Free Street Gang by Michael Davis

small-town strummer and brass instrumentalist, on his popular radio program in the 1940s. Brannum, who had demonstrated a gift for mimicry, narration, and song, was given a few minutes on each radio broadcast to spin a folksy installment of Little Orley , the rural adventures of a farm boy with “hair the color of strawberry soda and a smile that could put the sun to shame.”
    When Keeshan jumped to CBS, he brought Brannum along to play the Captain’s sidekick, the amiable agriculturalist Mr. Green Jeans. With a wide-brimmed straw hat, plaid shirt, and denim overalls, Brannum’s character might have been Little Orley’s uncle. In time, the Keeshan-Brannum duo would be to television what team teaching was to the classroom. Though neither had any training in education or child development, they both had sound pedagogical instincts and unshakable convictions about how young children should be entertained and instructed. Daily topics touched on basic science and nature, literature, music, art, geography, civics, and health. At the end of each broadcast, the Captain would often remind viewers to brush their teeth and to remember that it was “another Be Good to Mother Day.”
    Naturals before the camera, Keeshan and Brannum spoke to the “boys and girls” (never kids) with nary a hint of condescension, and they never lost sight of the vulnerability of their young audience. Captain Kangaroo thus became an especially valuable antidote to the commercial onslaught that was children’s television in the 1950s and ’60s—even as CBS kept continually trying to pull the rug out from under the Captain.
    Until the frantic weeks leading up to the Captain Kangaroo debut, the show had no cast, no costumes, no set, not even a fully realized concept. What it did have was a time slot and a network hungering to claw out of the ratings rain cellar. In New York, CBS was dead last in a three-way ratings race and losing ground. The network was about to dump The Morning Show , a mélange of news and entertainment that, despite significant effort and expense, never captured the kind of attention enjoyed by its chief rival, the quirky morning mix called Today on NBC, hosted by Dave Garroway, a cool conversationalist imported from Chicago.
    The Morning Show was originally built around the talents of Walter Cronkite, an Edward R. Murrow protégé from CBS News. As a United Press (UP) wire service reporter during World War II, Cronkite had parachuted into Holland with the 101st Airborne, flown along on bombing missions over Germany, and covered the Allied invasion on D-day. During the war, Murrow had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Cronkite to leave UP for CBS. But in 1950, Cronkite accepted a second offer from Murrow, a decision that ultimately led to a vaunted perch in broadcast journalism history.
    On The Morning Show , Cronkite took time to discuss the day’s events with Charlemagne, a lion puppet manipulated by Bil Baird, who appeared on early television with his puppeteer wife, Cora. In A Reporter’s Life , Cronkite’s 1996 autobiography, the newsman wrote: “A puppet can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. It was one of the highlights of the show and I was, and am, proud of it.” (For one teen viewer in Hyattsville, Maryland, watching Cronkite trade quips with a puppet was great sport. Young Jimmy Henson filed away the idea.)
    Cronkite was succeeded in 1954 by thirty-six-year-old Jack Paar, a witty radio raconteur and movie actor who had been under contract with Howard Hughes’s RKO Pictures. In 1955, Dick Van Dyke, a thirty-year-old comic from Danville, Illinois, joined The Morning Show .
    In retrospect, if television titans Walter Cronkite, Jack Paar, and Dick Van Dyke couldn’t move the ratings needle, euthanizing The Morning Show might have been the merciful decision. But that’s not how the miffed network news staff at CBS viewed the situation. To them, waving a white