Life was different in the 60s. How you ask? My mother, for example, would leave me at home when I was five years old and drive my older brother and sister to school. What did I know? She would turn on the television in the den and I would watch Captain Kangaroo. While waiting for Mister Green Jeans and Mister Moose to be hit by ping pong balls, she would scoot them out of the house and into the car. The school was only a few blocks from the house and she was back within fifteen minutes. Do that today and the neighbors would have her arrested on child neglect charges.
So, I grew up loving television. We had seven channels but that included channel thirteen, PBS, which I did not discover until 1970 when Sesame Street was created. I always felt a little out of touch with Big Bird because I was nine at that point and I could count well enough to find him boring.
In the 60s we looked forward to Saturday morning cartoons and, at least for me, living in the New York suburbs, Wonderama and Abbott and Costello on Sunday mornings. Officer Joe Bolton on WPIX had The Three Stooges after school. That was it. Well, there was Gigantor, Do Do the Kid from Outer Space, and Tobor the Eighth Man. (At least two of the three were Japanese imports. And how’s this? Tobor, which is robot spelled backward, had to ingest a cigarette to gain his powers).
One day in 1977 everything changed. My dad came home with Wometco Home Theater.
WHT as we knew it, was an early pay television service in the New York City area, owned by Miami-based Wometco Enterprises, which owned several major network affiliates in mid-sized media markets.
For fifteen dollars a month, we could watch five New York Islanders home hockey games (with no playoffs included) and movies from eight o’clock to midnight. This was my dad’s early entree into cable television which was still foreign to Long Islanders. But with only seven channels on our dial, this service seemed like fun.
Of course, there were caveats. My father made it clear to his children they were not to touch this box without his permission. “There will be holy hell to pay if I find this rule is broken.” With my brother and sister away at college, the rule was directed at me and quite frankly I was a rule follower, so I did not use the box on the TV. I did not use it, that is until my cousin showed up early for dinner. He was ten years older and ordered me to take him to the newly installed device, which, he not only was aware of but knew of the recently added WBTB-TV, Newark.
Walking up to my parent’s bedroom, he said that this new channel was the home of The Uncle Floyd Show which aired in the late afternoon.
“It’s great. It’s Uncle Floyd time.”
“It’s what?”
“Stevie, it’s time for the Uncle Floyd Show.”
So, here’s what I learned from my cousin David, who was now coming to dinner regularly while watching the show every day for an entire month.
It can be read as a children’s show or a parody of a children’s show. Much of the humor had a twist aimed at adults, in the style of Soupy Sales and Pee-Wee Herman. The show featured character comedy, puppetry, some audience participation, musical guests, and Floyd’s piano playing. One of Floyd’s puppet sidekicks was named Oogie. His on-air interaction with off-camera staff and sidekicks is somewhat in the style of what Howard Stern would later do. Local bands such as The Smithereens and The Shades, along with The Ramones, Tiny Tim, Benny Bell, Bon Jovi, Jan and Dean, former Monkey Peter Tork, Squeeze, David Johanson, Blue Oyster Colt, and Cyndi Lauper also appeared on the program. Crazy, right?
I knew none of the performers at the time. I did not know Howard Stern from Jon Bon Jovi. But it was so stupid and so silly and we would sneak into my parents’ bedroom to watch Uncle Floyd’s late afternoon low budget show which to me seemed to only care about making themselves laugh while making fun of anything and everything in the news.
Today, I am a huge fan of Howard Stern and when I heard a few months back that Howard was asked to induct Bon Jovi into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I thought about those days with my cousin, and how we laughed at this crazy and zany world. It brought a smile to my face as I could not remember what was more bizarre, the really bad puppets or the thought of me at sixteen and my cousin at twenty-six, hiding in my parents’ room watching TV, laughing, and hoping not to get caught.