[1951] “Laugh and Be Happy/ And the World Will Laugh with You.” Sheriff John’s theme song.
I was, as often as possible, a member of Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade from 1952 until I outgrew it. The soft-spoken sheriff was John Rovick, who was born in 1919 and was a radio-operator and gunner—a hero of sorts—in World War II. He went into radio broadcasting as a civilian and then, as a new technology spread into the nation’s households, he went to work for KTTV, Channel 11, in Los Angeles, where he held forth with a couple of children’s programs that radiated his simple, positive message—laugh and be happy, be patriotic, follow the rules for safety, and by the way, here comes another cartoon. He served up the Crusader Rabbit series, in which stills mixed with minimal animation and the silly Crusader mixed it up with his partner, Rags, the Tiger. He also showed Porky Pig cartoons.
He made a very big deal of children’s birthdays. For some reason, I never sent in a card with my name and photograph on it, and never requested a special drawing by “Sketchbook Suzie,” but once or twice I did send in for one of the special products he advertised.
Like Mr. Rogers later, Rovick had a way of creating a mood, an appealing ethical quality in a television world that was blissfully separate from the boredom and anxieties we lived in when the TV was turned off. It seemed possible, even probable, that those who remained good little citizens would enjoy happy little lives forever and always. (Rovick, as I write this in 2012, is still alive and happy himself, retired in Boise, Idaho.)
Unlike a rival children’s show host, Engineer Bill, Rovick was never totally identified with one product. Bill, every evening, would goad his child guests into drinking a glass of milk mixed with Bosco (a chocolate syrup Bill hawked constantly—“Remember to drink your Bosco, kids!”) by having them drink when he cried, “Green light,” and stop drinking abruptly when he said, “Red light.” Not exactly dazzling stuff, but you can imagine children all over greater Los Angeles watching their TVs and downing a big glass of milk and Bosco, much to the sponsor’s pleasure.
Rovick’s sunny outlook elevated him above such nonsense, though with some exceptions, and you would never expect the kind of serious error from him that apparently earned his rival Captain Jet a pink slip. (Tradition has it that, as the Captain’s show ended one evening—alas, before the microphones were turned off—he muttered, “That oughta hold the little bastards for the night.” And the station’s telephone lines quickly and outrageously overloaded.)
One day, though, Sheriff John introduced a product that he thought we kids would get a lot of enjoyment from. It was, quite simply, a set of about six small tubes of oil paint.
The Sheriff demonstrated: He squirted a bit of each color into a bucket that was nearly full of water. (This was rather like watching your shy and retiring Aunt Edith demonstrate how to wash her brassieres. The Sheriff was barely up to the task of doing this solemnly.)
Soon, he had various colors whirling in a rather mesmerizing way in the bucket, and he declared, “Now for the really fun part.” He picked up a stick and pushed it slowly to the bottom of the bucket, then pulled it back out. It emerged covered as if by clouds in a bright black-and-white television sunset. “Wow!” I declared. And there sat the Sheriff, with a satisfied but concerned look on his face. He obviously didn’t know what to do with his remarkable creation.
“There,” he said tentatively. “See?” And the TV screen suddenly filled with the information I found myself hungering for. “How,” I wondered, “do I get my very own set of Color Tubes?”
I scrawled the address on a piece of newspaper with a pencil and ran to the kitchen where my mother was attempting to iron a dress. She had flunked ironing school, just barely passed cooking school, and completely avoided gardening school. I was certain, though, that she had a set of hidden abilities—one of which I knew to be the wielding of a terrible temper, which I carefully avoided.
“Color Tubes!” I shouted. “I need some.”
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It was nearly a century, I was sure, before the Color Tubes arrived. I’d saved up $2, addressed the envelope, made my own return address immensely legible, and taken the whole affair to the local U.S. Post Office, being careful which slot I put the envelope in and asking a Postal server how long he thought it would take for a package to arrive from Pennsylvania.
