Free Street Gang by Michael Davis Page A

flag at their Today competitors at Rockefeller Center was crushing and humiliating. For years to come, wounded news executives would seethe at this decision and vow to get back in the early morning game, an animus that plastered a target on Keeshan’s back for almost all of his years at the network.
    But on the morning of the new children’s show’s debut, as the announcer intoned, “Boys and girls, CBS Television presents Captain Kangaroo and his Treasure House,” Keeshan had a geometrically expanded audience to serve and a business opportunity to exploit. Up came the musical theme, “Puffin’ Billy,” an obscure British instrumental piece written about a steam engine that Keeshan had snagged at the eleventh hour from a transcription library. Its playful opening bars provided a musical complement to accompany the Captain through the Treasure House threshold, an eventful stroll, to be sure.
    Children took to the show in droves, parents hailed it, and at least one critic cheered. A New York Times review, written by radio and television editor John P. Shanley, praised “the delightful artistry of a television performer named Bob Keeshan” for a program that delivered “civilized and absorbing fun” to weekday mornings. “Not only does it keep little ones occupied, but it also does so without being noisy.” 17
    By a quirk of fate, on the same day as the Captain Kangaroo debut, a highly anticipated show for school-age kids premiered on ABC’s afternoon lineup. Jack Gould’s review in the next morning’s Times fairly boiled over with agitation.
    Walt Disney’s long-awaited afternoon show for children, The Mickey Mouse Club , had its premiere yesterday on Channel 7. Hopeful parents, who had assumed that Mr. Disney would bring about a long-needed revolution in adolescent TV programming, can only keep their fingers crossed. His debut bordered on the disastrous.
    Not only was the opening show roughly on a par with any number of existing displays of juvenile precocity, but Mr. Disney and the American Broadcasting Company went commercial to a degree almost without precedent. . . . This viewer cannot recall ever having seen a children’s program—or an adult’s, for that matter—that was quite as commercial as Mr. Disney’s, which is easily the new season’s most distressing news. Apparently, even a contemporary genius is not immune to the virus of video.
     
    Jon Stone approached a typewriter in the same way that a concert pianist approached a Steinway.
    With a theatrical flourish, he snatched a fresh sheet of paper, fed it through the roller, lined the margins, cracked his knuckles, rubbed his hands, clapped once, and began.
    One morning in 1955, not long after the Captain Kangaroo debut, Stone’s hunting and pecking was impossible to ignore, as he was not so much tapping at the keys as he was attacking them, with percussion and purpose. An audience of sorts gathered outside the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue to watch his performance.
    With a forecast of fair skies, the typewriter company had proceeded with its plan to place a demonstration model outdoors, where it was bolted to a pedestal. Most who gave it a try pounded out high school typing-instruction inanities, but not Stone. He was furiously cranking out his résumé.
    A self-described jack-of-all-trades, Stone had a well-deserved reputation for sidestepping calamity. He was doing just that as the minutes wound down toward a job interview at CBS Television and, possibly, the break of a lifetime. It would take all the luck and pluck a guy could muster to duplicate the résumé he had left behind in his apartment on West Fifteenth Street, six subway stops behind him.
    Recently disentangled from a brief marriage and fresh out of the master’s program at Yale Drama School, he was trying to make his way as an actor in New York, settling for walk-on parts in TV dramas and a commercial here and there. Prior to relocating to Manhattan, he had enjoyed a season