously did. "How 'bout a hug?" asked Phyllis. The groans from producers and crew were audible on the air. "How 'bout a hug?" became the standard cynical greeting among CBS employees.

Not long afterward I arrived for work one day to see an old friend amid the trash at the Broadcast Center loading dock. It was Grandfather Clock. I wrestled him out of the other pieces of the Captain Kangaroo set that were to be carted to the dump. I dragged him aside, and then spent a little while trying to get someone at CBS to recognize that he was an important TV-historical artifact, which I finally succeeded in doing. Grandfather Clock was unwanted and abandoned because, sadly, Captain Kangaroo had been canceled a few months earlier.

How 'bout a hug, indeed.

Dennis E. Powell is a writer specializing in techno-political topics.

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