“Dunno, son. It all depends.” And he set off on an explanation that lost me in moments. I stood and listened as politely as I could, wanting to be on the right side of postal workers, but I was grateful when Dad took my hand and whisked me back to our Ford.
And then, for about six weeks, I asked my mother—even on Sundays—if my package from Pennsylvania had arrived and she, saying “No, dear,” once again, tried to assure me that I should be patient. “The more patient you are,” she said, “the sooner it will get here.” (I ran back outside before she elicited a Captain Jet-style response from me.)
A remarkable sense of grand possibility grew up around this project. I would be able to take simple sticks and make works of art from them. I might master the medium. I might become known as the Color Tubes genius. People might pay real money for my productions. Kids might ride their bikes for miles to watch me at work and beg to buy their own Color Tubes. Teachers would give me “A’s” in art and beg me to be in their classes.
Life might change in glorious ways.
So I was in a hurry for these Color Tubes to arrive, but they were taking their own sweet time. Laugh and be happy?
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Then they arrived. I bounded in from a long day of school and Mom said in an almost offhand way, “Oh, your color things seem to have arrived.”
“Seem?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘seem’”?
She handed me a package. It said “Color Tubes” on it. It said “Pennsylvania” on it. It all but said, “Here is your New, Exciting Life” on it.
Mom grabbed me as I took off for the back yard. “Need a bucket,” I yelled.
“Now, wait a minute. Let’s talk this over,” Mom said.
“Talk? Talk? Talk about what?” I demanded.
“I want to know what we’re dealing with here,” she explained. “I don’t want you to make a mess.”
“We’re dealing,” I said, “with magic.”
At that moment, my best friend T.J. McGarry knocked on the front door. “Anybody here?” he called out.
Mom let him in and laid down the law. “T.J., Billy has some kind of new toy. I want you to help him with it, and if either or both of you make a mess with this stuff, your bottoms are going to sting for weeks.”
“We won’t!” I declared, though I was a bit worried by the warning. Mom had gotten an “A” in spanking with a hairbrush.
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“Whoops,” T.J. uttered.
“Whoops?” I asked. “What whoops?”
I looked and saw that T.J. had managed to create a thin stripe of red paint down the front of his parochial school trousers. “Let’s wash it off,” I suggested.
We tried to eliminate the paint, scrubbing it with a wet cloth. The harder we scrubbed, the more tenacious it became.
“Let’s try coloring a stick, like you said,” T.J. suggested.
“Maybe we should stop,” I said. “Maybe you should go home and ask your Mom to wash these pants or something.”
“Maybe,” said T.J. “But let’s just try it once.” He grabbed the stick and stirred the colored water with it. The water was very rapidly becoming a monotonous brown tone throughout. Perhaps we had forgotten an important ingredient.
“That’s not the way it looked on TV,” I said.
T.J.’s stick emerged from the water sadly, not in any way special or life-changing.
“Maybe I should go home,” he said quietly.
“Good luck, T.J.,” I said, sadly, knowing his mother would punish him severely for ruining his pants.
The bucket was turning a pale brown inside. I didn’t know what to do with its contents, so I threw the browning water into the garden, as far in the back of our yard as I could go.
I was crestfallen, I admit. My career as an artist seemed to have been so easily extinguished.
In less than a month, though, I was asking my mother every day if my Kellogg’s puppet had arrived. It would be a hand-puppet version of “Snap,” “Crackle” or “Pop,” the gnome-like characters in the Rice Krispies ads. I was hoping for “Crackle.” I’d developed a falsetto voice for him.
Life was changing. I would become a famous puppeteer, if only the puppet would arrive. So I waited. And waited.
At last, it arrived, and survived a few preliminary shows that I performed in the garage for bored friends who all wanted their turn. All too soon, though, “Crackle” was beheaded by a trip through our senile washing machine when I mistakenly threw him in with my dirty clothes. Though clean, it would no longer fit on my fingers. I was finished, for the time at least, as a puppeteer.
It was time to rethink my career with care. And I’ve continued to do so, more or less, for most of my life.
